10 for 10
By Kathy Y. Wilson

Location, Location
Blockbuster manages to survive in the digital age

photo: sean hughes/pPhoto: Graham Lienhart

A Blockbuster clerk comes in to work his shift in Corryville carrying a bag with a stinky gyro in it, the onions lighting up the front of the store the minute he walks in.

Several minutes later, he looks at me and belches loudly as he's leaving, announcing: "I'm going to Walgreen's to get some water."

He says "'Scuse me, 'scuse me" halfway out the door only after I say how nasty he is.

"Actually," I clarify, "that's quite trifling."

It's not pretty, but it's just videos.

Belching video store clerks aside, it doesn't matter who rents you the DVD that'll pacify your dateless weekend or serve as backing track to your binge-drinking frat party. It only matters that the store - Blockbuster, CityBeat readers have declared for a decade - has a copy of the video you want or that video game your thumbs are poised to play.

And if location is the foundation of any surviving business, then Blockbuster has that on lock, too. Despite the resurgence of the hip, independent rental stores (a la Bughouse Video in Northside) and the saturation of online services (like Netflix), Blockbuster is the cockroach of rental stores. It survives.

"Location has a lot to do with it," says Colleen Sidi, six-year Blockbuster veteran and assistant manager for two-and-a-half years of the Corryville store. "We're everywhere. And brand name. And we have good policies, customer service policies."

Sidi says there was a surge in customers after Blockbuster's massive "no more late fees" campaign, and her store averages 30 to 40 new members weekly.

Some dinosaurs still ask for VHS tapes.

"We do have people coming in a lot asking for videos," Sidi says. "We tell 'em they've gotta conform if they want to watch movies."
Forgotten and Ladder 49 number among the 10 VHS tapes still lingering throughout the store. The tapes sell for $5. Please take them off their hands.

Wedding Crashers has been the most stolen DVD during recent months, and, Crash and Walk the Line were the most rented movies pre-Academy Awards, picked because customers presumably rushed to watch the Oscar contenders that had made it to DVD before the March 5 ceremony.

Next time you hit a Blockbuster and the clerk expels something from his body, remember that Quentin Tarrentino started out as a video store clerk. ©

Same As It Ever Was
First Watch's 10-year-old pancake

photo: sean hughes/pPhoto: Graham Lienhart

Dominic Mandizha, general manager since 2000 of the First Watch on Seventh Street Downtown, looks flummoxed when I tell him readers for 10 years have picked First Watch as "best breakfast."

Has anything changed? Any good stories? Anything "10" related? How many pancakes have you served during the decade?

He thinks.

White Catholics fresh from Mass and downtown-dwelling Yuppies swarm the front desk, jockeying to get on the wait list. Nondescript Classical-sounding music pipes above, drowned out by the din of orders shouted from the open kitchen and silverware scraping plates.
That's basically the same pancake and the same pot of coffee for a decade, I tell him, trying to jog something loose.

"Ten years? Hmmm," Mandizha finally says. "Not much has changed."

Exactly.

That imperceptible First Watch X-factor is the thing about First Watch customers love and depend on.

It's the sameness of knowing that what you order will be prepared and presented hot, identically well and blink-quick. Downtown, business types swear by First Watch for its expediency during the less-than-an-hour lunch hour. And if they do encounter a wait it doesn't stop them from talking on cellular appendages that cover their ears or trading business cards on the way to the table.

Once seated, regardless of how packed the room is, there's virtually no wait before a server appears to take a drink order. Sometimes, it seems as soon as you're through giving your order it's served by the plaid-and-khaki-clad servers.

Our server loudly, and with an almost militaristic precision this side of annoying, repeats our orders back to us, eliminating the chances of misconstruing a pancake for a waffle or iced tea for cranberry juice.

Whether it's Tri-County, Norwood or Downtown, the uniformity of the chain (gang) mentality of First Watch's sameness manifests in triplicate - the unidentifiable, barely-there Classical music; the boxy shape (from the booths to the dining room itself); and the perfect way the six hanging plants are suspended above the windows.

And at every First Watch, in a don't-bother-me-on-the-small-stuff move, servers leave and perpetually replenish a coffee carafe and a water pitcher on each table.

Even in the identicalness that's the dependable benchmark of First Watch from store to store, however, there is a slight difference in aura, if a chain restaurant can have such a thing.

"Tri-County sucks," I tell a different server who brings our food.

She says she'd heard that same complaint. The service there is questionable in the way the service industry in the suburbs sometimes lacks attentiveness and verve. And the food was bland, if that's not a redundancy for a restaurant selling only breakfast and brunch.

Hyde Park snobs confused by the Norwood Zip code of the Rookwood First Watch have given that store an air of exclusivity it doesn't deserve; the service and food are excellent.

