Melissa Hessler

I did not seek out the service industry. It roped me in, tied me down, and took me for a ride.  It forced me to confront many previously held beliefs while changing and adapting to new experiences – some for the better, some for the worse, some just for the cash. You may see just a $17 cocktail. That cocktail is years of growth and development on my part.  

Currently, I am employed at a restaurant – Little Donkey, one of the six restaurants within the hospitality group, JK Food Groups, led by James-Beard Awarding winning Chef Owner Ken Oringer – in Central Square, Cambridge. That is where this photo of me was taken. But I am not really in the photo. I’m out of focus along with the rest of the backbar. Dressed in a simple black tee with my hair tied back, I am just the help, fading into the background, waiting politely until there is something else I can do to serve you. 

The cocktail is the real focus of this photo. It is an Egg-White Sour served up in a coupe. The base layer is beautifully pink with a fluffy cloud of whipped egg white on top. A bamboo pick skewers a lemon twist with a real Luxardo cherry in the center to garnish the cocktail.  I crafted it for my close friend who doesn’t care for the taste of alcohol, but loves anything sugary sweet – the type of sweetness that you can feel on your teeth, giving you a bit of a buzz from the rush of sugar molecules straight into your bloodstream. The drink is built with two ounces of Grand Marnier – a cognac-based orange liqueur, a half ounce of Luxardo Maraschino cherry liqueur, three-quarters of an ounce of freshly pressed and strained lemon juice, one full ounce of grenadine, and the white from a just-cracked egg. The yolk goes into the trash for the homies – the rat friends that will swarm the dumpster at night, after all of us humans have cleaned up, closed down, and gone home. 

All the ingredients go into a modern Boston Shaker – two thin metal tins, one smaller than the other, with slightly weighted bottoms to aid in the shaking process  – that are then jammed together to form a seal strong enough to withstand a hard shake. To create the best seal, you want to place the top, larger tin slightly angled over the bottom smaller one, so that one side of the pair together forms a 180° line. Give it a good tap with the bottom of your fist against the metal railing of your well to really wedge them together. How high or where you hold your tins while shaking do not matter. All that is just added pomp and flair.  All that actually matters when traditionally shaking a cocktail is that you throw it forward and pull it back with enough force that you begin to circulate the drink in your tins, and the ice smashes against the sides and each other to ensure for proper aeration and dilution. How long to shake is decided upon how much of those qualities you want in your drink and the viscosity of your ingredients. That’s why you would never shake a Hugo spritz or a Manhattan and honestly, really don’t need to shake a margarita or a Cosmopolitan for as long as some people might lead you to believe. For egg-white drinks though, you have a lot of viscosity and want a lot of aeration and dilution. You then want to employ the reverse dry shake method where one shakes first with ice. Some solids of egg proteins will cling to the ice, which is discarded after the initial shake. This creates a smoother texture in the drink. 

After this step, the cocktail is given one last hard shake without ice to aerate the drink longer without adding any more dilution and create the frothy layers seen in the coupe glass. (Fun fact: the coupe glass is modeled after Marie Antoinette’s tit. Think on that next time you sip from one.) The tins are separated again, the small one gets nested under the large one. A Hawthorne strainer is placed over the top and the contents are poured through a fine mesh strainer positioned over the coupe. This double strain method is to make sure that no unnecessary solids or ice chips make it into the finished product. 

A lemon gets skinned with a Y-peeler. Be careful to get as little of the bitter white pith under the zesty, oil-filled yellow skin as that will impart too much of a bitter flavor into the drink, but also do not peel the skin off your knuckles either. Express the oils over the cocktail, and rub the peel along the rim and stem of the glass. The oils are meant to increase the aromatics of the cocktail as our taste buds are first activated by the olfactory bulbs located in the temporal lobe of the human brain. The stem of the glass is rubbed so the oils will transfer to the skin of your hands, further spreading the aromatics, and ideally heightening the flavor of the drink. 

Bring the glass to your nose. 

