Hi. Good to see you. I’m glad you came. We don’t really bother with the press normally because it’s so completely unnecessary. We exist in the fabric of this community and this community has been a part of this cafe for 200 years. Can you imagine that? 200 years.
The Utopian! is not only aware of its duty to protect the citizens from the possibility of political corruption but also to help make people aware of the arts. We are not robots, we are people or at least trying to be good people. A little manners and courtesy always goes a long way.
I am with Sharad of the Utopian Cafe. She, like all of the people who try and keep things going, is simply a component of a communal goal. And she means it when she talks about it.
The original concept actually took a while to show up. There were almost five generations before someone thought that bars and cafes were not such terrible things to have. Yes, we love our homes and we make ourselves comfortable. But sometimes you want to meet with friends individually and sometimes you like to roll the dice and see what happens to you.
Is the entire purpose of the cafe to meet people?
That’s one thing. People get a lot of things out of us. Food that they don’t have to cook themselves. We make great food. In fact, we are de facto the very best food as of the moment because our cooking stuff consists of the collective chef knowledge of the entire community. Every brash young man who lives for his opinion moment by moment has had something to say about the quality and quantity of the food we serve. We try to send people home with a sense of perfection. It’s a small goal but we try.
Can you tell me something about the beginning of the cafe?
Well, it came about as a political decision. Literally it was on the ballot for more than 20 years before it finally passed. But, do not think there was animosity. Our people have always been a forgiving lot and when they decided that they were going to have a cafe, people dove in with great happiness.
How were the original ideas arrived at? Who was the genius?
That’s the thing. There were a lot of people who came up with extraordinarily interesting ways to up the food game. Mostly this was the combination of getting everyone to agree to some extra exercise just so we could have some particular food to eat. Again, it was just extra. It wasn’t anything that was given to anybody. It was literally meeting everyday at the same time at the end of basic workday and talking it through. That was all they did. They understood the basic concept of what a cafe was or how it might have evolved through history. But the general idea of a public house was one for everybody. Everybody had to have say and so that’s the way they built it.
The name is rather long.
THE MUSEUM OF ANCIENT UNWANTED ARTIFACTS BIKE SHOP KOSHER NOODLE BURRITO PALACE THEATER BAKERY POTATO BAR PRODUCE MARKET AND VELODROME? Maybe. We think it is an acquired taste.
I thought the eventual name was Utopian Cafe.
Technically it was. But you see when people wanted something interesting to have at their cafe, they couldn’t really decide on one theme that would make everybody happy. So they stretched out. As far as the food was concerned, the general idea is that we would be seasonable and agreeable to our means. That meant we did not have a fixed menu, we were changing the menu all the time.
And people did not mind having a changing menu? Did you have people that liked you one time but did not like you later on?
That’s a really good question and I could see where you would think something like that. You don’t really understand what we were thinking. Or they were thinking. These were original vegans. They had not readapted a certain element of aggressiveness to keep the spice of Life moving along. They were much more purists. They were not really interested in tying themselves into that burrito if there were potatoes lying around. Or, if they were really thinking about some noodles but found out there were some excellent pies, nobody really needed to worry. And then again, everything was communication so they planned out the menu in advance for the week and the noodle people could come on noodle day and the pie people could come on pie day.
But the cafe was a lot more than just a place to get really nice seasonal food.
Of course. That’s what it was all about. It was a public house. So it was interesting how it worked out. We had a lot of people that wanted to help with the work and we had a lot of people who wanted to enjoy the place. Pretty quickly we understood that as a collective cafe, everyone who wanted to use the place had to be a part of the collective. This didn’t mean they excluded anybody, it just meant that everybody had to care about the cafe.
What does that mean, they had to care about it?
It wasn’t like it was punishable. We didn’t have any kind of authoritarian regime ready to punish us. It was just a matter of the vote. We said we were going to have a cafe and so everybody needed to go to the cafe at least once in a while. And so that’s what happened. During the course of any particular moon, there were 4 weeks of great diversity. Because it was considered extra work and not vital to life, the doors would close all day Saturday. But there was a line on Saturday night after the sun went down every time. And really, they had everything.
Everything?
They decided they could do anything that anybody had ever done in a cafe or nightclub setting. If you wanted intimate poetry, they had it. If you wanted visual arts, they had it. If you were more interested in smoking something then drinking, you could do that. And then they had the bicycles. You didn’t even have to come there to sit around and be sick. You could do all of this in the middle of your workout while running the velodrome. Or anything really. I think they even played baseball in there in a cage or something like that. Batter versus picture. Really, it was quite a place.
