On any given Friday or Saturday night, the stretch of restaurants on Wells street between 15th and 17th are crowded with students getting their fix after a night out.
Contentious debates among friends over whether to get cheese curds or chili is a frequent occurrence. Regardless of the choice, employees of these restaurants stand waiting to serve hordes of students that pour in until the early hours of the morning.
“I could probably write a book,” Matt Thomas, an employee of five years at Real Chili, said. “I’d call it Real Chili Memoirs.”
Thomas works the closing shift most Friday and Saturday nights, and has made a lot of Marquette friends along the way.
“Overall it’s pretty great. I get to work with my best friends and chat with a bunch of different people, and the students are always fun,” he said.
Erica Cornelius, an employee across the street at Qdoba, has a similar opinion of her late shift. She said that it’s usually pretty funny, given the student clientele at that time of night.
“It makes the time go by a lot faster than it would working any other shift. Students get a little rowdy, but for the most part they are respectful,” Cornelius said.
Working the closing shift at Jimmy John’s, Keyimoni Tucker also experiences respectful students, who he said always say “please” and “thank you.”
However, there are some inevitable outliers at these establishments, given the late hours.
“A student once came in and tried to swindle money from us,” Tucker said. “He didn’t have enough money to pay for his sandwich. I ended up paying the rest for him, but it was kind of annoying.”
Cornelius also experiences some inconsiderate people from time to time, but she doesn’t see it as a big problem. Since Qdoba is busy on weekend nights, Cornelius says the staff tries to get customers in and out quickly without paying too much attention to rude people.
Thomas similarly does not let a few negative experiences jade him. Overall, he loves his job but said he dislikes dealing with troublesome customers.
“(I’ve had) encounters with people who don’t know how to act in public, or people who can’t handle their alcohol,” Thomas said.
Located just steps away from Murphy’s Irish Pub, the Real Chili employee says he sees this from time to time. In one instance, Thomas was cleaning up the shop with his coworker and went to clean the bathrooms and found a surprise.
“It was well past closing time, and the door was locked. I was laughing to myself thinking, ‘oh no,’” Thomas said. “I knocked, and eventually the person opened the door. The funniest part about it was the fact that the person casually left, acting like they hadn’t just been asleep in the bathroom of Real Chili.”
While the restaurants of Wells remain popular on Friday and Saturday, their nighttime crowds don’t disappear during the week.
“There are students who come in all the time and who I’ve gotten to know pretty well,” Thomas said of his frequent friends and customers.“We kind of build a fan base.”
