To say that Birchwood Cafe is a Minneapolis institution is no exaggeration – the Seward neighborhood stalwart has been in business for a quarter century, and has become synonymous with farm-to-table eating, community gatherings, and an ongoing fight for social justice and equity.
But the last year and a half has been a brutal one for Birchwood, even by taking into account the impact of the pandemic and Minneapolis uprising. Owner Tracy Singleton (below) parted ways with 13-year executive chef Marshall Paulsen, whose cooking helped define the flavor of the restaurant in recent years. A planned joint venture with the Minnesota Farmers Union to open a restaurant in the former Spoonriver location foundered, leaving MFU to open the spot, called Farmers Kitchen + Bar, on their own.
And a Juneteenth block festival at Birchwood was followed by a mass firing that, according to former employees, left 18 people out of work. Singleton stated publicly that the staff walked out of the event; former employees say that they had raised safety concerns about the event (backed up by screenshots from Schedulefly) and had permission from Singleton to leave after setting it up.
Writing about the layoff on her personal Facebook page on June 21, Singleton noted: “…It was such a beautiful feeling to walk into the cafe this morning and realize that so much negative and dark energy is no longer here; the white supremacists have left the building.”
A group of thirteen former Birchwood employees issued a critical statement earlier this week – see addendum for the full text. It alleges overwork and a toxic work environment at Birchwood Cafe. Both of those conditions are sadly typical for the grueling pandemic and post-pandemic hospitality environment, but also run contrary to the restaurant’s progressive reputation. In part, the former employees’ statement reads:
Throughout the pandemic, a small, devoted core staff kept the cafe afloat with very little support, direction, or leadership from Tracy. During this time, the mental health of many of her staff members suffered immensely; many of the employees were overworked, having to shoulder responsibilities far beyond the scope of their position or level of compensation. […]
During this time, numerous individuals in leadership positions were fired or forced to resign due to working conditions. Tracy unilaterally fired the Executive Chef/General Manager of 13 years towards the beginning of the pandemic. Exactly one year later, she fired another Executive Chef—a ten-year employee—citing their poor mental health after allowing them to be overworked for many months. Other kitchen and bakery members resigned thereafter for two primary reasons: Tracy’s blatant disregard for their co-worker and the resulting workload becoming too great for the remaining staff.
Two former employees publicly endorsed the written statement: former server and caterer Michael Curran (3+ years of employment) and Jess Bernstein (5+ years of employment as bar lead, baker, and server).
“Personally, as someone who was cross-trained for most positions at the cafe, I would go in at 4 or 5am to get the bread baked and pastries started for the day,” said Bernstein in an email interview with Heavy Table. “When the cafe opened, I would usually be pulled up front to expo or answer phones as there were never enough staff to properly run the service side. Sometimes I would even jump on the line to expedite from the kitchen side and help fire orders, and then I’d head back to the bakery to continue my scheduled shift of baking. When the bakery manager left due to the working environment and compensation, I was asked to take over that role as well.”
Bernstein asked for a raise; Singleton, says Bernstein, declined, saying a raise wouldn’t be equitable to other staff members, instead offering less than the wage paid to the previous manager. “For a women-owned business to offer me less than the previous man to hold the job was laughable and I of course turned it down,” says Bernstein. “Unfortunately, a bakery manager was never hired, and I ended up doing many aspects of the job anyways in an attempt to prevent chaos. This was unquestionably mirrored in other positions throughout the cafe as well.”
We contacted Tracy Singleton to talk to her about the statement and the challenges Birchwood faces as it looks to a July 16 post-vacation re-opening. She responded by forwarding a July 5 email update to the Birchwood Cafe list detailing her struggle with depression, ongoing fight against racism, and a much-needed vacation with her daughter (full text below). We followed up with another request for comment, and as of press time (Thursday evening) she declined to reply.
ADDENDUMS
Here’s the full text of the Birchwood Cafe former employees’ statement emailed to us earlier this week. This doesn’t include numerous supporting screenshots from various platforms supplied by the former employees, but all of them appeared legitimate and corroborating.
We, a collective of former Birchwood Cafe employees, are compelled to bring to light the behavior of owner Tracy Singleton. We do so with the intention of making our community aware of the disparity between the restaurant’s public image and Tracy’s treatment of staff. Birchwood presents itself to the community as a bastion of progressive values including mental health awareness, workers’ rights, anti-racism, and supporting local farms. Tracy’s practices and the environment she fosters demonstrate the opposite of these ethics. We find it important to share these experiences to prevent future harm when Birchwood reopens.