Give it a little sniff. 

Cheers. 

Take a sip. 

Let me know what you think. 

I have gained all this knowledge and the skill of bartending and serving by working in various levels of restaurants going on four years now. It’s funny, as a kid, I thought if I ever worked in a restaurant, it’d be in the back of house as a line cook, not in the public-facing front of house. I grew up watching Food Network for fun. I idolized Masaharu Morimoto – an iron chef, Melissa d’Arabian – the fifth season winner of Food Network Star, and Alton Brown of Good Eats. I thought Mario Batali was silly for always wearing Crocs. My biological father taught me the basics of cooking when I was about nine years old. He told me there were going to be nights where he was unable to cook dinner for me and my older sister so I needed to learn so that I could still feed us. When he was unable, it was usually due to the fact that he was either too drunk, passed out, or was in prison. 

Watching the Food Network meant I could learn more about cooking and baking and new ingredients and find new recipes to try. It also meant I could watch the competition shows where people were praised and recognized for their hard work and superior abilities. People like Melissa d’Arabian became famous and were shown on TV because of their abilities. I used to fantasize when I was in my kitchen, I was leading my own cooking show and my adoring fans were sitting in my live studio audience or ogling me from their televisions at home – maybe on Tuesday nights 6 PM EST, 5 Central. My fans would adore me not only because I was a really good cook, but I was also pretty and funny and likable. 

Growing up the way I did, I did not feel pretty or funny or likable or like I was good at anything. I really wanted to be, but over time, as the abuse and neglect went on, I developed major fears & anxieties around and about people, the public, my ability to “be better” and not “cause so many issues” or “be a burden” on people.  Somewhere along the way, I got convinced I was a bad thing who deserved bad things. Even years after getting out of my abusive home life, I still suffered from crippling PTSD and social anxiety. The therapy I received that was supposed to help me just retraumatized me again and again for a very long time. 

When I was twenty-three, after the COVID-19 pandemic, and much instability and continued suffering, I broke up with my boyfriend of four years, quit my six week old medical insurance billing specialist for denied claims job, took my dog & my cat, but left the man, the other dog & cat, and my five chickens in Templeton and moved back home to Falmouth with my foster parents. 

For years my foster parents had been saying I could come home whenever I wanted or needed to. I finally felt like I needed to. The house was overcrowded with other foster kids and I was told that as the oldest, I had two weeks to find somewhere else to live. I moved one town over to Mashpee with my best friend. We’ll call her Tina. At the time, she was looking to move closer to the Boston area for her job. I had no idea what else to do, so I agreed. We toured two places, and signed a lease on a 2 bedroom in North Cambridge right on Mass Ave. At the time, I had burned through all my savings, had only a couple hundred dollars each week by working as a cleaning lady for Tina’s coworker’s mom’s company that she ran herself, largely out of her own house and car.  Yet I had just agreed to spending $950 a month on rent plus utilities, including oil heating in a drafty building under major disrepair. 

To say I was nauseatingly terrified, utterly desperate, and hopelessly confused is an understatement. I put on a nice pair of black dress pants, bright red blouse and walked up and down Mass Ave. passing out copies of my resume to any business that would take one. I had no time to be afraid, socially awkward, or worry I wouldn’t get hired somewhere, or my life would crumble around me because I chose to leave a man me feel like I was crumbling down on the inside. I needed a job. I needed money. I needed to live.  I couldn’t let my social anxiety, or my own self-hatred stop me from trying to forge and finally maybe make something of myself. I feared becoming my mother–becoming a “welfare queen” or resigning myself to selling myself to men so that I might afford to live as she did. 

One of the three places that wound up offering me a job was the dive bar located directly below my apartment – Joe Sent Me. My commute to work was the 10 second stomp down my stairs into the back door of the restaurant leading into the tiny, cramped, dirty kitchen. I was hired as a server and was quickly promoted to bartender as well. I had no prior serving or bartending experience. My closest work experience was that I had been a cashier in a bakery when I was fourteen and had been an assistant store manager at an Olympia Sports for three years back in Gardner. 

