Colorado’s pay-what-you-can cafes brace for an uncertain future

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — On a bright Thursday afternoon, Sarah Lesyinski warmly welcomed customers to Café 180, a nonprofit restaurant with a mission to feed those in need.

Once one of Colorado’s few pay-what-you-can cafés, Café 180 shifted its model in 2024, introducing set menu prices while dedicating all profits to providing free meals for those in need. As the café’s executive director, Lesyinski is determined to keep the nonprofit restaurant thriving for years to come.

But just four miles south on Broadway, Littleton’s Gracefull Café faced a different fate: rising costs and financial challenges led to its closure after eight years in business. 

“Over the last two years, we have seen increasingly challenging times. In our hearts, we always wanted to be able to end well as we were entrusted with much. Unfortunately, it has become too much for us to sustain this work in a healthy way for our family,” Gracefull owners Troy and Heather Greenwood wrote in a media release.

Lesyinski and her team of two full-time staff members and about a dozen volunteers are determined to keep Cafe 180’s doors open, despite the challenges. 

“Running a restaurant is, of course, very hard as is, let alone with a nonprofit model,” Lesyinski said. “And costs are very high.”

Café 180 opened in 2011 as a nonprofit, embracing a pay-what-you-can model where customers could exchange volunteer time for a meal if they couldn’t afford to pay. However, over time, Lesyinski said rising operating costs and declining revenue — driven by patrons contributing less per meal — made the model increasingly unsustainable and drove the nonprofit to require regular payment for meals.

“We really loved how our model functioned and felt like it broke down social barriers and the way it brought a lot of walks of life together,” Lesyinski said. “But it wasn’t working anymore.”

Cafe 180 brings hundreds of meals a week to food banks and other nonprofits serving food-insecure people in Englewood and around the Denver metro, as well as meal kits directly to individuals with recipes for how to cook the meal. Since switching to a priced menu, the cafe has served hundreds more meals than it did before.

“We’ve still found ways to be a part of the community, it just looks a little bit different,” Lesyinski said. 

Across town, on East Colfax in Denver, Carrie Shores is asking herself the same question: how can she, as the executive director of SAME Café, keep a pay-what-you-can model while meeting rising rent, utilities and labor costs?

“This is a very challenging business model and I’ve met several people who opened up nonprofit cafes across the US who didn’t last even two years because it’s very challenging to have that stability piece,” Shores said.

Shores joined SAME Café in 2020 after spending years in the for-profit restaurant industry. The café is dedicated to serving high-quality, nutritious meals at a cost determined by each guest’s ability to pay. Patrons have the option to contribute what they can or earn a meal by volunteering for 30 minutes in the kitchen.

All of SAME Cafe’s produce is donated from community gardens and local farms, so the restaurant’s food costs are practically nonexistent. Its three coordinators are paid $23/hour and its three managers are paid a $55,000 salary. The 2,000 square-foot cafe’s rent is $5,600 a month.

Shores said they’re locked into a lease for another four years, but she said prices are rising in their neighborhood just two blocks from City Park.