Not hiring right now. That doesn't mean we're not looking.
There's a difference between service and hospitality, and this place is built on it. Service is getting the order right: correct coffee, correct change, no mistakes. Most people can learn service in a few weeks. Hospitality is what happens around it, and it's harder to fake. It's giving a customer who is clearly having a rough morning an extra ten seconds instead of rushing them through. It's noticing someone has been staring at the menu for a while and offering to help before they have to ask.
Service means people do not complain. Hospitality means they come back.
We hire for hospitality first and skill second, because skill is the part we can teach.
Give us someone who has never made a coffee or shaped a loaf but notices when the person across the counter needs an extra ten seconds, and we'll train them properly. Give us someone who is already technically good but treats every order as just the next one in line, and that takes far more than training to turn around. Technique is teachable. Attention is harder. Hospitality does not start when someone walks through the door. If a regular shows up on the one day we are closed and nobody warned them, we would rather walk a loaf over to their door than send them off with nothing. When it rains, we lend out umbrellas. Both come from the same instinct, the kind that reads a customer's mood in two seconds instead of ten. That instinct is emotional intelligence, and here it isn't a soft skill. It's the job.
What success looks like
Three weeks in, you're reading the room without being told. You clock that a regular seems off before they say a word and adjust how you talk to them that morning. A familiar face goes missing for a week and you mention it to us before we notice.
What failure looks like
You wait to be told what to do. The quality holds up when we're watching and drops when we're not. A quiet Tuesday and a slammed Saturday are treated the same way instead of being adjusted for.
When a role opens, we go through the people who have already told us who they are first.
We care less about how many years of experience you have than whether you can walk into either of those Saturdays and still get it right.