The White Dog Cafe - Review

Whole Earth, Spring, 1999 by Judy Wicks, Kevin von Klause

We hope we're not going to be targeted in this. But if the businesses are targeted by the paramilitary or the Mexican government, then, under NAFTA laws, the businesses should be protected because of the US investment. If they're not, we feel it will be a violation of NAFTA. We'd like to see whether the NAFTA laws will actually protect small people-to-people businesses as they do multinational corporations.

We currently get our decaf coffee from a workers' cooperative in Chiapas and our regular coffee from our sister restaurant in Nicaragua. These people-to-people relationships are incredibly important to developing an alternative to the multinational economy. That's what we're really fighting for: the right to create business relationships that are respectful to both parties and build up the local economies at home and abroad.

Kevin von Klause: We also run a business serving lunch and dinner seven days a week, just about 365 days a year, plus another kitchen upstairs that serves light meals and snacks.

We have about a $4.5 million business, so there's a lot of food to be bought. For years we have been trying to obtain ingredients from small businesses run by people whom we know and who believe in the same things that we do. Most of the products we buy, especially our produce, come from small businesses and farmers. We recently started getting very, very heavily into humanely raised livestock. It's something we've been trying to develop for years, but it's been very spotty because of the costs of raising the animals, the space they need, and the lack of demand. Nobody wants to pay the premium cost for lamb or veal or beef.

We try to stay as local as possible, but we now import meat from Niman Ranch near San Francisco. Once a week I go to the airport and pick up beef, and especially pork, because of the terrible conditions of factory-farming pork production and its environmental impact. Bill Niman found a source in Iowa for wonderfully cared-for animals that are raised in a humane and clean environment that doesn't pollute like the surrounding places.

We're constantly working toward finding new producers, encouraging farmers to expand what they're doing, and encouraging other restaurants in the city to form a cooperative to buy from people who are using healthy feeds, who aren't giving the animals antibiotics or hormones or things like that. We want to keep our customers healthy too, and appreciate working closely with farmers who can raise produce that we know we can sell, and not be too exotic in their attempts to experiment.

Most people don't know where their food comes from; we're trying to educate our customers and staff about where their food comes from. We take customers to the farms, especially to the farm of Mark and Kitty Dornstreich, who grow beautiful heirloom tomatoes, baby lettuces, greens, cherries; you name it, they've got it out there. It's a beautiful, beautiful place. And we take them to Douglass Newbold, who makes goat cheese from a prize herd of Nubian goats. They get to see where cheese comes from.