The Silver Penny, better known to the students of Dublin as Abbey Street Spoons, is an institution of the city. From pitchers of Woo Woo to bowls of chips, it has what every growing university student needs for a fruitful night on the town.
But what is it like beneath the surface? Well, I am here to give you that sneak peak into the ins and out of working at Ireland’s busiest spoons.
The Work
Unlike most pubs, at Spoons, you do not even get to think about working behind the bar for months. You start out on the floor, bringing drinks and food to tables and collecting empty plates and dishes.
Working as a waiter while being hired under the pretense of being a “bar associate” has always felt weird to me, but such is the way of Spoons. For many who have worked in hospitality the work is much the same, burning your hands on plates or having your body covered in spilled pints and pitchers.
Eventually, after a number of months you “graduate” to working on the “app orders”, making drinks behind the bar for the online orders. This is the first proper step of progression for a person to become what we call “bar trained”. After this it’s onto the till, and dealing with customers face to face.
Making the drinks or dealing with an unruly customer has never caused a sense of worry or nervousness within me. Dealing with cash and money has. Mess up here, you mess up big. We’re assigned an individual till, meaning if the cash doesn’t add up, there is one sole person to question about the discrepancy.
Management is stratified like a corporate office, with layers of different managers and leaders, all vying for control over us — the lowly floor staff. Regular secret shoppers, visits from head office and audits keep us on our toes, always on the look out for the tell tale signs of their orders.
The work is long and hard, with even the quietest Monday afternoons holding the potential to turn into hell on earth, when a surge of students and tourists alike comes rushing in. However, a weirdly quiet night brings about an almost eerie feeling that something is not quite right, or something dastardly is afoot.
The Customers
Wetherspoons is truly the melting pot of pub culture, intersecting every division of society, rich or poor, young or old, student or worker, local or tourist. All come for the one fundamental truth of Spoons — it’s cheap.
Whether it’s €2.60 for a pint of ale you’ve never heard of, or €5.60 for a pint of Guinness, (one of the cheapest in Dublin!) Spoons can guarantee it’s going to be a cheap and cheerful night out if you head to Spoons.
Because of this well-known fact, the place attracts all types. From the regular who is a part of the furniture, to the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tourists, all types of customers come with a unique set of needs and challenges.
The regulars who order the same drinks, day in, day out, usually sit to themselves or in small groups and are mostly quiet and polite, but if something isn’t right they will let you know. For better or for worse.
Students, unsurprisingly, considering Abbey Street’s proximity to the multiple universities and colleges, make up a large part of the customers. Whether it’s grabbing a quick pint after class or prinks for a night out. These groups are polite, drink a lot and have a penchant for a game of cards. They are also largely unproblematic.
This changes when we turn to our last large group of customers — tourists. Big drinkers and eaters, these groups love to move tables together for their large groups on tour. The main issue for these is the lack of understanding of Irish pub culture. Standing in line at the bar, not understanding last call, or refusing to finish their drinks even after we have closed! While not their fault, these can cause many a headache for us staff, delaying the start to our long arduous journey to clean up.
The Cleaning
Before starting my job at Spoons I hadn’t worked a job in hospitality, and I never truly appreciated the sheer amount of cleaning that would be involved in the job! From half-hourly toilet checks, to cleaning a table for customers when you already have 15 different things to do, cleaning is a whole extra stress on top of the various tasks that you’ll be assigned on any given day.
While we have to clean non-stop during our shift, the real graft comes after we close, and the last hold outs of customers finally shuffle out the door, when we can finally close the place. Tables need to be cleaned and wiped, menus rearranged, floors swept, bars cleaned, bins taken out, glasses washed and bars restocked.
While all those tasks sound innocuous, in practice these can be the hardest parts of a shift, something as simple as restocking or cleaning the glasses can be the most tiring and longest closing tasks to finish, with the reward of an aching back to accompany you home on the 3am bus.
The ambiguity of timing for a close is one of the biggest pain points for me, not knowing if I’m going to be home by 1:30 or 3:30 am is a major downside of work.
However, the one true upside of working there is the coworkers. After settling into the job, and getting to know the people you work with, they can be some of the highlights of a week when every day was a new level of tough.
A stupid in-joke, a shared look of confusion after a customer asks a perplexing question, and a bond forged only in the time of a Saturday night rush is something to relish in.
So, if you were to ask me what it’s like working at the busiest Spoons in Ireland, I would say it’s some of the hardest work I have ever done, with long, back breaking hours. However, I would also say it’s been the most fun and fulfilling thing I have done for a long time, with a sweet paycheck at the end of the week to soothe any pains and aches that I had accrued.
