Celesta: The Plant-Based Restaurant That Is Not Just Surviving, but Thriving

Celesta’s dining room has become a living room. 

With all but one of the bright white tables and clear chairs stowed away in the basement to weather the pandemic, the once bright and comfortably cramped restaurant is now more familiar with owner Melanie Manuel’s roaming rabbit, two dogs and at least three different pairs of shoes. 

The space is also an office during the day, as Manuel spends most of her time either sitting at the bar or at the single table that was spared from the basement. The room is also a storage room. From the outside one can see dozens of boxes piled high, most of them filled with compostable to-go packaging and silverware or handled paper bags. 

The restaurant’s ambiance and comfort is all in Manuel’s image. Even down to the restaurant’s values of sustainability, accessibility, and social justice, the entirely plant-based restaurant is one-of-a-kind just like her. In just one hour of conversation, she and I talked about food specials, tracking trends, cleaning rituals, cookbooks, power dynamics, living wages, expectations, the exorbitant cost of single-use, compostable packaging and how to tell a friend gently that no, you cannot go on vacation right now. 

Without the ability to build relationships with her customers in-person, Manuel said that the place feels like a totally new, and frustratingly transactional, business. 

“I think when you open a restaurant, your mission and passion is to make people happy and spend time with them. … Now we try to make phone orders efficient but friendly.”

Melanie Manuel, owner Celesta

Celesta has had zero cases of COVID-19 and zero layoffs – A story of success by Manuel’s standards. Her secret might be right under your nose. 

The Pandemic Model

For small businesses across the city, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a full year of cutting hours, laying workers off, and, in the worst situations, closing their doors for good. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of service jobs in Wisconsin fell by more than a quarter in late 2020. That adds up to around 80,000 jobs lost in Wisconsin’s hospitality sector. 

Celesta has not been immune to those circumstances. Customers are not allowed in the restaurant, and there are only 4-5 people on-shift at once on any given day. Orders are placed over the phone, then customers pick out their name from a line-up in the window. Finally, a server brings the bag of goodies outside to the pick-up table, from which the customer is to stay 10 feet away. 

Needless to say, the health precautions are strict and many. According to Manuel, the customers keep on coming not despite the strict procedure, but because of it.

“A lot of our customers are the type of people who are okay with what we’re doing, because they are more likely to be cautious themselves” Manuel explained. “If you’re interested in vegan food, even if you’re not vegan, you’re likely a more intentional person. Same goes if you support small businesses, so our customers understand and are supportive.”

However compassionate the customer base may be, Manuel said she had to get very creative to keep the doors open. At Celesta, there are the famed non-denominational, multi-course dinner packs, custom-made tier cakes, take-home cocktails, the February cookbook giveaway, and her brand new lifestyle show ‘Otherworldly Vegan’ on Youtube. 

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By buying the cookbooks from local shops and choosing ones written by Black vegan chefs, an intentional decision that is as ethical as it is progressive, Manuel believes that the giveaway “makes people feel good.” Manuel’s YouTube show updates every month and covers global cooking tutorials and sustainable gift-giving tips, both perfectly on-brand. 

These strategies all share the common goal of engaging with customers online on several levels to accommodate for losing the ease of engaging in-person – a pivot that many businesses would benefit from making. 

Internal Affairs

No restaurant is perfect. Though none of Celesta’s workers responded for comment, Manuel did say that most of the employees do not make a living wage, estimated by the MIT living wage calculator at $14.32 per hour in Milwaukee county. However, the restaurant is a member of the Milwaukee Independent Restaurant Coalition, which lobbies to achieve a federal minimum wage that is livable and also feasible for small, local businesses to offer. 

Despite these arguably minor flaws in the business model, Celesta has been hugely effective at toeing the line between keeping workers safe during a raging global pandemic and staying afloat financially – a balance which many bars and restaurants in Milwaukee seem to be struggling with, as evidenced by the dangerously busy state of Brady Street in recent weeks.

Manuel says that the secret to her restaurant’s success is two-fold: First, she is an active participant in the vegan community, as well as Celesta’s geographical community. Everyone knows that you get what you give, and Celesta is a notorious giver. Second, her business model engages customers at home all while making them feel good about supporting the restaurant by shopping local, spending extra on compostable containers and keeping workers safe from the virus. 

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Around the holiday season, a woman who Manuel did not recognize knocked on the window facing Farwell avenue; “She knocked and we’re inside like, what’s going on here? She was waving something and the server went out and grabbed it and the woman left. It was a card with a really sweet Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, and she had drawn just a little heart on it,” Manuel retold warmly on our last call. The card hangs in the living room/dining room/storage room/office still, a reminder of the community they serve.