Positive Vibe Café | SMG - Solutions Marketing Group

Good Vibrations at the Positive Vibe Café

By Joan Leotta

Logo from the Positive Vibe Cafe Richmond, Virginia’s new Positive Vibe Café is about more than quality food. In establishing the café, founder Garth Larcen and his son Max created a first-ever venture—a community-backed experiment in providing workers with disabilities a chance at a career in the restaurant industry. And the early reviews are in: for good food and good opportunities, the café definitely has a positive vibe.

Café Concept

Like many small businesses, the Positive Vibe Café grew from personal need. “About three and a half years ago my son, Max, who has a progressive form of Muscular Dystrophy, was out of work and depressed because his plans for a career in sound recording were thwarted by the progression of his disease,” explained Garth Larcen. “He came to me about working in the restaurant business. Although I had been working as an insurance consultant since 1982, I had run a restaurant in Blacksburg in the 1980s, so we decided to try it.”

Larcen soon realized that starting a restaurant could do more than fulfill just his son’s job needs. An eatery such as he envisioned could employ and train others with disabilities in restaurant careers.

Getting Started

Starting any new business requires not just a sellable concept and a business plan, but also an inflow of cash. Larcen’s first move was to form a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation that would own and fund the restaurant. “Max chose the name for the foundation—Get Lost MD (Muscular Dystrophy)—and we began fund-raising efforts by looking for grant money, a traditional source of cash for nonprofits,” said Larcen.

“But we soon discovered that grants were not going to be easy for us,” he explained. “[I’m] not sure if it was my lack of savvy in grant writing or the novelty of our concept,” he said. Although local businesses eventually found much appeal in Larcen’s idea, “novel often equates to unproven, untried, and risky in the world of grants,” he said. “But we did not let that deter us. We plowed into fund-raising in the local community.”

That shift to community-based funding proved to have the additional benefit of building community involvement. Larcen tapped into his network of friends to solicit donations. He visited corporate executives of large companies in the Richmond area, many of whom he knew from frequent pick-up basketball games. His first big score was Target.

Recalled Larcen, “Target gave us $10,000. Once that came in, other folks followed with donations of varying sizes and in-kind assistance. For instance, Ukrops, a local grocery chain, also helped find the right disability-friendly kitchen equipment.” The donations helped to build a restaurant that is totally accessible, both in the kitchen and on the serving floor. Even the bar features a wheelchair-accessible area.

Employee Relations

Another ongoing donation to the Positive Vibe Café is volunteer time. The wait staff are all volunteers. Of the 25 paid employees, fourteen have disabilities and work in the kitchen, bus tables, or host. These employees all receive minimum wage or higher. The café’s goal is to provide training so that the entire restaurant staff can provide excellent service, either at the café or in another eatery.

Data from the National Restaurant Association illustrates the importance of making sure that people with disabilities are equipped to handle jobs in the restaurant industry. The 2004 fact sheet reported that an estimated 12.2 million people worked in our nation’s restaurants last year, making restaurants, as a group, the largest US employer outside of government. The data sheet also suggested that, since 27 percent of working adults got their first job experiences in restaurants, work in this industry is often a springboard to other types of employment.

The 70-seat Positive Vibe Café opened on January 15, 2005. In the months prior, Larcen provided four weeks of training that was so effective, two employees with disabilities went on to other jobs before opening day. Conversely, a number of the core staff with disabilities have expressed the desire not to ever move on. Both results are fine with Larcen, as long as the café has made a difference in launching food service careers.

A total of 12 workers have graduated from two four-week sessions held so far. The café has hired two of them, four found employment elsewhere, and six are still looking.

Larcen conducts training each morning from 8:30 to 10:30 for employees with physical disabilities and from 2:30 to 4.30 Monday through Friday for workers with cognitive disabilities.

Larcen noted that all non-disabled staff, including the chef, were informed at the start of the commitment necessary to work at the café. “This is not the place to work if you want to get rich,” he said. “You have to have a commitment to the mission: to enable the employees with disabilities to develop in order to work here successfully.”

