The Lucy sandwich at Sea & Soil. This excerpt was originally published in Pre Shift, our newsletter for the hospitality industry. Subscribe for more first-person accounts, advice, and interviews. Everyone needs a convenient, accessible place to socialize. But maintaining a cafe, bar, restaurant, or hybrid space that fits the bill has its challenges. In this three-part series, we’re partnering with Spectrum Business to put a spotlight on third spaces and how their operators make them work. This is the final installment in our series about the people behind some of the most welcoming, innovative, and accessible food businesses operating today. As Jaya Saxena pointed out last year, “third space” as a term is both fraught and loaded, and has in some ways lost its meaning when we are all in search of different things—not to mention the fact that the cost of merely existing in such spaces continues to be on the rise. Perhaps the goal shouldn’t be to make the ultimate third space, then, but instead to make more spaces more accessible for more people, even if they aren’t perfect solutions. “We recognize we’re working within the system that we’re working within,” says Noah Wolf, one of the people behind Sea & Soil Co-op, a sandwich shop which just reopened in a new location in Brooklyn with a mission to serve affordable, quality food while fairly compensating the team who makes it. “We’re trying to come up with solutions to make it a better world for as many people as we can.” Sea…
