Birchwood Café, one of South Minneapolis’ most popular food spots, is undergoing some changes and currently closed after an employee shake-up.
A few days after a Juneteenth block party this year, the restaurant shut down and laid off most of the staff. The fight moved onto social media, especially regarding the safety of staff, and the stresses they faced during the pandemic.
In a statement, thirteen former employees cited "overwork and a toxic work environment at Birchwood" according to the local food website Heavy Table.
Tracy Singleton is the owner of Birchwood and she told the WCCO Morning News that she is considering reorganization options but plans to full reopen in July.
“We don't have a specific date,” Singleton told WCCO’s Sloane Martin. “We are making plans to reopen soon, hopefully before the end of the month, and we're really excited about it.”
Birchwood has always taken an openly liberal stance to social issues across the city on their social media. The café announced they would be closed on Juneteenth, the holiday that recognizes the date enslaved people in Texas learned they were free.
Singleton recently laid off quite a large portion of the staff and told WCCO that she has no plans to hire them back.
“I still have 12 people that are employed and are very excited about our plans for the future,” Singleton says. “And you know, frankly I think that's much more of an interesting story, but I understand, you know people, nobody seems to want to talk to the staff who chose to stay. And as far as rehiring, I don't have any plans to rehire any of the employees that were let go. And it's not it's not my understanding that any of them want to want their jobs back.”
Singleton did talk about a former General Manager who has left due to the café’s political stance.
“She told me I was not hired to be an anti-racist,” Singleton shared. “You know, part of my vision for the Birchwood is this is a collective vision that's being co-created with my current staff and some other organizations and some other people. It's just a commitment, and I don't use that word lightly, commitment to anti-racism, anti-oppression and liberation for all. This isn't new. This is something I've been talking with my staff with for ten years and people get to make a choice. If that's a commitment they're willing to make then great, they're invited to come and be a part of what we're doing and engage with us in that way. And if they're not, they don't have to work at the Birchwood Café.”
As part of their reopening plans, Singleton says she plans to completely unravel the way they’ve been doing business.
“What's in the works is just a complete undoing of the way that we were operating as a business for the past 25 years,” she says. “The more that I'm learning in my own path to anti-racism is just the barriers that exist pretty much everywhere in society and that includes within the Birchwood Café. Anything from our hiring practices to just the culture of the café, how we treat people who are different than the majority of the café which has been white. Our staff has always been a majority white staff. In fact, before the pandemic, we had upwards of 80 employees and I would say, gosh, 95% of them were white. Now of our current staff, I'm one of three white people.”
Singleton is even going so far as to examine calling the Birchwood a restaurant.
“I'm even trying to think, is there a different word that I can use than restaurant? Because, you know, words are very important to me and they have so much weight and so much connotation. When I hear the word restaurant is just a very extractive word, at its basis capitalist. At the base of my business model, it has been a capitalist business model. And yet I've managed, I would say, over the years to do some really wonderful things. But at the end of the day you can put lipstick on a pig, but you still have a pig. And don't get me wrong, I love pigs, but I'm just really trying to think like what is the best entity and ownership formation for what we're trying to do and then all the systems and all the policies and all the practices and the culture of the people. How do we organize those, all those elements?”
As Birchwood gets set to relaunch, Singleton says it’s unfortunate that all of this has overshadowed what they were trying to spotlight with Juneteenth.
“I think that's just the most unfortunate thing about this whole situation. That beautiful, beautiful celebration has been overshadowed by this controversy. And again it just seems like it's what are we talking about? We're talking about a majority white, unhappy staff, when we really should be talking about what a beautiful celebration that day was. I mean it was amazing.”