The Food Makes the Difference

Area chefs contributed original recipes and worked with Larcen to design a menu that would attract a varied clientele. The menu, available for previewing at www.positivevibecafe.com, features eclectic dishes—from seafood pot pies, jambalaya, and quiche to an array of low-cholesterol, low-fat buffalo meat entrees (ribs, burgers, meat loaf, hot dogs and sirloin) and a variety of dinners “without a face” (vegetarian selections). “Seafood pot pie is a favorite among our customers,” Larcen noted.

“We are near the Fan district in an older shopping mall on the south side of the city,” he said. “While it is not the most visible location, the Cafe is easily accessible to all of Richmond. when my husband does not faint over the prices, I try o obtain real ivory buttons, civil war era buttons, campaign buttons and the like for their own intrinsic value.”

Still, publicity for the café has been growing. “In addition to national coverage on CBS and in the Wall Street Journal,” Larcen said, “we have been covered by all three local TV stations and written up in the local papers—including a good food review!”

When people stop in for a meal, they may be tempted to feel like they are more doing something worthwhile than visiting somewhere worth eating. But Larcen chuckled as he noted that when they take a bite, they most often learn that with food this good, helping the community is no real sacrifice.

The total experience of eating at the café, as described by Richmond.com, features “original cuisine, familiar faces, [and] a positive dining experience.”

Community Pride

When Larcen first set out to raise café funds within the community, he held a variety of foundation-sponsored fund-raisers geared to the general public. Each effort increased the visibility of the project and widened the circle of people in the community who were committed to the café’s success.

A particularly unifying event was the sale of lapel pins. “People all over town were sporting the pins,” Larcen reported. “When the restaurant opened, folks who gave money came in to see how things were going and have a meal.” He added that if the project had been funded by grants, the community probably would not have felt such ownership of the eatery. Now, when others call to ask him how he put the plan together for the café, he mentions that community-based financing has great advantages.

The café’s ties to disability associations are similarly community-based. “We do not have any affiliation with the national MD folks, but we are close to our local group,” he said.

The Ripple Effect

After the publication of a May 2005 Wall Street Journal article and segments on the CBS Morning Show, Larcen fielded calls from as far away as New Zealand from would-be entrepreneurs wanting to start similar enterprises in their communities. For a donation of $5,000 to the foundation, Larcen offers the café’s business plan and a step-by-step outline of the training program.

He reported that some communities are using the success of the café as an incentive to shame their own communities into action. According to Larcen, one US municipality’s mayor showed the tape of the CBS show to his city council and asked why, if Richmond could do this, their city could not.

Making an Impression

In addition to the great reviews of its food, the eatery has generated encouraging feedback for its work in training restaurant employees. Richmond’s Human Relations Management Association (www.rhrma.org) selected the Positive Vibe Café as its New Freedom Initiative Award Winner for 2005. The Virginia Hospitality and Tourism Council selected the café as a state Good Neighbor winner in 2004, making it eligible for the National Restaurant Association’s 2005 Good Neighbor Award. In addition, Garth and Max were invited to be the featured speakers at NASA’s Disability Awareness Day on August 15, 2005.

What has all of this done for the restaurant’s bottom line? “We had hoped to be self-supporting by the end of six months,” Larcen revealed, “but I think that it will take a whole year.” With all the positives vibes already generated by the café, that goal seems easy to achieve.

Getting There

The Positive Vibe Café is open for lunch and dinner six days a week. The hours are 11:00 am –2:00 pm and 5:00 pm –10:00 pm on Tuesdays through Fridays, 12:00 noon – 10:00 pm on Saturdays, and 11:00 am – 9:00 pm on Sundays. If you’re going for dinner, you may need to call for reservations.

Positive Vibe Café
www.positivevibecafe.com
Stratford Hills Shopping Center
2825 Hathaway Rd
Richmond, VA 23225
804-560-9622

Edited by Mary-Louise Piner.