It's downtown where humanity converges - families in the area to see a show at the Aronoff, gay couples, students, housewives and strangely coiffed out-of-towners. And the servers have it all down to a science.

"We have more seniority in this store than (other) First Watches," says Nita Crawford, a server downtown for eight-and-a-half years.
It's true. Many of the downtown servers' faces are recognizable to me from at least 10 years ago when First Watch and Fountain News comprised my Sunday morning routine. Then I went through a period of cursing the First Watch sameness.

Now I'm back for the benign.

Crawford says servers stay because First Watch offers good health insurance, a 50 percent 401k matching contribution, tuition reimbursement for full-time students and fat tips.

"That's a lot of what keeps us here, and because we close at 2 (p.m.), there's no nights to work," says Crawford, who averages $550 a week in tips.

Apparently, First Watch hasn't been rewarded solely with a "Best of" vote. You like them. You really, really like them. ©

A Scoop in Time
Graeter's ice cream is for reunions

photo: sean hughes/pPhoto: Natalie Hager

One of the few unwritten redemptions in this job is that it slams us against humanity, sometimes even hurtling us back to a less complicated era in life right smack dab in the middle of the mundaneness of now.

I went to the Graeter's store/factory on Reading Road expecting to scribble down the oft-reported trivia of these hometown ice cream demigods - stuff like French pot methodology, hand packing and the secret recipes of exotic seasonal faves such as watermelon sorbet (for the dog days of summer), apple cider sorbet (for the leaf-crunching crispness of fall) and eggnog ice cream (for the holidays).
But this won't turn out to be about any of that.

You've already claimed your favorite flavors, and you already know about French pots and how Graeter's ships its ice cream anywhere you want. You like the perfect symmetry of fizz, sweet and cold in their sodas, and you secretly scarf their white iced cake donuts and gourmet cinnamon rolls. You voted Graeter's "best ice cream" 10 years in a row.

Judging by the way you crowd your strollers into the Clifton store on Ludlow Avenue or the one on Hyde Park Square, you've passed these same virtues to your toddlers.

But enough about that. And don't expect anything about the joy and ecstasy of discovering in the middle of the night there's still two heaping spoonfuls of Graeter's black raspberry chip in the freezer when all you got out of bed to do was to pee.

This is about how small our city is and how the past resurfaces at just the right time.

I can say with certainty that I helped raise Jim Gray, manager of Graeter's Reading Road store, but I wouldn't be making that claim if he hadn't reminded me on an overcast March morning of whom we were to one another 23 years ago. As a Greenhills High School junior, I answered his mom's solicitation for a glorified nanny, the description of which was read over the school's PA during morning announcements.

Looking back, who wouldn't want to make $50 a week hanging out with some cool, smart kids a few hours after school in a nice house in Wyoming? I was always scrounging money to bulk up my tape collection, buy paperbacks of poetry, see movies and keep gas in my mustard-yellow AMC Hornet.

I was humiliated when my father and stepmother insisted on being good parents by driving me to the interview with Eileen, the mom, and by sitting in on it and asking pertinent questions such as, "How many hours an evening will Kathy be here?" and "Will she be expected to drive your children to their activities?" and my personal favorite, "What do you do for a living?"

Eileen was impressed that I'd had extensive babysitting experience, that I didn't appear to be a drug addict who'd come back Helter Skelter style and murder her family and mostly that my parents cared enough to send the very best - themselves - so I got the gig.

For the next year or so I let myself into their house and vacuumed the carpets and folded laundry before her three children got home from school. Once they got in I supervised homework, fixed snacks, curtailed TV watching and helped Jimmy, as we called him then, with his speech and eye exercises.

All of this is trivial except that the three kids are adopted from Vietnam or Korea (my memory fails me now). Eileen was then a single mother raising a blended family in a wealthy neighborhood and she trusted me - a silly, loud black girl and lackluster student from Forest Park - to watch after and drive around her children every single day.

If you're thinking it's obvious for a white woman to hire a black teenager to be a burgeoning domestic, you're stuck in the refrain of Song of the South.

Eileen K. Gray gave me a chance, and it wasn't the first or last time I'd call on my skills as a negotiator, a comedian and a pragmatist to bend folks my way. It took Jim's twin sisters a bit to warm up to my boisterous personality, but Jim and I connected immediately.

He stayed under foot as I knocked off my light chores, and we played in the leaves in the fall, had snowball fights in winter and sock fights throughout the house when the weather kept us inside. After Eileen no longer needed me, she was an excellent reference, recommending me for a cushy summer gig at King's Island. (Hey, a teenager's gotta start somewhere.)

I didn't know who Jim Gray was when I walked into Graeter's, but I knew he was the manager from previous trips.

