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Civilization Restaurant A Unique Dining Cooperative BY CHRIS WILSON ainesville is now home to what looks like the only cooperative restaurant in the state of Florida. Civilization, which opened in October 2009, serves breakfast, lunch and dinner nearly every day. While nobody can confirm if Civilization is, in fact, the only co-op restaurant in the state, the restaurants’ investors and workers believe it is. And an exhaustive Internet search proved they might be correct in that assumption. “Two of our investors are part of the Labor Party, so it was their brainchild,” said Civilization owner/ worker Esther Kaufman. “We had talked over the years about starting different cooperative endeavors and this is just the one that took. I don’t know of another [restaurant cooperative] in Florida. [Opening a cooperative business] is not an easy thing, when you’re dealing with the government. The state of Florida doesn’t recognize a worker-owned cooperative type of business. Really, we’re a limited liability company, but we let our structure work like a co-op.” The restaurant opened its doors for the first time on Oct. 6, 2009. Less than six months earlier, the investors involved in the business had purchased Terranova Catering Company and had intended to just run a catering operation. The group found a few catering jobs before the idea of a restaurant was born. “We’re locally funded, so we don’t answer to any particular person or bank,” Kaufman said. “When we were investigating what to do at the end of our lease, we wound up finding this space, so we ended up creating a restaurant as well.” The space that the investors had found was the
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142 | Autumn 2010
former location of 2nd Street Bakery (1511 NW 2nd Street), just south of NW 16th Ave. The old brick building needed little remodeling inside or out. Inside, the restaurant has a about a half dozen tables while the front patio also has a handful of tables. “We were totally shut down from August through October to get the restaurant opened,” Kaufman said. “You can see it’s kind of set up for a coffee shop and we’ve kept it mostly the same.” The cooperative is owned by about 15 investors, but Kaufman said the company is open to more willing investors. Not all of the investors are workers in the restaurant and catering business. Kaufman said some are just investors, but everybody who invests gets a vote on what the democratically-run business will do. “We actually just lowered our investment requirement,” she said. “That’s unusual, but it’s a good sign. Usually you hear about companies wanting to get their hands on whatever amount they can.”