Bread Kitchen rules

Coffee at $1.60 with complimentary slice of brioche makes Bread Kitchen the premiere stop du jour, especially since the coffee is far superior to Einstein’s and Panera. 

Panera retreat

Found back of Panera today.  No one here.  Had spotted ex-Longfellow-principal Mardi B. with friends in usual place, next to fire place, and Lance T., lawyer, actor, and supporter of youth theatrics on my way to rear of restaurant.  Raining.  April showering today.  Have secreted home-toasted half jelly sandwich, intend to dip it into my paid-for Panera coffee.  This is partly why I ensconce myself back here: I don’t want to be ejected for bringing my own food into the eatery ball park.

The other reason is the remoteness of it: I am far from the mad crowd, which is not bad by Friday rush-hour standards but still would be distracting as I think and scribble.  As it is, I sit at a small round table for one, with no one in sight or even earshot.  All I hear is delicate mood music, slightly classical, and distant patches of comment.  Outside the traffic in the rain: Lake Street, River Forest, a few blocks west of Harlem

Making Money

"Easiest dollar I made all day," I told a fellow customer at Einstein's after telling the young counter woman I was a dollar short on my change and receiving from her the dollar. Then I sat down and realized I'd been charged for a large coffee when I had ordered small with the comment that I'd be refilling it here, so why get large? Back I went to the counter for the easiest 30 cents I had made -- or it turned out, would make -- all day. The 30 cents was retrieved, as had the dollar, from the transparent plastic tip collector on the counter. Reflection: One may ask why if one is to sit drinking his endless-refill cup he would order a large, unless he was to supply the office when he got there.

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 The folks here at Einstein's are people for whom the sheer rationality of doing things in organized fashion is a heavy burden. We know the feeling, do we not? It explains why some do well in business (or almost anything else), why some spend their days doing what others tell them to do (or else), why some fly high and others fly low. Not entirely. We also have life's sharpies, corner-cutters who excape tedium, penury, and even the limitations of a modest life style. Chicago and Cook County politically connected chiselers come to mind, proficients of the wink and nod who appear regularly in the paper and less regularly in the courts and jails -- wholly federal, we should note, since these matters are never grist for state and county mills of justice. Never. It's enough to make a big-government advocate out of you.