On the Job: Coming Around in Circles

Five mornings a week, Jolene Allen looks like the essence of energy, conversing with customers and moving quickly from job to job.

One minute, she’s working the cash register. The next, she’s calling an employee to come into work on his day off.  Then she’s getting supplies from the back, filling a bag with fresh bagels or smiling and saying hello to the regulars who come into the shop in Santee’s Town Center.

From Tuesday through Saturday, Allen is up and out of the house before roosters even think about getting up, starting her job as a shift manager at 4:30 a.m. so the store is ready to open at 5.

The perfect job for a morning person, right?

“No, I hate getting up early,” she says, laughing. “But I don’t need caffeine to get me going. I’m pretty chipper once I’m up. But I like to sleep in. I don’t know why I work the 4:30 shift.”

The job – despite that early wakeup call – has worked out perfectly for Allen, a Santee native and graduate who brings a wealth of experience to the store.

Two years ago, after losing her job as a sous-chef at a country club in Arizona that was hit hard by the economy, she found this opening on Craigslist and has been happily selling morning wake-up calls – bagels and coffee – ever since.

Allen, 36, has her associate degree in culinary arts and has worked as a sous-chef, a lead line cook and a waitress and hostess in places from Santee to Arizona, West Virginia and Maryland. She also worked for a while as teacher, helping disabled adults to clean and cook and do budgeting, and as a nanny.

She has hit the road in search of new adventures, but somehow she’s like a boomerang, always landing in Santee.

“I always end up coming back,” she says. “It’s like a magnet.”

Doing it all

As shift manager, Allen, does a little bit of everything. When the general manager is present, she assists where needed. Otherwise, she supervises and “keeps the store running” by working the register, making sure employees take breaks and lunches, baking (in a pinch), keeping the coffee pots full, making sandwiches or special menu items and generally making sure the customers are satisfied.

It’s the constant interaction with customers that she says is the best part of her job. She likes to work up front to hear the feedback – what people like and don’t like.

“I love talking with them,” she says. “That’s why you’ll rarely find me in the back.”

The restaurant business is in her blood and has been since she started as a hostess years ago at the Valley House in Santee.

She’s learned almost every aspect of the business along the way, working at the Dana Hotel on Mission Bay, as the lead line cook at a fine dining restaurant in West Virginia and then as sous-chef – one spot below the executive chef, “the kitchen manager,” she says – at a country club restaurant for eight months.

But when the economy tanked, so did her job, so she made her way back to Santee where her parents still live.

Now, she says, she’s comfortable with a job she enjoys and being around friends and family. It also gives her a chance to plan her next steps.

She’d like to go back to college to study business en route to what she calls her “ultimate, ultimate goal” of opening up a small inn or bed and breakfast.

She says all her experience has helped her as a shift manager at Einstein’s.

She says whatever she does, she tries to handle it in a mellow manner.

“I grew up with old-school chefs where you’d get yelled at,” she says. “I try to be nicer than that.

Gastronomic growth

Growing up, Allen was more of a doughnut person than a bagel nosher. But two years around aromatic, fresh-out-of-the-oven bagels of every kind have put a hole in that habit.

Now, she much prefers to break out some some garden veggie cream cheese and a wheat thin, cinnamon raisin or Dutch apple bagel.

“I was never into bagels until I started here,” she says. “Now they’re a staple.”

Another staple is the regular customers. She says about 75 percent of people march in happily each morning, looking for the jolt of java and something to eat. Others, she says, look tired and maybe even a bit grumpy until they get their caffeine, “and then they’re good to go.”

But it’s the people who come in almost every day she appreciates the most.

She talks about a family that comes in on weekends and pushes tables together outside, and groups of firemen and police officers and nursing students. She says one group of five to seven “older gentlemen” comes in all the time for morning coffee.

Being able to see them everyday, catch up on their lives and trade greetings is a good way to start the day.

Another good thing about that start?

Getting up at 4 a.m. may not be a happy thing, but leaving about noon is.

“I’ve got the afternoon for myself,” she says.