The things I learned quickly about serving in a restaurant was that you are always on display, watched by multiple people at any given time, and your paycheck is determined by how you do. It is also determined by a number of other factors such as the mood and/or drunkenness of your guests, how pretty you look today, how high pitched a voice you speak in, how much you smile, how flirty or coy you are, the jokes you make, the jokes you’re willing to convincingly fake laugh at, or how many inappropriate remarks you take before finally cracking and showing your discomfort. Another aspect is that each of these factors and more mean different things to different guests and will influence how they tip you. One regular, a forty-five-year-old alcoholic man, let’s call him Tony, would tip me more when he thought his chances of sleeping with me were higher, but if he got too drunk, he would forget how to do math or how to pay, and my tip wouldn’t be as high or there at all. A different regular, Bill, at first did not tip me well. But over time I learned that he likes his bitter canned IPAs to be poured out in a fresh and frosty cold glass and wanted to be left alone to watch whatever game was on the TV. Once I started doing that for him my tips greatly increased. 

I used to have such horrible social anxiety and mental health issues that I would go mute hide under furniture, or run away, or just go into a catatonic state if suddenly somehow my “fight or flight” trauma responses were activated. For the first time in my life, I felt like people could see me in a way where I was pretty, funny, well-liked, and doing a good job.  And I was taking home cold, hard cash every night because of it. Facing your fears seems like such a cliche thing to say but working as a server & bartender helped me face down my deep-seated fears of what other people were capable of doing to me, or worse, what I was capable of doing to myself. It helped me realize my childhood dream of being a pretty, and funny, and good woman who could stand on her own two feet solidly. 

Of course, it was all just an act though. I started smoking cigarettes, getting tattoos, became borderline alcoholic, destroyed my relationship with my best friend (it was a two-way street though but you know, that’s for another story). I moved in with a new man who bartended Tuesday trivia nights with me. (My biological mother had a habit of changing jobs and dating and becoming dependent on the new man that she worked with. Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. It frightens me that the fruit borne from a sick tree might just be fated to rot in the shade underneath its boughs.)  

But Vinny, oh boy, was he a wicked charmer. He opened my eyes to just how much money I could make in the service industry by working at higher end places like he did the other nights of the week. He helped me hone my skills and took me to these fancy restaurants to watch and learn and taste and experience the upper echelon of dining. He got me jobs at newer, nicer restaurants of higher caliber with clientele that could afford $400 dinners multiple nights a week and would tip 20% or more every time, if you were good enough to deserve it. 

But this man too smoked cigarettes, most definitely an alcoholic and used other substances, could not stop spending money on new tattoos, an also made me feel like I was crumbling inside. I still wasted two years of my life with him. But I do not know if I can call it a complete waste because he is the reason I work at Little Donkey today. Working at Little Donkey still means that I feel like a pretty, funny, good woman who gets paid equal to how good she is (usually), but in a way that does not feel as exploitative as the dive bar did. I also have an immense knowledge of all parts of what makes a nuanced dining experience that I amassed myself through study, practice, repetition, and lived experiences. I feel I finally earned my status as pretty, funny, and good through my hard work and my ability to just keep going, even when nothing is going well. You have to hold on. The other option is something I’ve always considered, but I don’t want to do that. I can’t possibly admit that I might actually be a failure.  

This photo draws your attention first to that pretty cocktail sitting atop the black granite of the bar. The glassware and liquor bottles gleam and glint out of focus in the warm yellow glow of the backbar. I stand back, looming, waiting for my next order. You can even make out some of the colors of the tattoos on my arm. It seems like a nice bar for a quick bite and a craft cocktail after work on a Tuesday, maybe before you catch that 6 PM Food Network show at home. I never thought I’d frequent places like this as a guest, let alone as a front of house employee. I never would have been able to conceptualize how healing it would be for me and how much I’d genuinely enjoy it or how fulfilling it would be. 

