City o’ City, a vegan and vegetarian restaurant in Denver’s Capitol Hill district, seems to be dedicated to inclusivity, at least in theory. Their website proudly states that they “serve all needs to all people,” and the strictly lowercase type on their site comes across as welcoming and familiar. In an interview with a local news source, City o’City founder Dan Landes says his mission is very simply to “[express] love for humanity… by the use of hospitality.” Marissa Oves, Colorado College grad and City o’ City aficionado, says that the restaurant is inclusive of people with or without dietary restrictions. In her potentially punny words, “It’s super digestible for people—there’s food there for everyone.”
When I walked into City o’ City for the first time last May, I wondered if my dad, who was born and raised in Denver, would find it quite so digestible. In his (albeit very narrow) view, dietary restrictions are for people who can afford to have them. Growing up, there was no “special food”—tofu, milk alternatives, fake meat—allowed in our house. He also laments the fact that today’s Denver is overrun by hipsters and greedy developers who knocked down his middle school and filled his neighborhood creek with concrete.
Because of these inherited chips on my shoulder, I was suspicious of City o’ City’s hours-long wait time, plant-based menu, younger staff and clientele, and hip aesthetic. I immediately assumed that the restaurant played a part in Denver’s gentrification, and that it profited from pandering to the trendier aspects of veganism. And while there is some truth to the forces behind these snap judgements, City o’ City’s role in Denver’s food world is far more nuanced than I originally thought.
City o’ City’s support of local businesses is integral to their proposed ethic of care and community. The vast majority of their produce is locally sourced, much of it from their own urban micro-farm nearby. This not only ensures that the food is fresh and seasonal, but that money goes to small Colorado farmers rather than to large corporations. Advocates for the farm-to-table concept also argue that when restaurants buy locally, they help reduce greenhouse gas emissions produced by transporting food across long distances. City o’ City’s community focus extends beyond produce—their website proudly proclaims that they buy everything “from coffee to beer to cheese” from local vendors. Much of the edgy furniture and decor is upcycled, and the restaurant space serves doubly as a gallery that features a different Denver artist monthly.
It’s likely that Denver’s two-dollar-sign-on-Yelp health food restaurants like City o’ City have benefitted from the gentrification of the city as a whole. When Dan Landes announced in 2018 that he was selling his restaurants and moving away from Denver, he published a goodbye letter in which he identifies a clear distinction between “Old Denver” and “New Denver.” Nostalgically, he notes that “Old Denver” had less people, more crime, and more snow. In “Old Denver,” he could open WaterCourse Foods, his first vegetarian restaurant, for $30,000—“no permits, no problem.” Today, he says, “$30,000 will get you a crop-dusting from a passing developer and a scale drawing of what you can’t afford.” His observations (as a white, successful business owner) point to a much larger and more detrimental trend in Denver’s gentrification. Between 2010 and 2017, rent prices in Denver increased by almost 50%, the fourth highest leap out of all major cities in America, and the highest outside of California. Alongside this has come the steamrolling of racially and ethnically diverse communities and the mass displacement of people of color. As of 2019, more Latinx individuals have been displaced from Denver’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods than in any other city in the U.S.
Capitol Hill, the neighborhood where City o’ City is located, is home to two major new development projects: Ogden Flatts and Nine Hundred Penn. When completed, both will have units available for upwards of $1 million. A local artist known as Billy the Poet, quoted in an article by Confluence Denver, remarked that “it used to be a lot more young, broke people and artists and whatnot…[now] it’s harder to live here if you’re a starving artist.” In the same article, business owner John Donahoe noted, “It used to be gayer than it is. Now it's more young, upscale, heterosexual couples with pets and kids.”
As an enormously popular Denver institution for more than 20 years, City o’ City is situated within this changing context. Located just blocks from the capitol building, it is positioned to serve a diverse and shifting clientele, from artists to families to million-dollar renters to members of Colorado’s government.
