24/06/2024
WE ARE ALREADY CLOSED
Dear all. We’ve been compelled to take the incredibly tough decision to close Café van Gogh, after
nine years of trading as a unique vegan social enterprise, which always placed kindness and ethics at
the heart of its business model.
Alongside many hospitality businesses, we’ve been negatively impacted by a series of events
including covid, Brexit, the steep rise in energy costs and changes to the lunchtime economy that
working from home has created. Put simply, sales have been significantly down for several months
now, whilst our costs have done nothing but rise.
Many of you will know that we’ve been working on converting our community interest company to
charitable status – but sadly our financial circumstances have meant that we can no longer
legitimately continue to trade whilst this is pending. We are therefore left with no option but to
close.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on our successes.
In these 9 years we’ve worked with 60 adults and young people with a learning disability to train
them in the skills needed for a job in hospitality. We’re immensely proud of this achievement.
We’ve provided a space for several groups to meet and provide peer support to each other, with all
their drinks paid for by you, our customers through our pay-it-forward scheme. (Lambeth carers
group, and a dementia support group, and others)
Our pay-it-forward scheme has captured the heart of our community in our corner of the world, and
we’ve handed out over 2000 free hot drinks to people in need in our community, including to vital
key workers such as ambulance drivers, road sweepers and delivery workers, all thanks to you
We’ve seen friendships and partnerships start at our tables, at least 5 couples we know had their
first date with us and come back on their anniversaries to celebrate in the space that they first met.
Environmentally, we’ve managed to never send any food waste to landfill (it all gets composted) and
have ran without ever selling an item that is packaged in single use plastic, or comes from an
environmentally degrading multinational company (coca cola and nestle we’re talking about you)
Animal rights has always been at the forefront of our minds, and we’re really proud to have been a
vegan restaurant before the word vegan was in common parlance.
It’s been really important to us to make our endings as considerate and in keeping with our ethical
business model as possible . There are no small businesses or suppliers who have not been paid by
us, and we’ve gone about winding up the business with full consideration of the needs of our
fantastic team, who will be looked after to the best of our ability and will leave without us owing a
penny to them.
We’d like to end on a thank you. Every sale we’ve ever made has been an act of support from you,
our wonderful customers. We hope you’ve enjoyed our service even half as much as we’ve enjoyed
serving you.
Before we go, we have a bank of talented staff that are now on the job market, chefs, baristas,
waiters and kitchen porters. Some of whom have a learning disability. If you have any opportunities
for these people, please be in touch on our Instagram page, which we’ll be keeping open for the next
couple of months.
With love
All of us at Café Van Gogh
