Place and Space Driven

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

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

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.

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.

Constraints always produce more creativity—every 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.