For now, Café Gratitude on Lincoln Street remains open. Photo by Tessa Stuart.
Santa Cruz was Grateful, Nourished, Fortified—for a few months, anyway. Beginning in mid-August, the city was the newest home to Café Gratitude, the chain of local, live, organic, vegan restaurants known for self-affirming dishes bearing names like “I Am Dazzling.” Then, on Nov. 29, Santa Cruz was Crestfallen after an open letter posted on Café Gratitude’s website stated the company would be closing all Northern California locations. Conflicting news reports followed, giving both employees and devotees hope the Santa Cruz café would remain open.
The message on the site, though, was fairly straightforward. “A series of aggressive lawsuits has brought us to this unfortunate choice,” read the note, signed by owners Matthew and Terces Engelhart. “Although we believe that we have done nothing wrong and our policies are completely legal, it will cost us too much money to defend them in court.”
Santa Cruz’s Café Gratitude opened on Aug. 15, joining existing locations in Berkeley, Cupertino, Oakland, Healdsburg, San Rafael and two in San Francisco—the original Café Gratitude and the popular Mexican restaurant Gracias Madre—located a few blocks from one another in the city’s Mission District. (Two additional Café Gratitudes are operated by independent owners in Los Angeles and Kansas City; those locations will remain unaffected by the decision.)
In addition to operating the restaurants, Café Gratitude LLC brands and sells cookbooks, supplements, foodstuffs, apparel and dishware emblazoned with the slogan “What are you grateful for?” It also holds workshops and retreats, and manufactures a self-help board game called “The Abounding River.”
“Everything is for sale,” says director of operation Chandra Gilbert. “Café Gratitude LLC and all of its properties are for sale. What that means in the future unfortunately makes people uncomfortable. WIll the buildings be for sale? Will somebody want to come in and offer Matthew and Terce enough money to keep the concept going, like they have in Los Angeles and Kansas City? We’re just really not sure at this time.”
Five separate lawsuits are currently in litigation—two from former employees, two suits alleging noncompliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and one involving a car accident. “They are all in litigation so I can’t talk about them a lot,” Gilbert says, but together the suits have created “a bunch of financial stress all at one time.”
The claims in lawsuits by former employees include unfair division of tips, deprivation of mandated breaks and allegations that the organization pressured employees to take Landmark Forum seminars if they wished to advance to managerial roles.
Landmark Forum is an outgrowth of Erhard Seminars Training, or est, the controversial ’70s self-help seminar. Est received criticism for its almost military–style control tactics, like not allowing participants leave the room to use the bathroom, eat or drink and encouraging harsh confrontations. Since its emergence in the early ’90s, Landmark Education has sued organizations from Condé Nast to the Cult Awareness Network for suggesting it was a cult.
The founders of Café Gratitude are both graduates of Landmark Forum and openly encourage employees to take the course. In one pending suit, a former employee alleges that she was fired after refusing to take a Landmark workshop; her accusations were chronicled in a piece that appeared in Oakland’s East Bay Expressin 2009.
Santa Cruz’s Café Gratitude has 28 employees, according to a count by one shift leader; what this development means for their short– or long–term employment prospects is hard to say.
For her part, Gilbert is reluctant to make predictions about how long it would take for Café Gratitude LLC to be sold off piece by piece.
“If I took a guess, it would just be based on different circumstances that could happen. I wouldn’t guess because it could be three months, it could be forever,” she says. The “forever” scenario would involve a new owner taking over the company.
The Santa Cruz location, like the others, “is currently open and it is going to stay open until something occurs,” Gilbert says. “The best way for the community to support it is just to continue coming in right now because it is flourishing now. There are people who have jobs there now, and they’d like to keep it rich as long as that can happen.”
The letter’s closing words offered some hope to fans that Café Gratitude would survive in some form: “We have come to realize that it isn’t how we serve that is most important but rather that we serve,” it reads. “Our mission will survive this, as love cannot be threatened.”
The Engelharts signed the letter “on behalf of Café Gratitude LLC,” stirring speculation that Café Gratitude would attempt to reorganize under a different LLC. Gilbert says there is no chance of that. “Not with Matthew and Terces Engelhart. They’re moving on,” she says. “They are just trying to negotiate through this particular part in their life—the big unknown.”
