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 & Soil operates as a cooperative, where Wolf is a worker-owner alongside Gabby Gignoux-Wolfsohn and Nilda Ortiz. I chatted with him about how it all works. Read on to see how it all works.
Did you always know you wanted to operate a worker-owned restaurant?
[Around 2007 in Los Angeles], I was working in a restaurant, and I had a realization that that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. But I also saw a lot of issues with exploitation [in the industry]. The person who ran the restaurant [I worked at] was somebody I generally respected. You often hear the owners of restaurants saying, “There’s no way we could have better conditions. The margins are just too thin.” You hear that over and over again. The way that I came to see it was that, whether or not that’s the case, that should be determined by the workers. The people who are doing the labor [should be able to] determine if there’s enough money to give everyone a raise, if there’s enough to provide better conditions to work in, if there’s enough flexibility to have a schedule that works for everyone. People should make those decisions for themselves, as opposed to just hearing it in a top-down format.
How did the idea for Sea & Soil come to be?
During the pandemic, I had become friends with the co-founder of Sea & Soil, Gabby, when we were doing court support for a friend. For a lot of people, with all its tragedy, the pandemic gave a chance to take a breath and think through where everything was at. Gabby and I developed a bond, and we both had backgrounds in food and a similar ethos in life. I just asked them, “Do you want to do a worker-owned bakery with me?” They had been wanting to do something for a while themselves, and they said yes. We started selling sandwiches in Prospect Park for like $5, and little by little, we took steps [to move the project forward]. We moved to Grand Army Plaza, where we sold sandwiches at a price that was a little more sustainable for us, but it was still just a passion project.
We had no capital, and rent is so crazy [in New York]. We were both working in food justice. We were able to find a spot in Carroll Gardens/Red Hook that was renting for less than $3,000 a month for a tiny space, and that was within the ballpark that we could afford. We moved in there in July of 2023. When that lease was up, we realized we were outgrowing the space and we couldn’t do everything we wanted to do there. We really loved that neighborhood and built a community there, but it was a tough location. So we reached out to The Working World, whose raison d’être is to fund worker-owned businesses, and they accepted us for a program to give us what they call a “non-extractive loan,” which means we don’t repay it until we’re profitable. We made that agreement back in December 2024, closed the [Carroll Gardens] shop in April 2025, spent a year getting [the new space] built out, then reopened here [in Downtown Brooklyn] in April 2026.
I’d love to hear more about that loan. Was that a program you applied for and pitched yourself to, or did they approach you?
Someone who was a project manager at Working World was eating at the shop and was like, “I’m from The Working World, if you’re ever looking to do something and need money, this is what we do.” It wasn’t an offer, but they said that they could potentially help us. We sat on that for a little while, then when we realized we needed to expand, I reached out to them. They have an application process [for funding], and we applied.
When we talked to them, they were like, “Actually, we just bought this building on Atlantic Avenue, and there’s this old cafe space. It would probably be a lot of work for you guys because [the former tenant] wasn’t doing any real cooking, but it could be a good space for your new location.” So, not only are they our lenders, they’re also our landlords. Those things are split into different tranches, legally speaking, but it meant we were negotiating on different levels, which is a little different [from how they usually work]. We are on the first floor of their headquarters.
What did that application entail?
They run themselves like a financial institution, just in a radical way. We had to make a business plan, say what we’ve been making, what we plan to make, and how other similar businesses in the neighborhood are doing and if there’s room for us. They also take a progressive notion—like, “Who is in your co-op?”—to look at it from a perspective of who has had access to resources in the past and how we can more equitably distribute them.
Did you have other co-ops or other people in hospitality that you looked to for inspiration?
There’s this place in Spain called Mondragon that was this worker co-op association, and one of the founders was this priest [José María Arizmendiarrieta]. There is a co-op bakery in the Bay Area that is named after him. Both Mondragon and the Arizmendi Bakery were inspirational to me. I also grew up personally going to some of the food co-ops that were founded in the ’70s in the D.C. area. I was inspired by any organization [I came across] that was doing things nonhierarchically and in a cooperative way. All organizations do things differently, so it was the general ethic of “workers should have a say in how their labor is used and the profit you create” [that inspired me].
Sea & Soil uses sliding-scale pricing. What inspired you to do that model?
I was always [asking myself]: How do you have just compensation for the people doing the labor, utilize high quality, locally sourced ingredients, and also be accessibly priced?
