Gray's standard lunch was a BLT on white bread with lots of mayo, skim milk and a chocolate-chip cookie. A couple of months ago, on a day that wasn't going well to begin with, the cookies were all gone. But the spunky 60-yearold said she thinks deserves some time off to work in her yard and get her flowers growing again. O'Leary-Duthie has been working at the cafeteria seven days a week for most weeks since she won the bid for the business a decade ago. She's done most of the shopping herself to avoid paying delivery fees, and she and her staff make most of the items on the menu from scratch, baking 10 dozen cookies and cooking up to 50 pounds of potatoes a day.
Coffee is a quarter.
Fries and hash browns are each 75 cents. Big cookies are 25 cents each. On Wednesday afternoon, Labor Department employees Gordon Bruce and Mike Furlong were seated at Esther's for an afternoon break. For years, they have been eating there at least once on most workdays. He's been eating with Esther since the early 1980s, back when she ran the cafeteria in the Department of Revenue building.