A look inside: Cabot House
As 8 p.m. approaches, three baristas scurry about Cabot Café in the Radcliffe Quadrangle. They arrange fresh pastries on glass shelves, slice a gooey Mississippi mud pie, and unlock the doors. When they grind the coffee, the delicious smell fills the space, and students from around the quad filter in with friends or homework or both. Before the official opening of the café on Sept. 25, general manager Jesse Kaplan ’13 and four other managers taught the dozen new hires how to run the shop. The intensive, weeklong “barista boot camp” paid off; any of the dozen undergraduate baristas can smoothly run the shop alone on a given night. Kaplan and his classmates/business partners — Laura Hinton, Chandan Lodha, Daniel Lynch, and Carolyn Stein — last spring proposed their idea of opening a coffee shop in the basement of Cabot to House Masters Rakesh and Stephanie Khurana. Both masters have extensive business...