Marissa is one of those customers, and identifies the restaurant’s busyness as an indicator of its inclusivity. “I think a lot of people associate vegan restaurants with a quiet ambiance,” she says, but at City o’ City, she found that the music and bustling atmosphere made plant-based food more approachable to her “friends and meat-loving dad.” It feels like a restaurant, not a Vegan Restaurant.
Nonetheless, the fact that a plant-based restaurant would feel the need to make efforts to present itself in a way that is “digestible” to everyone highlights stereotypical perceptions of veganism and vegetarianism as trends followed exclusively by crunchy, wealthy white people. My dad, with his vendetta against soy milk and veggie burgers, clearly subscribed to this belief. Marissa points out that, “anyone can be vegan,” and that there is a plethora of cheap options for people who may not be able to afford City o’ City’s double-digit menu, but who are willing and able to cook for themselves.
Vegan diets can certainly be affordable and accessible, but this isn’t always accounted for in common perceptions of plant-based diets. Advocacy groups such as Vegan Voices of Color call mainstream veganism “white veganism.” People of color are often completely erased from discourse surrounding dietary diversity. According to Khushbu Shah in her article, “The Vegan Race Wars: How the Mainstream Ignores Vegans of Color,” vegetarian and cruelty-free eating practices have been a part of non-Western religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Rastafarianism for centuries, long before the British “father of veganism” Donald Watson coined the term in 1944.
Shah goes on to state that many trendy “superfoods”—think jackfruit, chia seeds, collard greens—are merely rebrandings of centuries-old staples of communities of color. These foods are not new, but, as Shah says, “When anything gets sucked up into the current of what’s trendy, the price goes up, making it harder for the communities that have long depended on these ingredients to afford them,” not to mention harder on the people whose labor is often exploited to keep up with rising demand. The most famous example of this phenomenon is quinoa: the price of quinoa tripled between 2006 and 2013, making the grain too expensive for many of the Bolivian and Peruvian farmers who depend on it.
In the face of misrepresentations and appropriations of veganism, many people of color see their dietary choices as resistive. Quoted by Shah, PETA producer Jackie Tolliver says, “I've heard other black vegans talk about living this way as a revolutionary act, and I totally agree.” If their idealistic mission statement rings true, City o’ City and the plant-based practices it promotes could serve as one small site of this revolutionary act. That is, for anyone who can afford to eat there, and who feels welcome doing so.
Food, in this context, is much more than food, and City o’ City is more than a restaurant. It is a site of cultural, economic, and personal identification, connection, and division. Marissa identifies her personal relationship with City o’ City as the reason she chose to permanently mark her body with a tattoo honoring the establishment—the stylized “o” from its sign. City o’ City is the place where, in her words, “my whole family had dinner for the first time in Colorado, where I showed my mom my tattoos, the place where my sister told us she was pregnant.” She describes a memory of spontaneously driving up to City o’ City from Colorado Springs with her friend instead of going on a hike. Another time, after a concert (the restaurant is open 7 am to 2am daily), Marissa and her friends asked their waiter, “Party Pat,” to strip for them, as part of an ongoing experiment with “rejection therapy”—asking ridiculous questions to get used to hearing “no.”
When I interviewed Marissa, I didn’t ask her about the gentrification of the Capitol Hill neighborhood, or the racism of mainstream veganism. The positivity of her experiences, or how much I enjoyed the cauliflower chicken and waffles I ate there last May, don’t negate City o’ City’s broader role in a complex and complicit Denver restaurant industry. Rather, all of these realities operate at the same time, in the same space, on the corner of 13th and Sherman. The question then remains, especially for a restaurant which makes such lofty claims to inclusivity: who occupies that space? Who is eating at City o’ City, waiting hours for a table or attending their 3-6 happy hour? Who is profiting off of it, and how, and why? And what can a restaurant like City o’ City do to truly become a place which serves “all needs to all people?”
Mediocre Issue | October 2019