Dishes served with side of community
Vegetarian, vegan fare at Tricklebee
It’s a familiar format: Tricklebee Cafe customers look over the small menu board and place their order before taking a seat and waiting for their lunch. The resemblance to other counterservice restaurants pretty much ends there, though, as the Rev. Christie Melby-Gibbons asks from behind the counter if a customer will need change, then discreetly turns away.
That’s because Tricklebee is a pay-what-you-can cafe. Some customers pay less than the estimated $5.69 to $6.46 cost of a meal; others pay it forward, putting enough in the jar to cover their meals and part or all of a stranger’s.
After the faith-based, nonprofit cafe’s opening in November, its mission was widely told in the media, including a vivid article by Journal Sentinel reporter John Schmid. It seemed symbolic, so hopeful, that a new business with a model of fairness and kindness would open in the Sherman Park neighborhood after a summer of unrest and pain.
But in purely practical dining terms, the public also should know this is a place to find tasty, wholesome vegan and vegetarian fare, in a charming setting (check the fancy, vintage tile floor) with friendly, helpful staff and volunteers.
One of the cafe’s charms is robust coffee, served in an area of the city not yet awash in coffee shops. The cafe occasionally uses dairy products, but often not; the “cream” for that good, strong coffee — served in mugs bearing the cafe’s honeybee logo — is almond milk.
The counter, a repurposed pulpit, is at the back of the cafe, past small tables, a couple of large community tables and a well-used play area for children.
The kitchen is steps away. The day’s menu, always changing, is brief — typically a soup, a salad (or two), a grilled sandwich or quesadilla, plus a cookie or another dessert. Beverages usually are coffee, herbal tea and water.
The menu takes its cues from what’s growing — it might be a box of arugula from one of the cafe’s three CSA farms, or vegetables from a row in a volunteer’s home garden.
In spring, morel mushrooms from Melby-Gibbons’ parents’ property in Iowa appeared on the menu. These days, fresh herbs garnish soups.
Ingredients might arrive as donations; sometimes, a pallet of food not yet expired but being discarded by a big-box store is rescued.
So, what’s in the kitchen can be pure serendipity; it means the cooks have to be nimble, creating menus on the fly.
“It’s a blast,” Melby-Gibbons said, adding that cooks were told in their interviews for the two 10-hour positions, “We need you to be a passionate cook … and find excitement in the process.”
The menus are always posted online and on a sandwich board outside the North Ave. cafe, but it might be posted only a half-hour before the cafe opens as the menu takes shape.
Salads at Tricklebee were particularly good, like the one that dressed cauliflower in olive oil and flavored it with capers, or another that tossed greens with pomegranate seeds, walnut, grapefruit and carrots in a lightly sweet dressing donated by the case by a Minnesota chef.
I never saw the same menu twice. On different days, there were grilled sandwiches of almond butter and raisin chutney, slaw made of red cabbage, carrot, ginger and apple, a salad of papaya, red pepper, ginger and lemon, black bean dip with blue corn chips.
Oatmeal, walnut and dried cranberry cookies often were on hand. There might be chocolate chip cookies, or a parfait of pureed banana and ginger with granola.
The cafe, open for lunch Wednesday to Saturday, plus an agape dinner on Thursday nights (a buffet of soup and baked goods), serves as many as 70 people a day. The dining room holds about 25 at a time.
Melby-Gibbons’ efforts received national recognition in May when James Beard Foundation humanitarian of the year award winner Denise Cerreta, of the One World Everybody Eats network of community cafes, singled out the pastor as an inspiration.
The name, Melby-Gibbons explained after Tricklebee opened seven months ago, came from saying the “trick’ll be” sustaining a cafe in an area streaked with poverty. But Melby-Gibbons said it’s doing well.
“I keep sort of pinching myself, but it’s working,” she said. When Melby-Gibbons said she was opening a pay-what-youcan cafe, she was told she was crazy, that customers would take advantage of the model.
Instead, she’s found “people want to pay for their meal. There’s some kind of dignity in this transaction,” Melby-Gibbons said. Some might put in a handful of change or help out at the cafe in return for their meal, and others will put in $10 or $20.
“Food is the thing that unites us all, no matter what background,” Melby-Gibbons said. “It’s the thing we all do every day and find delight in.”
The idea in opening the cafe as a mission tied to the Moravian Church was to provide healthful food in a neighborhood where options are limited.
And from a faith perspective, Melby-Gibbons said, Jesus “got what it meant to be a neighbor, out with people on their turf.”