06/03/2026
"You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth... Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness." — Kahlil Gibran
There's a particular quality to a Wednesday morning in late spring. The grinder whines beneath the low murmur of conversation. The door swings open every few minutes, a mix of cool and humid air drifts in, and a pattern repeats like it has so many weeks before with a quiet sacredness. Jeremiah is on bar. He pulls a shot, sets it in front of a regular, and says something I don't catch that makes her laugh. He does this. He has done it for nearly five years. You can miss how important it is the way you might overlook a load-bearing wall.
If you’ve ever grown garlic, you know the process requires a patience that feels a bit unsettling. You press a clove into the earth just as everything else is dying back and the cold of late October begins pushing in (or November if it’s been a particularly hectic year). Nothing visible happens for months. The soil appears to be nothing more than a container of frigid, unforgiving black earth. But underground, a process called vernalization is occurring. The garlic needs the cold. Not in spite of winter, but because of it. The chill triggers the biological mechanism that makes flowering possible. For the garlic, becoming is never a matter of if, but when.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. We don't have a good cultural framework for necessary dormancy—for the kind of loss that isn't a setback, but a season. When a person struggles, things change, or something beloved ends, our instinct is to ask what went wrong or who is accountable. It rarely occurs to us that the necessary progression might be unfolding somewhere less visible exactly as it’s supposed to. Often, the tendency in work is towards extraction, asking what a person’s time can produce or how much output it can generate without interruption. Countless corporate work strategies seek to "optimize", to use AI to "automate", to "streamline", to make the work go faster and faster. But work can also be organized around a different assumption: that the relationship itself is the work. The people who work here and the people who walk through the door are worth forming, not just utilizing.
The Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr, when speaking on change and transformation uses a metaphor of a container, that a vessel exists to hold the contents, the container gives things shape and form. Could Race Street be such a vessel?—A place that holds people long enough for something to happen to them. You come in as a regular and, over time, you become known. Your order, yes, but also your mood on a Monday. The fact that you just got back from the vet. The joke that made you laugh last week.
What has been difficult for me to accept, though, is that a good container forms and releases. Every year at their anniversary, our baristas complete an exercise: name one hundred regulars and their orders. It’s a map of relationships rendered in cortados and oat milk lattes. Hannah completed it again recently for her second year. Sitting with her list, she realized many of the names she’d reached for during her first year were gone. Moved away. Changed routines. Life intervened. In their place were new names—people she now knew just as well. The container had held, but the people inside had turned, the way a garden turns, the way any healthy living thing turns. Renewal isn’t the absence of loss; it’s what loss makes room for.
A Place You Can Leave (well)
I’ve always hoped Race Street could be a place where our employees build a career, pushing against the idea that hospitality is merely transitional work on the way to a “real job”. I still believe that. But I’ve had to expand my definition of "success." A school doesn’t keep its children forever. Generally “success” in parenting means your children have the skills and confidence to leave you for their own journey. Holly flew to start Birdy’s Bagels; Mika moved to Nashville to teach; Jeremiah is continuing his career in coffee in Chicago. Our alumni story tells of countless team members who have built something here and then carried it forward. Perhaps a place rewarding enough to stay in long term might be exactly the kind of place that prepares you to leave. What more could we hope for than to walk alongside them, giving shape to their lives for the season they're in — as they do the same for our team and our customers?
The garlic is almost ready now, green and improbable, right on schedule. The café is in its seventh year. Our growth has been slow, intentional, and beautifully consistent (thank you, Neighbor). Hannah is learning new names. The bar keeps moving. The team is already stepping forward, the same staff Jeremiah shepherded into strong pillars are becoming load-bearing themselves.
I watched Jeremiah work on that Wednesday morning not long ago knowing something was ending. The door swung open. The levers on the machine rising up. A regular walked in, he said something I didn’t catch, and they laughed.
Another Wednesday at Race Street.
- Aaron
Wishing Jeremiah and his family all the best in Chicago.
Thank you for your beautiful hospitality.
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