And they had a regular theater and a movie theater.
The theater becoming a permanent part of the cafe didn’t happen for almost 20 years. The theater people thought the idea of being in front of an audience was everything they wanted in life and so the general political vote said that professional attention seekers should not be seeking attention from amateur guests. They were appointed a night like everyone else and so they could come and play small plays. Usually it was of a political nature. Sometimes it was about love. Sometimes it was about parenting children. Sometimes there were melodramas about people who get injured and perhaps don’t make it or those old people who bravely check out so the young can come in. It was quite good but it took almost 20 years before people believed they could trust the theater not to take over everything.
Yes, keeping drama to a minimum is a very good way to keep any good community running.
Exactly. But still, they also made some pretty good films and we can watch them. Every generation has made some film. There are not as many as you think. It seems they would make however many films for each other that they wanted but at the end of the year they only gathered a few for permanent display. Usually these also were community projects and there weren’t too many of them. People wanted to make their films special and some people even took two or three years to make a film. The longest period of time that anyone used was 15 years from beginning to ending. There were films every year but they announced they were going to do this and they allowed everyone to age 15 years just so the film would be interesting. Now of course we see it all as one big beautiful film and many people have created hodgepodge collections that last an hour to give a really good overview of the sorts of things our ancestors liked to put on film. And yes, they liked sitting in a theater and watching the light flicker. Why not?
In your opinion, do you think this cafe would be possible in the old world, the competitive world, the slave world? Do you think they’re ever could have been a place such as this?
No. It could have happened. Governments in the old days did Civic projects all the time and universally, it was almost always a disaster. They built by their specifications but they did not listen to what the people wanted when they built it and eventually nobody wanted to adapt. It also happened that there were wealthy people with creative minds and whimsy and they built some rather remarkable bicycle theme parks and frisbee golf courses and all kinds of alternative activities. But eventually, the point was whether or not the collective was willing to bear the burden. There is a cost in man hours and in materials to run a restaurant. True, there are types of foods that you can eat only at a restaurant only because preparing for a small number of friends is simply not cost effective. Keeping a kettle of boiling oil going for deep frying for example. We would never do this in our kitchens because it’s too much of a waste. But if we agreed that we had an excellent cafe restaurant that served excellent cafe restaurant / bar food, people decided it was what they wanted.
And the rest was 200 years of worker/patron symbiosis. Was there ever a time that the cafe lost interest?
There is an ebb and flow to things. The community moved in interesting ways based upon the harvest. And then of course there were personality shifts and certain people who had louder voices than others in one moment suddenly became quiet for one reason or another. It’s not intrigue, it’s just public tastes. And then I understand there was a period of almost 35 years where they could not get a chef to save their lives. They kept everything going but there was almost no cooking involved. Just basic food laid on the table and you could help yourself. I think for a while all it was was a bread shop and everything else was raw. No other cooking except for the bread.
I have sampled exactly that meal and it’s one of my favorites. I’m one of those people who doesn’t look ahead or plan. If I feel I want to go to the cafe, I go and I am never disappointed.
There were quite a few arguments back in the beginning about the menu. There was so much diversity, why couldn’t there be more diversity in the food? And they did. There were choices that could be made. But not really. They just prepared the meals that they were going to prepare, there were always going to be more meals even when everybody wanted them. It was just understood. And published of course. We have this many meals today so first come first serve. True then and true now.
How do you feel about the accusation of snobbery?
Snobs? Foodies, please. We care. We care about everything. There is no organization. It’s just a community run cafe for a community that has been enjoying a cafe juice bar velodrome yoga salon and martial arts dojo. We just give people what they want. If we have a student, we find a teacher. If we have a teacher, we find a student. If we find someone who wants to be extra kind to someone who needs it, we have people who require extra kindness. I don’t think that’s such a bad way to run a cafe. And it’s not mystical. We just serve good food to good people and do a good job cleaning up.
So if you haven’t been there for a while, please go down to the Utopian Cafe for the bicentennial celebration. Menus from 200 years ago. Music from our ancestors. Film festivals and even recreations of live theater. Not to mention bicycle races on traditional bikes built by our own craftsman trying to get a modern version of an old design perfect.
For the Utopian! This is Gina Spiderbitelanini reporting.
