Elmwood Cafe: Berkeley spot in ’15 incident closes
Elmwood Cafe, a Berkeley coffee shop, closed without warning Friday, days after the business was brought back into the national spotlight amid conversations about racial bias.
Some believe the abrupt closure may be a result of a recent wave of negative reviews after parallels were drawn between this month’s controversial arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks and a similar 2015 incident at Elmwood Cafe involving Bay Area comedian and CNN contributor W. Kamau Bell.
The cafe was open Thursday afternoon, yet by Friday morning, the windows at the cafe at 2900 College Ave. were covered with brown paper. A note on the shop’s window read: “Elmwood Cafe has closed. Our sincere gratitude to all in the community. Thank you for your support through the years.”
Local reaction to the closure has been one of surprise, evident in the groups of Berkeley residents who could be seen milling outside the cafe Friday morning as news of the closure spread.
Nigel Jones, an East Bay native and chef, said the closure reflected the influence of a vocal East Bay community.
“Well, them closing shows the importance of the conversations about race our society is having right now, in general,” said Jones, who owns Caribbean restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland.
Elmwood Cafe was associated with racial bias in 2015 when Bell, who is black, said he was told to leave after an employee incorrectly asserted he was bothering a group of white women seated outside at a table. Bell’s wife was among the group. The incident made headlines after it was detailed in his blog.
This week, Bell told The Chronicle that after the incident at Elmwood, he was told by the business that the employees at the time would go through sensitivity training. But “the Elmwood Cafe definitely went back to business as usual,” he said.
The owner of the Elmwood Cafe, Michael Pearce, could not be reached for comment Friday. In 2015, shortly after the incident involving Bell, the news site Berkeleyside reported that Pearce “reached out to the comedian and they agreed a public forum to address issues of race would be an appropriate step.” The employee in question was fired, Pearce told Berkeleyside.
At the Philadelphia Starbucks, two black men were handcuffed and removed from a store after an employee called 911 because they had not purchased coffee and refused to leave. The men were detained for nine hours before being released without charges. A video of the incident posted on Twitter has more than 11 million views.
Starbucks announced Tuesday it is planning to close more than 8,000 stores for an afternoon of racial sensitivity education for its employees.
Oakland chef Preeti Mistry, a queer person of color who for years has pushed for equal representation of minorities within the Bay Area food landscape, said the situations in Starbucks and at Elmwood Cafe had distinctive parallels and easily could have been avoided.
“Giving (people of color) the ‘benign interpretation’ that is always given to white people can de-escalate most situations,” Mistry said. “Treating someone with respect and dignity also de-escalates situations.”
Keba Konte, the founder of Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, one of the country’s more prominent, black-owned coffee businesses, said that while a community like Berkeley has little tolerance for racial bias, Elmwood Cafe’s demise may have had a simpler foundation.
“No place really closes that fast. I think they were probably on their deathbed already,” Konte said. “If they were a vibrant, thriving business, it would have taken weeks or months for this kind of negative press to have any effect on the financial side of the business.”