By mid-afternoon Saturday, Berwyn Cafe was particularly crowded — and it was already out of tofu.
The homemade vegetarian restaurant on Berwyn Road near Rhode Island Avenue shut its doors yesterday for the last time after years of financial issues, leaving behind a community that has loyally purchased its healthy fare for about 30 years — the original health-food co-op Beautiful Day was reincarnated as Berwyn Cafe in 2001.
“This place is a community center, you know?” said senior biology and English major Danny Collins, who has been an employee at Berwyn for a few months and a customer for years. “It’s sick that it’s just getting pushed aside.”
For its tenure, Berwyn Cafe resided in a corner of College Park a bit too isolated and a bit too far from the campus to attract the foot traffic necessary to maintain a profitable small business — one of the factors that led to its downfall, said owners Kathy and Tal Brosh. The couple met at the original Beautiful Day as cooks in 1990 and married in 1993.
They decided to fold a week ago.
“We met over that stove,” Kathy said, pointing to the back of the kitchen, “arguing over how to make a burrito.”
Kathy, 49, had been going to Beautiful Day for years as a local and then as a university student when the owner decided to sell in 2000. The Broshes had been running a falafel cart in Takoma Park for about five years when the newest owners decided to give up their lease in 2001.
They came to say goodbye, Kathy said, and ended up taking over the lease instead.
What blossomed was a place where patrons could find menu items such as tofu gyros, organic carrot juice with ginger, coconut and red lentil soup, and, of course, plenty of pita bread, falafel and hummus. It was nothing fancy, more like a hole in the wall than a traditional restaurant, with a down-to-earth atmosphere where patrons could sign up for Friday open-mic nights and local artists found an exhibition space on the walls.
“It’s my favorite place to go,” said senior music education major Mandy Maruchi-Turner, a vegetarian who has been a regular customer for three years. “There’s no place that has that kind of atmosphere with that kind of food, and none of us knows where we’re going to go now.”
It was a money squeeze from the start with a lonely, out-of-the-way location and a dilapidated building owned by landlord Alvin Jenkins, whom the Broshes and District 2 College Park City Councilman Bob Catlin described as uncooperative and uncommunicative. A glance in the kitchen shows broken tiles in floors that Tal said are more than 30 years old; cracked windows are carefully patched up with cardboard and duct tape; and vents on the outside are falling off their hinges.
Catlin said Jenkins owns the bulk of the properties in the area but has kept much of it empty and in shabby shape for years.
“It would have helped if there were more businesses opening there,” Catlin said. “It seems his interest in getting tenants for his spaces hasn’t been very strong.”
Jenkins did not respond to calls for comment.
For six years at the beginning of their enterprise, the Broshes couldn’t afford heat, opting instead to purchase propane at a nearby gas station to put in heaters around the space. Buckets would catch rain dripping through the roof.
“We should have folded a long time ago,” Kathy admitted. “It becomes a snowball that you can’t get out of.”
Despite the occasion, their last weekend in Berwyn Cafe found the Broshes smiling and greeting customers old and new like long-lost friends, with a guitarist crooning on the stage.
“I’m devastated,” said Sophia Carlton, who graduated last spring and has been going to Berwyn for about seven years. “I was like, no, this can’t be real.”
Sophomores Sam Orlando, an engineering major, and Shannon McGuigan, an English major, had just found Berwyn yesterday morning on a quick Google search for breakfast and were stunned to find out their first visit would also be their last.
And for Wendy Herndon, 50, it was the end of an era.
“There’s nothing like this,” said Herndon, who graduated from the university in 1984 and described watching the Broshes’ three sons grow up there. “It’s the family feel.”
In the end, the Broshes said they blame themselves for their business’ fate.
“We have been serving, serving, serving; we don’t let people know our needs, and we should have,” Kathy said. “We’re learning a lesson about receiving.”
The restaurateurs will be auctioning off Berwyn Cafe’s furniture and paintings at an event Kathy said will be an “all-day party.” But even a party cannot dull the sting of closing the cafe’s doors, Kathy said.
“We’re broken-hearted,” Kathy said. “All we’re going to have left is chains. No one’s going to have any real food to eat. … We’re getting squeezed out by the franchises.”
Collins agreed, calling Berwyn’s menu offerings “food that has love in it.”
“Kathy and Tal are just the best people I’ve ever met,” he said. “If any business in this city deserved to do well, it was this.”
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