I enjoy being of service because my purpose in life is to make other people’s lives better. It’s a blessing and a curse derived from the agony I’ve experienced throughout my life. I do not want anyone to ever feel the way I have. They deserve better than that. My current job allows me to orchestrate a special moment for people to come together, relax, and enjoy. When I am able to do that, and see it, and know that it is in part due to my hard work and capability, I feel compersion for others. For so long, compassion was the only way I could experience happiness of my own. This is what makes me feel fulfilled – if I can make other people happy, then maybe, I too can be happy.

Originally I enrolled at Middlesex Community College to change careers and become a Registered Nurse, because hey, I’m already really good at bringing someone a ginger ale. Soft skills transfer well to other fields, right? After three years of pursuing this goal part-time, I came to the realization that the field of psychology always has always been my true passion. I tossed my fool-proof five-year plan out like the customer copy of a bill at the restaurant that no one seems to bother to take with them anymore. My current endeavor to reach my education and career goals is looking to be more of a ten-year than a five-year plan….

While I am terrified at the massive undertaking getting an education requires, I know this is the right move for me; becoming a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) is my calling, the reason I endured everything that I had to. I want people to come to me with their concerns,  their fears, their suffering so that I may be there with them, to share the burden with them, to shoulder some of it for them, just for a moment, to truly hear them out, and to see them for who they are in that moment.  Once we get to the place of understanding and acceptance – no matter how hurtful or ugly it may be, we can then begin to collaborate on their plans toward their own betterment and fulfillment. The pain or negativity may never fully leave, but at least together we can begin to box it up and stow it away on the shelf for a while, hoping that it’ll collect dust over the years. 

Just as I have my dusty boxes of memories in my head sometimes the rickety shelf folds under the weight of the boxes and spills its contents out for me to clean up again. Sometimes I intentionally take one down to revisit moments of insecurity and terror in hopes of discerning more, or just to take a trip down memory lane to remind myself how far I’ve come and how much I now have to be grateful for. My boxes contain seemingly several lifetimes’ worth of memories and the many hats I’ve worn throughout my different careers. 

One box in particular that always seems to require extra care contains the memories of when I was a little girl staying up late with my drunk father, starting around six or seven years old and continuin until we parted ways when I was thirteen (the same age he was when he left his family), as he would scream and cry about his own childhood abuse at the hands of his own blood family, his mother’s suicide, my mother’s suicide attempts, and he’d describe what it was like growing up in the Bronx, alone, White, as a substance addict, as well as his intentions at the time of murdering people who have wronged him until he had planned to finally end it all, culminating in his own suicide. After he’d finally let me go to sleep, I’d cry in my own bed and develop plans for my own suicide while wishing someone would stay up with me as I did for him. 

I want people to know that I understand just how painful it is to be in pain, to let them know that I see their struggle, I know it’s hard, but we will get through this together. How may I be of service to you? It’s nice and all to see people happy, a little buzzed at dinner. But have you ever seen someone get healthy – to pull themselves from the depths of whatever is besieging their mind or their body? I believe that having a career as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor will hold innumerable moments that will remind me that I am not a bad thing, I was never a bad thing, and I do not deserve bad things. 

No one is a bad thing and good people deserve good things. We are not meant to live our lives in a constant state of terror and torment. This change of career will be my next step in becoming the next version of that pretty, funny, and capable girl who works hard and feels satisfied and contented with herself. She is an amalgamation of all the past versions of her. She’ll still have tattoos. She’ll still not feel worthy of good things unless she does good herself. She’ll still be a damn good cook and be able to make a mean drink. 

I wonder what else she’ll be able to do and if she’ll always feel like the help, waiting in the background and staying up late while tirelessly, but contentedly working for other’s well-being. I wonder if she’ll ever be able to love herself as much as she loves others. She thinks if she works hard enough and does enough good, she might be worthy of their love someday. Not this Sunday. But maybe next Tuesday – would 6 PM be okay?