"You used to babysit me," Jim said before I could finish my "Best of for the past 10 years" schtick and as soon as I said my name. I kept talking.

"You used to babysit me," he said again.

All it took was one hard look. He is that same rambunctious kid I knew who cracked me up with his "black babysitter" jokes.

We hugged and caught up. And I could've cared less about ice cream.

"Remember when we...," Jim said, giggling with memories, "Ohmygod we had so much fun together. Those sock fights. You were the best one."

And so is Graeter's, because it's where we meet home sweet home. ©

Paul Is Dead
Or the city's best sportswriter stays too busy to check his messages

photo: sean hughes/pPhoto: Slim Jim Puvee

Top 10 Reasons Paul "best newspaper columnist 10 years running" Daugherty of The Cincinnati Enquirer
never e-mailed me back for this Best of Cincinnati piece:

10. He's been fooling his Enquirer bosses all these years - he really can't read.

9. He was detained by Homeland Security coming back from Torino, Italy, after covering the Winter Olympics, which followed his coverage of the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Kentucky Derby and the Soap Box Derby.

8. He's too busy fulfilling his community service requirements in Covington, picking up trash on Greenup Street.

7. He's spending all his free time undercover on the set of those Fitworks commercials working on an expose of Bob Huggins.

6. He's taking my former column title, Your Negro Tour Guide, literally and thinks I'm soliciting him to join a group tour of Over-the-Rhine.

5. He's pissed because I keep pronouncing his name DAR-ty instead of DOCK-er-ty.

4. He has a big head after being voted "best columnist" by CityBeat readers for 10 consecutive years, so the rest of us are peons.

3. He didn't clear it with Peter Bronson.

2. He's actually in jail in Tijuana with Channel 9's Dennis Jansen.

1. He was in Sarasota covering the Reds' spring training, and the extension cord from his laptop didn't reach that far. ©

A Museum By
Any Other Name Gallery or not, the CAC is OK by readers

Let's get something straight off the rip: The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), voted by you as "Best Art Gallery" for 10 straight years, is not an art gallery at all. It's an art museum that exhibits but doesn't permanently collect art.

So there.

From New York City, where he's viewing the Whitney Biennial, CAC Associate Curator Matt Distel gives us a few of his favorite moments and exhibits from the recent past.

The CAC prides itself on bringing to Cincinnati groundbreaking artists, some of whom make their American premiere at the CAC. South African Kendell Geers and Israeli Guy Ben-ner are two such artists who exhibited their first solo U.S. museum sows at the CAC - the former showed drawings and sculpture in Hung, Drawn and Quartered (fall 2004), and the latter exhibited video and installation work in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (fall 2005).

Distel called the spring 2004 Beautiful Losers show "landmark," saying it's now touring Italy. Since he's been visiting New York, Distel says art afficionados there have told him the Losers catalogue is a "seminal text."

Distel recalls the Mapplethorpe exhibit as a significant moment in the museum's history. Of course, anyone old enough to remember - regardless of wherever we fall on the issue of freedom of expression and the definitions of art - will agree that the 1990 exhibit and all the resulting fallout was little more than fear of a black penis.

On a lighter note, Distel says the Un-Museum on the CAC's sixth floor endears the museum to families and is "a template for children's museums."

The section of the 2003-04 show Crimes & Misdemeanors that addressed 1980s art censorship and the AIDS crisis in America also resonates with Distel.

"I felt it encapsulated the '80s art in a way that hadn't been done before," he says.

While he was in college, Distel worked on the CAC's installation crew and remembers late 1995's TODT: Zero Zum exhibition, a four-man collective of New York artists then living in Cincinnati, as an industrial show targeting consumerism, abortion and genetic modification.
Proof that Cincinnati is on the vanguard of the art world, Distel says many of the artists exhibited at the CAC, like sculptor Tim Hawkinson, who exhibited Humongolous in late 1996, go on to places such as the Whitney. Distel says Hawkinson, in fact, recently had a large solo show at the Whitney.

Obviously the art coming through the CAC is world-class. So what's in a name? ©

I'll Drink to That
Party Source is (not) a supermarket for alcoholics

JonJphoto: sean hhes/Photo: Natalie Hager

"This is like a supermarket for alcoholics!" said the bewildered black man walking through the automatic doors to Party Source. He was with his friend on a mission to buy up copious amounts of liquor.

I laughed out loud. He didn't. He'd meant what he said.

He was almost right. Actually, Party Source is a supermarket for connoisseurs of wine and spirits, a Best of Cincinnati readers pick for 10 straight years now.

That "supermarket for alcoholics" exclamation was made probably 12 years ago, not long after Party Source opened in 1993, and it's stuck in my head as a generic fill-in-the-blank tag applicable to any brand name hyper-market clogging the pop culture landscape. (As in: "Wal-Mart is like a supermarket for anti-union bashers supporting lower wages for women!" Or "Kroger is like a supermarket where wealthy neighborhoods get better produce and fewer sugary cereals!" But I digress.)

