Eating Hot Dogs at the Midnight Hour

When bats swoop low in the glooming night, and street lamps cast pale glimmers on the sidewalks, it is the hour of the Tasty.

No longer an insignificant diner, it dominates the empty streets. Through the gathering gloom, its greasy siren call brings in the faithful: hordes of people whose only bond is a common craving for a nocturnal hamburger.

"It's not really the Tasty until midnight," says Michael J. Smitah at 11:30 p.m. Friday, deftly wiping the grease off the grill. There are three burgers sizzling and four people sitting in the restaurant. One is reading a book. "At midnight," says Smith, the Tasty "bursts open; it changes."

The customers range from "brilliant professors to brilliant street people, to overeducated idiots," Smith says. Taxi-drivers, waitresses, bartenders, students--he sees them all, he says. "And lots of kooks, lots."

"Some people you just naturally fall into a relationship with," he says. "And others you avoid like the plague."

At 12:10 a.m., Michael J. Smith's shift is over. He takes off his apron and hands it to Michael Smith, who works the early morning shift with Charles Drapeau. They have worked together for 16 years.

Maria Maritoni, a student at the Extension School, sits at the counter next to her four-year old son, Justin.

Justin perches serenely on a swivel-top stool, a wooly red scarf wrapped around his face. He lists his interests as "playing, rolling cars, and this"--he brandishes a crumpled package od Starburst candies.

"How are you doing, Justin?" asks Michael J. Smith, leaning over and giving him a kiss. on his way out. Justin smiles and licks a yellow lollipop.

A man with a guitar comes in. "Guys! Live music at the Tasty? Can we do it?" says Maritoni, turning around to greet him.

"When all the street musicians are done with their acts, they come in here," she explains.

Drapeau and Michael Smith, stacking burgers begind the counter, turn off the sound system. "Ladies and gentlemen, we're making an exception to the general rule," says Drapeau. "This will last five minutes." He turns back to the grill.

Maritoni sits on the window sill, singing "Bluejay Way," to guitar chords. The customers are mostly silent, holding their plates and listening to the music.

Michael Smith hands Justin a hot dog, covered with green pickle relish and mustard. Justin is displeased. "Why does it come with mustard?" he asks.

"Can we wire off the mustard?" Matteo Luccio asks Drapeau. "He doesn't like mustard." Drapeau hands him a knife and a napkin.

"Maybe I should have told them I didn't want it," says Justin dolefully.

"It is the evening of the day," sings Maritoni.

"There's still mustard on it," Justin hisses quietly. "Don't get he relish off. I like the relish."

Maritoni finishes the song, returns to her seat and scrapes off the remaining mustard. Drapeau turns the stereo back on.

"The Tasty is a haven," says Maritoni. "The other day, I walked in here, and there had to be at least nine or 10 people that I knew from various parts of the Square, all talking to each other."

"And at the same time, there was this shy Harvard student--I knew he was a Harvard student by the fact that he was so well-groomed, so well-mannered. He didn't interact at all, but you could tell he was listening, taking everything in. At the cash register, he turned around and smiled, and I knew he was a nice guy."

Other Harvard students are less shy. "You come here for the people," says Pat B. Pazmino '93, taking the last empty seat at 1:20 a.m. "A lot of people from Harvard Square come here, and they'll always talk to you. They're really interesting."

He leans over, pointing to his double cheeseburger. "It's also kind of a morbid attraction, for the food."

"This is a sort of a nostalgic trip for Pat and me," says his roommate, Adam R. (Woody) Halvorsen '93.

"We came in her every night on Freshman Week," explains Pazmino. "We spent so much money here. My parents gave this money for semester..."

"...For books," adds Mark A. Apolinar '93 helpfully. "For books," repeats Pazmino. He shakes his head sadly.

At 2:15 a.m., the seats are full, and people stand three deep, yelling out orders. Gordon M. Aamoth stands at the back counter, eating oozing cheeseburgers. He's from Minnesota, and, with his hulking figure and blond hair, looks it. Currently, he's a sophomore at Babson College. He says he drives into the city to visit his only friend in Boston, and when his friend goes home, Aamoth stops off at the Tasty.

"I first came to the Tasty when I was a freshman," he says, polishing off his third cheeseburger.

People stand wedged into corners; there are 20 burgers on the grill. The music is very loud.

"I was lost and alone, and I came here because I saw a big crowd," says Aamoth. "I was here for about and hour, and I ate nine burgers."

"Not only does the food come fast, but it's like a cult thing. They talk to you, they're sarcastic," he says of the cooks. Sometimes, he says, the cooks take five-minute smoking breaks and all cooking stops.

"Another great thing about the Tasty," he says, "is that you can say you'd like a bagel and herbal tea, and what do you get? The cheeseburger with onions. That's all they serve. You can see the desserts, but you can't eat them."

