A COMMUNITY-CENTERED RESTAURANT PLAN

I used to live in deep, residential Bushwick close to where the J/L/A/C trains converge at Broadway Junction for a little more than three years. When I first moved there, the area was very quiet and had only three restaurants within a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment. If you aren’t familiar with that part of Brooklyn, Wilson Ave is eleven stops away from Manhattan on the L train — the equivalent of traveling from Union Square to 96th St on the 6 train. It’s pretty deep into Brooklyn.

Four years later, that part of Bushwick is rapidly becoming more gentrified. Featureless condos are replacing beautiful-but-rundown houses; there are multiple Citi Bike outposts peppered throughout the area; and trendy new bars and restaurants with irreverent names and light pink interiors have taken over previously vacant buildings. I no longer live out there, but every time I return, I’m amazed by how quickly things have changed.

This past summer I moved to Bed-Stuy. Architectural features like stoops and front porches spur spontaneous interaction between residents and passersby, contributing to a sense of community and shared responsibility. While it’s beginning to see early harbingers of gentrification — condos popping up between brownstones and an organic bodega opening up a couple blocks away — it’s been mostly sheltered from developers taking over in the same way as they have in Bushwick. However, there’s still a sense that aggressive, widespread gentrification is inevitable unless residents take action to define their neighborhood and community for themselves.

I would love to live here for a long time and ethically contribute to the community by opening up a community-centered restaurant. Yet as a newcomer to the neighborhood, I’m aware that owning a business here could potentially have negative, colonizing effects despite my best intentions. So, I’ll be taking measures into consideration through spatial design, business structure and ingredient sourcing to be sure that it sustains the community that I have come to love.

Ruby’s is a counter service restaurant and outdoor pop-up space that serves mostly plant-based food and employs both long-time Bed-Stuy residents and newcomers to foster a community among the restaurant’s guests and staff members that reflects the surrounding neighborhood. It will be housed in a small, narrow restaurant space a few blocks away from my apartment that’s currently available to rent and adjacent to a vacant lot. Instead of cramming in ten two-top tables with a hidden kitchen in the back, I’ll subdivide it into three sections: a provisions space at the front of the restaurant, an open kitchen facing sixteen counter seats and a small mushroom sprouting room that visitors can look into through amber glass.

The provisions space stocks affordable local food products that aren’t readily available in our local grocery stores as well as provide a testing ground for new products created by local entrepreneurs. However, I want this space to be flexible and responsive to what the community needs; I’ll regularly seek feedback and suggestions from guests to make sure that the products being offered are catering to what people want and need. Beyond providing a commercial space within the restaurant, keeping the front of the restaurant open with interesting things to browse provides an open space for guests waiting on a seat at the counter.  

Ruby’s will be counter service only, encouraging guests to face the restaurant staff and facilitate spontaneous interactions that wouldn’t happen at a traditional table setting. In my experience, the staff plays a huge role in defining a restaurant’s culture. Many new restaurants around us employ a lot of the same kinds of people: young artist types from outside of New York. Although creative class newcomers are certainly part of the community, we will seek out and recruit long-time residents in addition to newcomers in an effort to make Ruby’s culture welcoming to all Bed-Stuy residents.

Despite having limited seating, I want Ruby’s to be a place where people feel welcomed and comfortable. The front half of the counter will be at table height to accommodate people in wheelchairs, while the back half will be at bar height to create depth and visually divide the space. All the chairs have backs, and hooks line the wall under the bar for guests’ coats and bags. The building materials and furniture will be worn-in and comfortable, as though the restaurant has been around for years. I’ll source as many fixtures and materials from BIG Reuse as I can — they sell discarded building materials, kitchen appliances and restaurant furniture that I could upcycle. The lighting will be soft and warm, with gentle amber light filtering through tinted windows that face into the mushroom sprouting room along the back third of the restaurant.

Over the course of cooking dinner with my vegetarian roommates this past year, mushrooms have become one of the staple ingredients in my omnivorous approach to vegetarian cooking. Mushrooms can grow almost anywhere as long as the conditions are right, so we’ll grow king oyster, shiitake, lion’s mane and hen of the woods mushrooms to reduce the amount of food we need to source externally. At Ruby’s we’ll serve primarily vegetarian food alongside just 20 portions of a rotating meat-based entrée per night to reduce our carbon footprint and expose non-vegetarians to rich and savory vegetarian food. I would like for the menu to reflect community preferences, so the menu offerings will constantly evolve in response to our guests’ preferences.

For non-fungal produce, I’ll collaborate with the nearby Hattie Carthan Community Garden Market for ethically and locally sourced produce. Hattie Carthan is a “grassroots, people of color-led agricultural revitalization project” (Hattie Carthan Community Market website, 2020) that hosts educational and entrepreneurial events in the Bed-Stuy community while providing easier access to fresh produce. In addition to selling fruits and vegetables grown in their own garden, they also aggregate chemical-free produce from local farms within 150 miles of Bed-Stuy. Joining this existing network not only helps us minimize our carbon footprint but also allows Ruby’s to actively support and uplift an important community fixture.

The adjacent outdoor space will host a small, contained kitchen that faces a covered courtyard with communal tables. This courtyard will be a place that the community can define for themselves, following Future Cities Catapult’s theory of fast and slow architecture (Hill, 2008). Slow architecture encompasses permanent buildings and established business presences; while fast architecture is more temporary, like pop-ups (Hill, 2008). This space can seat overflow from the restaurant as well as facilitate community-led gatherings and events like small markets, art and entertainment events, and short-term pop-up restaurants from local chefs. Because people in my neighborhood already gather on stoops, porches and in the nearby Herbert Von King Park, I hope that this will provide yet another enclave for connecting with each other.

Caring for employees’ wellbeing goes hand-in-hand with caring for the community. It’s important that employees are paid a fair wage and have opportunities for career and personal development. But that takes money, which requires customers to be willing to pay more for the food we’re serving. The limited meat entrees will be meant for special occasions and thus significantly more expensive than the vegetarian dishes. I hope the effect of this will be twofold: encourage diners to eat less meat and essentially subsidize the plant-based offerings.

I’m really interested in creating a co-op restaurant of which employees could be part-owners. However, co-ops are limited by the same financial restrictions as conventional restaurants: finding a way to balance paying fair wages and offering accessible food. With that in mind, I’ll start out by structuring Ruby’s as a conventional restaurant with a single owner; however, all employees, regardless of position or seniority, will be paid the same wages of $15-20/hr with the remainder going to food and overhead costs. Once we’ve become more established as a restaurant, I’ll open up discussions with my employees to collectively shape Ruby’s future business structure.

If I’m being honest, I don’t know if this is a realistic business model. But I think it would be irresponsible to not try creating a new restaurant model that’s ethical and sustainable for all its stakeholders — especially now that the pandemic has thrown the restaurant industry’s inequities in sharp relief. I want Ruby’s to be an extension of the care I have for my friends and family, and for it to be a place that invites the community to take part in defining a new role for restaurants as a shared resource within our neighborhood.