Heritage is really about what you bring to the community that is from your soul. Creative work is what keeps heritage alive.

When people come back from Ireland, the two things they say are, "It's beautiful, and the people are so friendly." That is significant in terms of the heritage and the culture of a place.

You can find an Irish pub anywhere, and I think they are successful for the reason that they are gathering spots.

I don't know how you can have innovation without imagination. Imagination is about what sort of world you want to create for people.

George Bernard Shaw said, "An Irish person is nothing if not their imagination."

The pub, the public house—or as I call it, the egalitarian gathering spot—were people's own houses back in the 1700s and 1800s. They became the community centers.

I've never had a creative idea over a cup of coffee. I was awake, but no creative ideas... How do you think all these rock bands got these great songs and albums? You think it was from drinking coffee?

I was privileged to have access to that capital from family, but in general, women don't have access to capital, especially in the restaurant industry. It's taken me 25 years to get access to capital.

Soil health, air quality, and clean water is really about human health and happy, productive people.

Triple bottom line approach boiled down is people, planet, profit. You consider all those things when you're making decisions in a business, not just profit.

The bigger the business gets, the more power accrues to me that I don't want. I want people to have their own power and responsibility.

Because we're neighborhood restaurants and I care about the arts and various social justice and agricultural issues, we try to connect in as many ways as we can with the neighborhoods that we exist within.

Carrots taste better and are healthier for you when they grow in soil that has a diverse amount of various life inside of it. From the ground up, diversity is just a better thing.

The first and foremost thing I care about is feeding people good food.

Last year we harvested about 2,000 pounds of vegetables off that lot. That's meant to be a demonstration of the level of production that permaculture can produce so we can obliterate the dominant narrative around not being able to feed the world without killing them with chemicals at the same time.

Author and farmer Wendell Berry said, "Eating is an agricultural act." Tiny Diner tries to reconnect people to the agricultural aspects of food by being surrounded by permaculture demonstration gardens. It's the strongest example of my triple bottom line approach to business.

Constraints always produce more creativity—every time.

Restaurants are the small businesses that use the most energy, the most resources, and generate the most waste. While I love food and I really love making places that people gather, we had to do it in a better way.

I wanted a less pretentious place to drink wine, and it turns out that 90s Uptown hipsters could actually smile and have fun at a bowling alley.

My goal with restaurants is to actually feed people. I have a quaint idea that that's what restaurants are about.

Running a larger business is quite a bit lonelier than running a smaller business.

Our destiny is all tied up together. You can't be a human being by yourself. You can't be white by yourself, either; you gotta have somebody to be better than. There's no such thing as whiteness independent of somebody else to be nonwhite or an other.

The work for justice isn't charity work.

To what am I going to be loyal, and to what degree am I willing to suffer and sacrifice for that?

A lot of us are obedient to our egos. Every good thing I do has my ego in it, too. I have to constantly work on that, and pray and hope those good things are accepted from whatever good was in the intention.