Aamoth, by experimentation, has discovered the basic principle of late-night Tasty life. Although the formal menu stretches across the back wall, during peak hours Smith and Drapeau serve only the Red Alert Special: double cheeseburgers, hot dogs, and Husky superburgers. "We used to try to make everything," says Michael Smith, "and we were going out of our minds."

"You're welcome to read everything else," Drapeau tells a hapless customer, "but this is what you'll be tested on, right here." He points to the Red Alert board.

There is a $3 minimum, and loitering is not encouraged.

Drapeau flips the burgers and brings them, still dripping with grease, to the counter. Smith lays out buns and cheese, puts on lettuce and mayonnaise, and skewers the burgers with a cocktail toothpick.

Drapeau puts them on plates and they rest at the counter: waiting for the next person to pass by, see the light, hear the music, get the craving.

"Girls like it the most because they eat, and eat, and eat," says Aamoth. "Guys like it too, but girls wouldn't normally eat like this."

"True," he emphasizes, his eyes large behind hornrimmed glasses.

On the other side of the restaurant, Michelle R. Voci, clutching her black suede purse on her lap, disproves Aamoth's theory about women's lust for Husky cheeseburgers.

"The food is pretty awful," says Voci, who is in her final year at the Graduate School of Education. She toys with a french fry.

She comes to the Tasty because "I know it's the only place that's open 24 hours," she says. "Also, we drank too much, so we wanted to get some food in our stomachs."

Next to her, Ted T. Kataji, a first-year Harvard Business School student, nods in agreement as he eats his double cheeseburger.

"Actually," Voci adds, sipping a Coke, "this place would be okay if it just had more of a selection. The $3 minimum is ridiculous."

"Yeah, a buck for a soda," says Kataji. "We spent $90 going out tonight, so we figured we had to round it off to $100."

"I'm from New York," explains Voci, laughing. "I have expensive tastes."

Perhaps the Tasty is just a let down after a dinner Kataji describes as "a dining experience," at a posh restaurant on Newbury Street.

"I had filet mignon," says Kataji.

"I'm in Lent season, so I can't eat meat," says Voci, her crystal earrings glinting in the flourescent light. "I had pasta. He had meat. Being Italian, I had pasta."

"Look at this," says Kataji, carefully scraping a french fry along his napkin. A thin oily residue remains. "Grease."

"Don't do that, that's rude," says Voci, eating a fry. "If you're eating it, you shouldn't complain."

At 2:45 a.m., the customers are all college-aged, and almost all male. The music is so loud it is difficult to hear conversations.

"Hello, Sir," says Drapeau to a heavyset man in long grey coat.

"Could I have an order of fries?" asks the customer.

"You haven't returned my greeting," says Drapeau. "How can I possibly get you an order of fries?"

"I think everyone who comes in her is stoned," says Voci. "Look at them, they're staring at the burgers. You get the munchies when you're stoned."

"Excuse me," says a tall gaunt man, tapping Voci on the shoulder. A red paisley tie hangs around his head and a brown around his neck; he carries a plastic bag from the Vassar gift shop and wears fuzzy purple mittens on his hands.

"Do either of you carry lipstick?" he asks. His lips are chapped and dry.

"No," say Voci and Kataji in chorus.

"Rats," says the man. He sits back down on the windowsill.

He is still there at 3:30 a.m., when Tommy J. Dillon, a cabdriver with Ambassador Brattle, comes in. "When the night's over, I come in here, and I have a cheeseburger and a coffee and milk, and then I go home," he says.

He stirs his coffee. "The people that work here are good people," he says.

At 4:00 a.m., the last customer leaves. Two cheeseburgers sit by the fryolator, and Drapeau and Michael Smith sit and smoke at the back counter.

"The business has grown so much we don't have as much time to interact with the customers," says Drapeau. "I used to have a great time here...I still do."

"The cooking is a miniscule part of it," he says. "People want entertainment, not food. I'd rather hire a guy with personality."

"If we were interested in cooks," he says, nodding at Michael Smith, "the first thing we would have done was fire ourselves."

Drapeau says some workers feel demeaned by working in a "hot dog shop." One employee, he says, used to play opera on the stereo.

"He wanted to show that he was serving hot dogs, but he was an intellectual," says Drapeau, chuckling. "His way of doing it was playing opera."

Being unpretentious is the Tasty's primary asset, says Drapeau. "In here we have a good time. We won't let [the customers] read books--we tell them we have a deepseated fear of being thought of as a coffeehouse."

Political analyses and musings on the state of the nation are also taboo, he says. "That's Au Bon Pain talk. This is a hot dog shop."

Drapeau calls his job "fascinating...because kids at this age are very optimistic. They haven't fallen on their asses yet. You're at Harvard, you have the whole world ahead of you. Well eventually most of you are going to fall. But it's great to see that spirit."