#9: Just Good Foods

When I first started making this list I realized that I could easily come up with Ten Restaurants I Will Miss Most About Kalamazoo, which only made me feel fat, so I had to eliminate at least a couple of restaurants from the equation. Just Good Food made the cut not only because of the food, but for the role it has played in my life from about 1997 onward.

I should have been fired after my first event, when I spilled red wine all over this lady's green linen suit during Tapas Night at the Gilmore Keyboard Fest. Instead, I got called back again and again for banquet service, which is why to this day I can tell you with a 3% margin of error the playlist at your cousin's wedding next month. This is the job I tried to leave time after time, selling or donating my uniform, because I was - finally - moving on to bigger and better things. Bless their hearts, they always acted sad to see me go and never once acted smug when I came back over and over again...just like everybody else.

Just Good Foods, alternatively known to those of us who have been there forever as "Just Food" or "Just Bad Moods", has a spectacular revolving door policy. "Once an employee, always an employee" seems to be a tenet of their business. That's why this is the job that got me through 2.5 college degrees, on and off. Of course, it isn't hard to understand why they have to welcome back their old, seasoned crew with open arms; they're mysteriously afraid to hire anyone new, ever. Perhaps it is out of fear that the never-ending list of idiosyncrasies pervading their business model is just too daunting for anyone who hasn't already been exposed to it for too many years to count. They're like, "So, you want to work for a wacky pair consisting of a Salvadoreñan diabetic and a Northern Michigan NPR junkie with a heart of gold, eh? Well, in that case, you must polish these glasses, first with a towel to remove water spots, next with a cloth napkin to remove the towel fuzzies, and next...oh, to hell with it, can't we just get Christine in here who worked for us three years ago? Anybody know if she's still living in her van?"

I loved that job. If you were a hard worker, it didn't matter what a weirdo you were, you'd fit right into the family. The big, kooky, dysfunctional family. And if you sucked, you were swiftly ostracized until you made up your mind to quit. And the food is just as eclectic as the staff. And the regular customers are just as eclectic as the food. Highlights for me are the ginger sesame tofu and the vegie burritos, the "missing egg" salad and Olinda's home-made pesto, easily the best I've ever tasted. That's all in the deli; from catering, mostly I'll miss watching paunchy white people overeat, get drunk and do the chicken dance. Or maybe the moment when they first arrive and they're all lined up at the door waiting to be seated, and the catering staff is not-so-secretly sizing them up as if it's the red carpet at the Oscars.

There was the wedding where the floating candles melted across the necks of the hurricane vases and sealed off the oxygen to the goldfish and all the centerpieces not pilfered by children went belly up (the ones pilfered by children, of course, ended up flopping all over the floor when someone went to sit in the chairs under which they were hidden). There was the Kenyan wedding reception held in a barn, where they served a roasted goat just one floor up from where a live goat must have been asking himself, "what the hell...?" Then there was the one where several cousins lifted Grandma out of her wheelchair for a special waltz around the dancefloor poised on top of her husband's feet (Anne Murray: "Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of my Life"). That one pretty much brought the house down.

All told, Just Good Food is a central thread running through my time in Kalamazoo and I'm glad that I one day stumbled into that particular funky basement.