Riot Cafe was born the night Olivia Rose Griffin ran down the street leading a group of protesters to safety at her bar, The Limbo, in downtown Louisville.
Griffin, who owns The Limbo and the newly relocated hat shop The Mysterious Rack at the corner of Fourth and Chestnut streets, has been active in supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and protests downtown since protests began in earnest in late May.
For more than 100 days, protesters have gathered in the streets over the police shooting of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed Black woman who was killed during a narcotics investigation at her apartment in March.
In early July, Griffin was on one of her customary water and snack runs to Jefferson Square to bring supplies to protesters when “cops shot out of the back of the park out of nowhere, tackled people, slammed people against walls,” she said. “I've been around the cops a lot the past few months but I've never seen that with my own eyes that close.
"It was terrifying."
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Pulling a wagon full of bottled water, Griffin started running back to her bar“ and all of a sudden people are running with me and I was like ‘just come with me,’ so a bunch of them came with me to the patio at Limbo.”
They were all shaken, she said.
“One woman had asthma and she was overheated from running," Griffin said, but "she was able to go into air conditioning and drink some water and feel safe. And that was a really pivotal night for me. There is no safe harbor downtown for Black people that I know of."
It was then Griffin realized she needed to — and could — do more.
Her passion to support the ongoing social justice movement will coalesce under one roof with Riot Cafe at 574 S. Fourth St., with The Limbo and The Mysterious Rack on either side. The social justice cafe will be part bodega, part cafe and bar, part safe meeting space and part art gallery.
Riot Cafe is Griffin’s way of showing up for the Black community and using her privilege and business platform to support the community while highlighting the talents of people of color in the arts and culinary fields.
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With the small Falls City Market in the Omni Louisville Hotel at Third Street and Broadway mostly boarded up since the riots, downtown is a food desert again, Griffin said.
A bodega at Riot Cafe is “an obvious step” in helping the community, she said, and though she wants to offer locally made foods, she’s looking for sponsorships “so I can keep prices down so that people can walk in and can get a ... sandwich that's not $15, you know?”
That’s just the start.
With a morning coffee bar and full bar operating later in the day, the cafe will also provide a community space for socially distanced meetings, an option lacking in downtown right now, Griffin said.
In addition to Japanese and Korean-inspired light food during the day, beginning at 5 p.m., a Hawaiian-inspired menu will be available from The Limbo next door at 411 W. Chestnut Street. Sidewalk seating will also offer a much-needed space for people working and visiting downtown.
The new space is a former art gallery complete with tall exposed brick walls so it’s perfect for displaying art, Griffin said. A future artist-in-residency program will provide space for Black artists to create work for two months (while eating for free) and events will showcase their work along with other artists. She hopes to collaborate with Black-owned Uncle Nearest Whiskey to support the art program.
“I want to continue the work,” Griffin said, and “I feel like my time is less valuable at the park feeding people now, and more valuable creating long term systems to help the community.”
Griffin will also set aside a percentage of cafe sales to fund a zero percent interest loan program available to people of color who want to start or grow a food or beverage business.
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These loans will fill a dire need because “it's almost impossible to start a business without investors,” she said. “When I opened Limbo, I contemplated coming up with a fictional white male investor from San Francisco so people would take me seriously.”
It was so hard getting a start, she said, “I can't even imagine being Black, let alone a Black woman and trying to do this.”
Opening Riot Cafe wasn't a stretch for Griffin — her friends involved in protests were already calling Limbo the "Riot Bar," she said.
And while the rioting at the beginning of the protests was shocking, Griffin said, “I had the position early on where ... when you look at social change and history, it starts with riots."
She wanted to do more to play an active role in supporting the protests, so she used her social media platforms during the early months to gather donations and her location downtown near the park to shuttle water bottles and food and supplies.
When a larger community took on that role, Griffin moved on to working with members of the Black community and advocates and protesters, including those in Louisville’s food scene, to support the movement and the evolving needs of marginalized communities and the struggling small business and restaurant scene.
Among her activism was helping Feed Louisville, a nonprofit providing hot meals to unhoused Louisvillians; getting a food trailer downtown so protesters could be fed after the barbecuing gear she and others were using got thrown into dumpsters by the police; Feed the Revolution, a coalition with the aim of growing more food locally in an urban setting, especially in the West End, with produce being donated where needed and sold to local restaurants; and the Responsible Bar and Restaurant Coalition of Louisville.
These various endeavors are all “partially about becoming pandemic proof,” Griffin said and becoming strong enough to rely not just on the government but on the community.
A social justice mural will figure prominently outside the cafe along Chestnut Street in downtown. It will be completed in stages by a collective of artists, but Griffin expects at least some of it to be done by Sept. 26 when she hosts an outdoor event to launch the social justice cafe.
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The event will be more than just a business opening — it’s celebrating a movement.
“This is where history was made,” she said, “this corner. The riots will always be remembered on this corner.”
And through Riot Cafe, the work will continue.
Tell Dana! Send your restaurant “Dish” to Dana McMahan at thecjdish@gmail.com and follow @danamac on Twitter.
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Riot Cafe will be part bodega, part gallery, part meeting place to lift up Black community - Courier Journal
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