Gabby and I liked the idea of sliding-scale because it puts a little more agency into the hands of people as opposed to the pay-it-forward system where you might buy a sandwich for someone else. Other places do that, where you pay extra for a piece of pizza, and there’s a sticker on the wall that says “A piece of pizza has been bought for you,” which feels a little bit like charity. This is not a judgment, just our opinion on it. For us, a sliding scale says, “You pay what you can. If you can afford to pay more, that opens up the possibility for someone else to make the choice to pay less.” That can change day to day, month to month, year to year for any given individual. We like it because it feels hopeful.
For most customers in the shop, are you having a conversation about the pricing? Or are people mostly just ordering how they’d like and grabbing their food?
It differs from person to person. We want people to talk about it when they want to, but we [also] want people to feel comfortable enough that [ordering this way] feels routine. Of course, these things can be uncomfortable for people; sliding scale is not new, but for a lot of people, it’s their first time [encountering it]. Money—discussing it, thinking about what you have and don’t have—is uncomfortable for people. We’re always trying to create a space where it’s like, if you want to come and talk to us about it, absolutely. But if you want to take a sandwich and leave, that’s great, too.
We also have these sandwich order cards where instead of having to say something to us, you can take a card, write down how many of each you want, and at the bottom, you just circle how much you want to pay, so that keeps it a little more personal. We’re always messing around [with our ordering system] to see what works best.
Do you have a goal for the number of people you want to be paying each tier? And do you know how close to that goal you are?
I have an average [price that people are paying for one sandwich], which is around $16.40 right now. We’re basically at the average we’re hoping to hit. [Editor’s note: Wolf has yet to dig into the exact numbers regarding which tier customers most often select, but plans to in the future.]
The sandwich game is definitely not a quantity-over-quality game, but it is a quantity game in terms of survival; we’ve got to sell a lot of sandwiches. We make everything from scratch. We’re pickling, we’re fermenting, we’re making jams, we’re making the bread, and there’s a lot of labor that goes into it. But it’s a sandwich, at the end of the day. We can’t charge $40 for a sandwich—like the famous half-chicken—nor would we want to. So there is a real cap on it. That’s why $16-$17 feels like a good place. The higher it is, of course, is great, because we can be more sustainable.
We feel we launched really successfully, and we feel really happy, but after all that, we’re still barely breaking even, if that. It takes a lot. When you take something complicated like financing a restaurant and add another layer like this, there are of course complications to it, but I absolutely think it’s going well.
Did you consider not making everything from scratch, and maybe sourcing cheaper ingredients?
But that’s the whole point! I say that only to express how important it is to us. There are plenty of places we love [that don’t make food entirely from scratch], but for me, why have a sandwich shop and not make the bread? This is the core of what we’re doing, and what’s more core to sandwiches than the bread? For us, that’s the fun part. It’s work, but we want to do the fermenting, we want to do the pickling, we want to make the bread. That’s where the labor joy is, even if some days we’re like, “Ugh, we’ve got to make the pickles.”
The “growth” tier of your pricing scale says that the higher-end cost of a sandwich can help you get closer to providing certain benefits for staff. What benefits are you hoping to secure?
The thing about worker-ownership is that if we come to those funds, we’ll debate what to do with it. With a place as small as ours, we’re probably not going to be able to get an amazing deal from a health insurance company; we wouldn’t get bulk discounts. So there’d be a question of, “Do we want to go in on a healthcare plan or do we all want to take a larger dividend at the end of the year?” In terms of what we think [the benefits we’ll discuss are], there are three main things: higher wages, healthcare, and paid vacation time.
No one’s making a lot working here. I always tell people my goal is that everyone’s making what works out to $40/hour. And people think that’s crazy for food work. But if you actually said that wage—that’s like $75,000/year or something—to a lot of people in New York who are not in the food world, that’s the minimum they would take for a job in New York City in 2026, especially if you look at the rents, healthcare, [the costs of] having kids. It’s a basic cost of living so people can have a decent life.
You have three worker-owners, but also other workers who are on the path to worker-ownership. What does that path look like?
It’s a one-year candidacy, or if someone is working part-time, it might be up to two years. We do monthly check-ins, just like you would at other workplaces. We check in with each other through reviews, and then at the end of the year, if someone doesn’t want to be a worker-owner, then they don’t stay at Sea & Soil. We don’t want to become a place where it’s like three worker-owners and 10 [non-owners]. Then that would be just a partner-owned business. We know it’s going to be a little more lopsided right now, but after the first year, we’ll come out of it with a few more worker-owners.
In the hiring process, did that mean you looked for people who had worked in highly collaborative environments or had management experience?
[Hiring] mostly came down to finding people who expressed interest in working at a worker-owned business. We didn’t want to exclude someone who seemed like a great candidate who didn’t have experience in those realms; we figured they could learn. We’re learning all the time.
