Tricklebee Café logo
“We have a tag line that says: ‘Cheerful hearts, Continual feast, Cozy chapel,’” says Christie Melby-Gibbons, the Moravian Church pastor who heads up Tricklebee Cafe, the pay-what-you-can vegan eatery that has been operating Wednesdays through Saturdays from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. at 4424 W. North Avenue and will soon be celebrating its tenth anniversary.
It's the feasting that has led most of Tricklebee’s guests though its door their first time. “It is pure joy to see our next-door neighbors who work and live on our block come to eat at the café every day that we’re open,” says Melby-Gibbons. “They so enjoy eating real food that’s made with real ingredients that is full of love. Many of those neighbors choose to eat a Tricklebee because they feel good when they eat our food. And because it’s also delicious!”
Some who tasted Tricklebee’s options have been inspired to change their diet. “Several have stopped eating at local fast-food restaurants because they don’t like how they feel after they eat that food,” Melby-Gibbons continues, adding that fast food “is also very expensive” in dollars as well as physical wellbeing, “Many of our neighbors do continue to struggle with hypertension, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other diet-related health problems,” she laments.
Vision and Reality
Photo via Tricklebee Café - Facebook
Tricklebee Café meal
A recent Tricklebee Café meal
Of how Melby-Gibbons and her husband arrived in Milwaukee to found Tricklebee, she says of their journey, “I was serving a congregation in Southern California, where I helped to start a weekly community dinner using all rescued food. We called the meal Open Table. After five years of that ministry, I began to get curious about opening a restaurant where the menu is made daily with food that might otherwise go into the waste stream.
“I happened upon the One World Everybody Eats website,” she says of an organization that assists people in starting and maintaining pay-what-you-can restaurants, “and got connected. My vision soon began to grow into reality. When I moved my family back to the Midwest where my spouse David and I are from. Milwaukee was one of the cities we were looking at to start a pay-what-you-can community cafe. Even from my first visit to Milwaukee up until today almost ten years later, everything continues to align for the good.”
The good for which Tricklebee is undoubtably best known is its lunches of animal-free entrees and sides. “On a more trivial level, serving only vegan food makes cleanup so much easier in our kitchen,” Melby-Gibbons confides of the ease she and her volunteers are afforded.
More importantly, however, she emphasizes, “Our main reasons are for the health of our customers. The closer we eat to the Earth—a diet rich in plants, vegetables, grains, seeds, and fruit—the less disease we have in our bodies. We also recognize the unsustainability and horrid conditions of factory farming. The animals that are confined in cramped, gross, and violent areas live in constant fear, and their bodies produce adrenaline. When we eat the flesh of those animals, we’re consuming that very chemical, adrenaline, which causes fear and anxiety in our bodies,” she says.
Farm to Fork
Tricklebee also tries to reduce the distance between their dishes and their points of origin. “About 20% of the food that we serve at Tricklebee Cafe is grown in our garden beds or harvested from the food forest directly behind the café” Melby-Gibbons says. In particular, they grow fresh herbs, lettuce, tomatoes, kale and apples. Twenty-five percent of the food Tricklebee serve on comes from local producers such as Cream City Farms.
“In early autumn,” she adds, “that percentage goes up when we get large donations of fresh, organic produce from the West Allis Farmers Market. About 25% of our regular donations of produce come from local gardeners who have excess produce during the growing season. Also, local food pantries bring us excess food, at the end their food distribution. We also get occasional large donations of produce and baked goods from Trader Joe’s. We end up giving much of all of this produce out to customers. We incorporate the rest into our menus. Lastly, about 30% of the food that we bring into the café to prepare meals we buy from local food distributors.”
Harvesting and organizing all those foodstuffs for meals serving 80 to 100 people each day makes for serious work. “Sometimes customers come in looking for the chapel. I remind them that they’re in it,” Melby-Gibbons explains. “The whole place is a setting where sacredness happens. The peace and joy of good conversation soaks into the cafe walls. Sometimes people are having a bad day. They can sit down with myself for a staff member and be vulnerable. We listen with much empathy and compassion.”
Tricklebee also hosts events to build community and educate its customers. The next of these is the latest of its free, all-ages Community Song Circles at 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 23. “We also enjoy offering monthly creativity nights for people to just come together and do some restful creating. This is especially important to us in these times of political division and fear.”
Among Tricklebee's brand extensions, which include a cookbook and comic book featuring a vegan pirate named Pumpkin Boot, is a 2021 spoken word opera, Home Cooked Heroes, with a libretto by Brit Nicole and music by Ms Lotus Fankh and presented by Milwaukee Opera Theatre...