Throughout the pandemic, a small, devoted core staff kept the cafe afloat with very little support, direction, or leadership from Tracy. During this time, the mental health of many of her staff members suffered immensely; many of the employees were overworked, having to shoulder responsibilities far beyond the scope of their position or level of compensation. Requests for additional workers and pay increases were largely ignored despite receiving two rounds of Paycheck Protection Program loans, an SBA Restaurant Revitalization grant, and extensive community investments through the restaurant’s Community Supported Restaurant initiative.
During this time, numerous individuals in leadership positions were fired or forced to resign due to working conditions. Tracy unilaterally fired the Executive Chef/General Manager of 13 years towards the beginning of the pandemic. Exactly one year later, she fired another Executive Chef—a ten-year employee—citing their poor mental health after allowing them to be overworked for many months. Other kitchen and bakery members resigned thereafter for two primary reasons: Tracy’s blatant disregard for their co-worker and the resulting workload becoming too great for the remaining staff.
By June 2021, those remaining were concerned about the ambiguity of their positions and heard rumors of a mass layoff, which created a tense environment; though staff were promised updates on their employment statuses, they were met with denial and a refusal to engage. Instead, on Sunday, June 13th, Tracy announced that the restaurant would be co-hosting a block party the following Saturday in celebration of Juneteenth. Staff were made aware that Tracy had not obtained proper permits from the city to shut down the street. This led to legitimate questions regarding how guests and workers would be kept safe, and worry that police might get involved. Rather than address these concerns, Tracy responded by publicly posting the employees’ private messages, stating: “The chaos you are feeling at work today are your feelings, created by you,” and classifying the concerns as “very white behavior.” This form of gaslighting and condescension represents the treatment that staff has endured behind closed doors on a regular basis.
After laying off eighteen staff members over email the following Monday—citing COVID-19 impacts as the reason—Tracy wrote on Facebook, referring to the laid off staff: “…It was a beautiful feeling to walk into the cafe this morning and realize that so much negative and dark energy is no longer here; the white supremacists have left the building.” She went on to share a narrative on Birchwood’s public account that staff had walked out during the block party on Juneteenth when in fact employees were explicitly instructed by Tracy the evening before to leave once the event had been set up. The staff clocked out as directed and returned Sunday, the next morning, as scheduled only to receive public castigation from Tracy for not being present at the party.
While the block party and subsequent treatment of staff have been made public on social media, we hope to make clear that this is just the latest example of how Tracy has treated the people that have kept Birchwood running as disposable. Her disregard for the mental health and working conditions of her employees stands in stark contrast to the values she claims to champion. We share these truths with no ill will towards Tracy and the future of Birchwood. Rather, we offer this statement as a way for our community to understand the complicated truths of the restaurant they have supported for the past 26 years, and extend an invitation to Tracy to publicly recognize her pattern of harm in order to live up to her proclaimed politics and better serve community through the restaurant’s next iteration.
And here’s the newsletter edition Tracy Singleton emailed to me in response to my request for comment.
Dear BFFs — Birchwood friends and family,
We are CLOSED for Summer vacation!
There’s a long and a short answer to the question “But why would you close during the height of patio season — also known as Summer — when your business has been decimated by Covid19 and you’ve already suffered great financial loss and why haven’t you opened to indoor dining yet?” Given that I’m on vacation, and I promised my daughter more face time and less facebook, I’ll spare you the former and skip to the latter; it’s been a hella challenging fifteen months and all of us still standing at Birchwood Cafe; those who choose love over fear, those who believe that going “back to normal” is not an option because normal sucked for too many, those who know that change is inevitable and transformation is hard work and those of us who know that none of us are free until we are all free; we are taking a collective pause.
Last November, after eight months of too much crisis mode, too much stress, too much pivoting and too many times being forced to weigh staff and guest safety with the cafe’s viability and therefore my ability to provide a safe and loving home for Lily, I fell into a major depression. Though I did seek professional help, I had to wait over four months to see a psychiatrist even though I had a good health insurance plan. Thankfully, on March 2nd, I zoomed with a wonder doctor who prescribed me some anti depressant and anti anxiety medications and referred me to a group therapy program; three hours a day for three days a week for 12 weeks and it has been the some of the most enlightening and enriching and life affirming 108 hours of my life.
