Coops in Oakland taking a new path
Workers of color team up to run cafes with political agenda
“We’re trying to live out our different values and politics in a system that doesn’t really create a space for that.” Alejandra Cano of Hasta Muerte Coffee
The kitchen fell behind on a recent busy Friday night at Tamarack, a new restaurant and cafe in downtown Oakland. Despite the pileup of orders, executive chef Jesa Brooks looked calm and collected as she plated fried chicken and waffles. While many chefs have gained reputations for yelling in highstress environments, Brooks aims to treat her colleagues as equals — because they are.
Tamarack is a workerowned, cooperatively run restaurant, making it unique in the neighborhood’s bustling food scene. It operates with democratic principles and profitsharing like other food coops — grocery stores like San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery or Oakland’s Mandela Grocery Cooperative — but sells cocktails and pastries instead of kale and eggs.
The restaurant arrived in February as part of a young fleet of foodservice coops in Oakland, including Hasta Muerte Coffee, a Fruitvale cafe that opened in 2017 outfitted with a radical bookstore, activist art on the walls and Latino workerowners; and Cafe Sama, which opened downtown in January as a minority and transowned cafe “dedicated to building community at the axis of identity, creativity and labor,” according to its Instagram account.
In the East Bay, workerowned, cooperatively run restaurants and cafes first came to prominence in the 1970s in Berkeley with the likes of Cheese Board, the Juice Bar
Collective and Swallow, a restaurant that included food writer Ruth Reichl as a member. But Oakland’s newest coops carry a more urgent political bent, borne out of decidedly different circumstances. While the last generation of coops emerged from the predominantly white counterculture movement, these new coops see people of color at the helm, seeking to sustain community organizing and create alternatives at a time when service workers often can’t afford to survive in the Bay Area. The challenge is making it work in the long term.
“We’re trying to live out our different values and politics in a system that doesn’t really create a space for that,” said Alejandra Cano of Hasta Muerte Coffee.
Tamarack, Hasta Muerte and Cafe Sama — which has a “no media policy” and did not respond to interview requests — all regularly organize events that speak to resistance: a teachin on the Sudanese revolution, a talk with a Kurdish activist, postermaking in support of migrants stuck in Tijuana, a presentation on the global housing crisis.
About 15 percent of the workerowned coops in the country are foodservice businesses, as estimated by Melissa Hoover, executive director of Democracy at Work Institute, an Oakland organization dedicated to developing cooperatives. These cafes and restaurants have been steadily humming along since the 1970s, but she said who is starting them today — and why — is very different.
According to Democracy at Work’s 2017 Worker Cooperative State of the Sector report, 61 percent of workerowners across the country’s coops are people of color. Back in the 1970s, coop founders were typically white and privileged, according to the report.
“They were choosing to use a coop to exit the economy and start a new thing. People starting coops today are people who were left out of good jobs and are using it to enter the economy,” said Hoover, adding that those left out of jobs are often people of color or trans folks facing discrimination.
Hoover sees two things specific to the Bay Area fueling this small resurgence. First, the strong local history of coops means the idea is already in the ether — in addition to popular staples like Arizmendi Bakery and multiple grocery coops, there are newer spots like Alchemy Collective Coffee and Taste of Denmark Bakery, both founded in Oakland in 2010 with racially diverse membership. Hoover also said that the astronomical cost of living leads people to look for more financial stability — something ownership can offer.
The latter was one major reason Tamarack bar director Will Adams moved into the coop world. He said many service workers have to work 60 hours a week to make ends meet in the Bay Area.
At Tamarack, whose 10 members met through activism, including Occupy Wall Street and protests against the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Adams’ salary is higher than the average Oakland bartender’s, though tips are much less. That’s because Tamarack is small at 40 seats — and still relatively unknown — and he splits his tips evenly with other workerowners.
Adams was frustrated with the structure of most restaurants, where chefs can be prone to yelling and people don’t always treat each other with respect.
“The idea of having a horizontally run collective space just cuts out the two problems I have with the industry: that the hierarchy sucks and you don’t make enough money,” he said.
Starting a coop isn’t easy, however. When Hasta Muerte’s members first started organizing, they used donated handbooks from other Bay Area coops as a starting point. They ran into some issues.
The cafe gained national attention when its policy against serving uniformed police officers became public — its members started regularly receiving threats, its Yelp page swelled with fake onestar reviews, a rightwing protest erupted outside of its doors. At one point, someone even took the trouble to send the cafe a bag of plastic penises. But Hasta Muerte’s members stuck to their policy, which they said was an effort to make people of color feel safe at the cafe.
Ultimately, none of that chaos impacted the strength of the collective. Instead, it was regular interpersonal conflict that caused half its members to drop out, from an original six workerowners to three, said Hasta Muerte’s Matt Gereghty.
“There are plenty of templates for how to organize yourself, but you have to create a model that fits your particular culture,” Gereghty said.
During the fallout that resulted in multiple members leaving Hasta Muerte, Gereghty thought back to how other coops ask members to assume other members always have the best intentions. But unlike coops of past generations, Hasta Muerte’s owners experienced too much subtle racism in prior work environments to automatically trust one another, he said. That kind of trust takes time to build.
It can be tricky to live out these ideals. All of Hasta Muerte’s members work other jobs, and the business has yet to turn a profit.
At Tamarack, Adams and Brooks are the only two who work at the restaurant full time; everyone else takes unpaid shifts on top of their fulltime jobs with the hope of paychecks after Tamarack becomes more established. Members scored a great deal on their downtown Oakland space and did the entire construction process themselves, largely financed by Tamarack’s wealthiest workerowners, who also work in the tech industry. Neither business can afford to provide health benefits, but they plan to eventually.
“Ultimately, vale la pena,” Gereghty said. “It’s worth the struggle. It’s worth the challenge. It’s worth the pain.”