Few weekend drinkers had ever seen anything like Party Source, accustomed as we were to mom-and-pop corner bodegas, the sallow lighting and company store aesthetic of old-school state stores and those crowded and seedy liquor outlets dotting Covington.

Imagine it: Liquor with wide-ranging price points and mind-boggling selections, wide aisles and bright lighting that took squalid out of liquor shopping.

"We take our cues from the grocery stores," says Party Source General Manager Jon Stiles. "We pay attention to what the grocery stores do."

Party Source was ahead of its time. But also necessary.

Back when it opened, there was a grassy knoll down the street on what's now a destination "levee" of entertainment. There weren't exotic fish or turtles in giant tanks or valet parking for revelers seeking the convenience of a mall without the convenient of mall parking. Back then, Newport was a brand of cigarettes and not the antithesis to Cincinnati's barren riverfront.

According to Stiles, who helped open the Bellevue store as its specialty foods director, Party Source was predicted to be a "category killer" of the smaller, independently owned liquor store. Yet he says there are currently more liquor sales permit holders in Kentucky than at any other time previously. But I bet few have liquor sales on lockdown like Party Source, which closed its four Louisville stores and its Florence store to concentrate solely on the Bellevue location.

And while all Kentucky liquor outlets in September 2004 won the right to sell liquor all day on Sunday, Saturday remains Party Source's biggest retail day.

"(Sunday) is our slowest day of the week, but it's still a significant day," Stiles says. "It's still a $50,000 day."

Contrary to popular retail belief and media trumpeting, Stiles says the Saturday before Christmas - not the day after Thanksgiving - is the most lucrative retail day of the year.

And yet nearly 5,000 customers swamp Party Source every New Year's Eve.

"New Year's Eve is almost as big," he says. "That's the day we back up on the interstate and jam the parking lot."

Though liquor sales boom and wine purchases continue to outnumber all other sales, the store's famous gourmet deli was closed in January 2004 because it lost money, says Stiles, who opened and ran the deli and who now manages the store's 90 employees.
Ironically, the onslaught of the surrounding restaurants, which Party Source predated, siphoned off the deli's customer base.

"I always go back to The Cosby Show episode when Cliff said, 'I brought you into this world and I can take you out,'..." Stiles says. "I brought it in, and I had to take it out."

The store, whose motto is "Everything but the guests," doesn't seem to be hurting. The space where the deli once stood is now used for EQ ( "Entertainment Quotient") programs like tapas demonstrations and wine tastings.

Customers trek in from Tennessee, Columbus, Michigan and Illinois for the store's growing single malt scotch selection and its top-tier Italian wine collection. Stiles says a customer once shelled out $32,000 in a single trip for wine and that many customers are on a first-name basis with employees such as Shelly Dischar in customer service, who, from her booth, serves as the store's liquor traffic controller.
"Once you come here the first time, it's hard not to shop here again," Stiles says.

Maybe that bewildered black man was right all those years ago. ©

Chili Willies
A gastrointestinal dime bag of Skyline factoids

photo: sean hughes/pPhoto: Chris Kemp

1. The downtown Skyline at Seventh and Vine streets delivers at lunchtime to the immediate downtown area.

2. Vegetarian beans and rice are available throughout the year, and a special blend is sold during Lent.

3. Skyline's chili comes from its factory as a frozen block; cooks at each location just add water. (People still say some locations make their chili taste different, but no one will admit they add anything but water in the kitchen.)

4. Skyline counts Gold Star Chili as its sole competitor. Independents like Camp Washington Chili don't pose a chili threat.

5. The three-, four- and five-way are the Rubik's Cube of chili and are available in countless combinations that include, in some amalgamation, chili, spaghetti, cheese, onions and beans. Servers can't count the different ways they're ordered.

6. The Skyline counter staff at Seventh and Vine daily wear through seven 100-count bags of plastic sanitary gloves, changing to a fresh pair at the start of every order.

7. The same store grates 80 pounds of Wisconsin cheddar cheese every day.

8. Before it's drowned in Skyline chili, cooked spaghetti is tossed in tomato sauce. Check the red tint next time your three-way is being prepared.

9. The Seventh and Vine Skyline serves 600 hot dogs a day.

10. The weirdest requests at Seventh and Vine? A customer ordered a chili sandwich (made with chili, onions, mustard and cheese) with spaghetti and beans, and once someone ordered a three-way with lettuce instead of spaghetti.

Sources: Marilyn Barnes, server for 8-plus years, and Erin Otis, shift supervisor, Seventh and Vine Skyline.