The long-vacant café space in the Main Branch library will soon feature an establishment that could easily be described as “different.”
So All May Eat Café, which goes by the acronym SAME, is a nonprofit restaurant based in Denver that has entered into an agreement with the Toledo Lucas County Public Library to open its second location within the Main Branch in downtown Toledo, the organizations announced Monday.
The news comes after a process that’s taken over three years, but was steered to Toledo by the team of Steve North and Erin Peterson, who had come across the Colorado location and worked to bring it to northwest Ohio.
“We put together all of the stuff that we needed to. We’ve been fund-raising, we have a board of advisers, and we’ve got the support we need to run it,” Brad Reubendale, executive director at So All May Eat, said of the prospective new location for his restaurant. “We were just looking for the perfect location.”
The Toledo Lucas County Public Library and SAME are still looking to hire an executive director for the Toledo location. The café plans to make a $200,000 investment in equipment and renovations. An opening date is to be set after a director is found and renovation contracts are finalized.
Mr. Reubendale said a public library was always thought to be an ideal location because of the similarity in function to So All May Eat and in their search for a location in the city of Toledo, the organization had had their eye on the Main Branch for a while.
“I would love to work with the library to feed everyone regardless of ability to pay because it’s pretty systemic for libraries to have challenges regarding their café space,” Mr. Reubendale said. “Often the outside operators struggle to have food that is affordable to everyone that is in the library, and they are struggling to make ends meet while the library wants to have food there.”
The Denver SAME location was founded in 2006 and over the last 16 years has been the model for many nonprofit restaurants around the country, Mr. Reubendale said. As indicated by the restaurant’s name, the café does offer food regardless of ability to pay. And it encourages patrons to give their time as volunteers, make whatever monetary donation they are able, or bring produce that could be used in a future meal.
Staff at the café often is made up of volunteers although some staff are paid. Mr. Reubendale said the menu for the Toledo location is not set but in Denver the café serves two different kinds of pizza, two different kinds of soup and two different kinds of salad every day from Monday through Friday.
The founders of SAME viewed it as a “library of food,” Mr. Reubendale continued, another way in which the mission of the two institutions overlaps.
“Libraries make information available to everyone regardless of background and SAME Café makes food accessible to everyone regardless of background or ability to pay,” he said. “We’ve had a correlation to how libraries function for a while, and I love that we can be in a library in Toledo.”
Jason Kucsma, director of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library, has known about SAME Café for almost two years now and his interest kicked into high gear after the library’s previous food vendor Sarnies left the space in the fall of 2020, due to struggles returning from the coronavirus pandemic.
“As we are trying to come out of this pandemic with so much divisiveness in our community, we really see the public library as a place where we can build community and rebuild community and where we can bring people together.” Mr. Kucsma said. “People can come to the library regardless of where you come from or what you have or don’t have, and SAME Café operates in the same way.”
It’s this idea of building community that sticks out most to Mr. Kucsma who envisions a situation where executives can sit next to people experiencing homelessness or food insecurity and that is something he thinks SAME Café can help realize.
“This can be a powerful statement on human dignity and our need to honor and respect and appreciate it among our fellow community members,” Mr. Kucsma said. “SAME has a long history. There are a number of restaurants like this one that maybe haven’t tried to expand nationally yet and to have Toledo be chosen as that location is a testament to the community leaders that came together to make this happen.”
First Published March 6, 2022, 3:30 p.m.