One of the crucial things I learned in group therapy — a life saving life line consisting of six amazingly brave strong smart beautiful women all choosing love over fear and learning together and supporting each other to live our best lives with anxiety and depression and one fantastic therapist who got me and got my racial justice mindset even through my observation is that the program frame was created though a lens of oppression, conformity and whiteness —is that you can build real authentic relationships over zoom and the importance of self care.
I have also acquired new vocabulary and life skills that I don’t know how I survived these past 55 years without.
Vacation — /vāˈkāSH(ə)n,vəˈkāSH(ə)n/
an extended period of leisure.
Leisure — /ˈlēZHər,ˈleZHər/
freedom provided by the cessation of activities; especially time free from work and responsibility.
And the biggest life lesson of all is knowing that when my fear of losing the cafe, my identity and my house due to Covid19 spiraled downward to bankruptcy and homelessness, and not being able to get a job because I’m worthless and have no skills and I’ll have to live under the Franklin bridge all alone because Lily’s dad would take her way from me and my friends were disgusted by me, spiraling further downward into the dark depths of despair that is depression, by a diseased mind that catastrophe’d this all into incessant ideation of jumping off that same bridge because I was a shit mom and Lily would be better off without me; the truth is…..depression lies and tells us we are worthless just like pseudo white supremacy lies would have us believe that white peoples’ lives matter more than Black people’s lives. As one of my anti-racism teachers, Catrice Jackson says, “there is nothing supreme about killing Black people”.
Words don’t work to express my profound gratitude for brain science and medication, for therapy and for my anti-racism teacher who have given me so much grace for me to realize that anti-oppression work is the ultimate in self care. Instead of gauging my worth on how much I was doing, I know my worth is immeasurable by getting out of my head, moving beyond performative allyship and into my heart to see Black people as human beings, with lives that truly matter. I know that staying is this work is my path to becoming a real human being.
I know I know, I promised the short version!
Suffice it to say, Lily and I are having the most amazing vacation; kicking it at the beach with dear friends, playing mini golf, strolling the Ocean City Boardwalk, eating all the ice cream, visiting national monuments and learning our country’s true history and being spoiled rotten by two dear restauranteur friends in DC. Yes, we are doing a lot and we are also “being” and healing from the strains of 2020 and the first half of 2021. I don’t know anyone who has not come face to face with an oh-so-dark place and I am hoping that we can normalize mental health. erase the stigmas and stop losing so many wonderful people to suicide. I also hope that our courageous small-but-mighty crew of Austin, Simone, Blanca, Lourdes, Nancy, Juan, Jacob, Elysha, and Frederick, who have all had their own struggles too, can all take this paid pause free of worry and stress, free to put ourselves first, free to relax, restore, renew, rejuvenate and reimagine, free to fill our cups beyond the brim to overflowing so that when we do reopen, we will have that much more to pour into the life affirming fountain of abundance and Good Real Food that is this next evolution of our beloved Birchwood Cafe.
Though I have numerous conflicts with the values and leadership of both our government and theIndependent Restaurant Coalition, I am grateful for the PPP loans and the Restaurant Revitalization Plan grant we received. There are times when you have to navigate within the system in order to change and mitigate the harm wrought by the system and this was one of those times. I am also mad as hell that the Black chefs, caterers and restaurateurs I am close to did not get any federal funds. Now that we have these funds, we plan to share our space and resources and do our best to practice humility and get out of the way of those who should be leading, those who have been systematically denied access and know best what they need so that our entire community can thrive. These funds will help a lot toward realizing a collective vision, one form of reparations, one drop in the bucket toward repayment of a debt owned.
I also share the utmost gratitude for our dear friends at House of Gristle and Until We Are All Free who are keeping the cafe’s home fires lit and keeping the community fed, all while leading the fight for Justice. They have already taught us so much about taking time to take care and just how beautiful authentic relationships and building in community can be.
Thank you for your patience, your understanding for my lack of communication and your ongoing RSVPing a big bold beautiful YES to our twenty six year old invitation to join us and be the change we want to see.
Our current plan is to reopen on Friday, July 16th at 8am. Please note this date may change and stay tuned for info on reserving your patio table, your take out or a private dining experience in our lovely Cafe Community Room.
Changes are coming and we can’t wait to share them with you.
with Love + Gratitude from your community shepherds and guardians of the present,
Tracy and Lily.
#normalizementalhealth
#untilweareallfree
#Blacklivesmatter
#goodrealfood