I see dead restaurants. They are everywhere I go in Downtown Boulder.
I see the 14th Street Grill where Oak at Fourteenth is now. I spy the Good Taste Crepe Shop and Rocky Mountain Joe’s Cafe atop Into the Wind. So many restaurants have filled these spaces over the past half century, and tens of thousands of prep cooks and dishwashers and waitresses have worked there.
In all my decades of working in (and writing about) Boulder eateries, I’ve only seen one dead person … I think.
It was the late 1970s, and writing jobs were nonexistent in hip-but recession-pounded Boulder. I put my McGill University degree aside and went to work as a cook in a string of restaurants.
I hated working at night, but those were the shifts available at Caffe Circolo, an Italian-American eatery located at 1447 Pearl St. It opened shortly after the debut of the downtown walking mall.
I was in the sweltering kitchen doing the grunt work of cleaning, taking the trash to the alley and prepping ingredients for the next day. Wearing a tomato-stained white apron, I was weeping over a cutting board of chopped white onions. I suddenly became acutely aware that I was being observed — odd, because I was alone.
As I turned to look, I caught something quivering on the edge of my peripheral vision, like the shimmering ephemeral auras that surround some people.
I sensed there was a presence. Even though I couldn’t see them, I had the unmistakable warm feeling that this apparition was female with seemingly long flowing hair. A name came to me out of the blue: Mirabelle. I thought: “What a beautiful name.” I did not look to see if she cast a shadow.
In my kitchen career, I’d witnessed plenty of weirdness, including knives thrown, grease fires, blood spurting, screaming, weeping and groping in the pantry. I’d never seen anything like this before.
Back in 1970s Boulder, I also enjoyed many psychedelic adventures. I knew what hallucinations looked and felt like. Mirabelle didn’t look like anything induced by acid, mescaline, mushrooms (or hits of nitrous oxide from whipped cream cans).
I pondered other explanations for this spectral presence. Was it aliens communicating with me, vivid déjà vu, astral projection, a waking dream or a multiverse convergence?
Some men might have been scared or been prompted to do the sign of the cross, but since I believed in neither ghosts nor gods, no cold horror shudder went up the spine. In fact, a warmth slowly spread through my various loins.
I smiled. The feeling was more than friendly, more like longing. It felt a lot like testosterone-fueled lust. It would have seemed ridiculous except for my history of hungering after unavailable and imaginary lovers.
I thought about saying “hi.” If she was post-dead, I hoped nothing bad had happened to her or that she hadn’t done something horrible to end up as a spirit.
Real-life close encounters are nothing like in the movies. I had to finish my prep work, put the marinara in the walk-in and close up the kitchen for the night.
If I had hooked up with a waitress instead of a phantom, we would have headed to my place. Instead, I locked the kitchen door and walked home alone. That said, I’d gone on much worse dates than this one.
After that night, I intentionally asked for more late-night shifts. I had a sense that Mirabelle was still there with me as I cooked, but the presence was sadly fading.
Right around that time, a costly disaster struck Caffe Circolo. The morning crew came in one day to find that a huge saucepan of marinara sauce had gone bad overnight in the walk-in. It was chalked up to a storage problem. Then it happened the next morning, too. The sauce — the lifeblood of the lasagna, baked ziti and spaghetti — went sour again.
When it kept happening, the restaurant owners made a very mid-’70s Boulder business decision. They hired a shaman to clear the space, and he left a dreamcatcher in an east-facing window. The pots of pureed plum tomatoes, olive oil, salt, garlic and basil never went bad again.
I soon left Caffe Circolo for another eatery without ever telling anyone about Mirabelle. I didn’t think they would understand.
Several years later, I was back in that kitchen when the space became the Heartland Cafe. I learned after I started cooking that the new owners had pre-emptively asked a Tibetan monk to clear the spirits from the place before the eatery opened. I never felt Mirabelle again.
Since then, I’ve eaten at successive dining spots on that corner, from Golden Mountain Chinese Restaurant to Illegal Pete’s. I’ve wondered if any of the hundreds of people who worked there over the decades had encountered Mirabelle.
The other night I parked near Pearl and 15th streets to take a few photos of Illegal Pete’s. A beer sign was hung in the window that once held a dreamcatcher.
I remembered a familiar tingle and wondered whether Mirabelle would recognize the elder, white bearded version of me if we met today. Would her glimmer have greyed, too?
I gently chanted “Mirabelle, Mirabelle, Mirabelle” as I hobbled off into the Boulder shadows.
John Lehndorff cooked in Boulder at Yocom’s, Good Taste Crepe Shop, Pearl’s, Tom Horn’s, Potters, French Peasant, Greenbriar Inn and The Sink (but only for one shift). A version of this story was originally published in the Colorado Daily in the late 1970s.
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