Etienne Note: In a free society you can have pockets of socialism but it is impossible to have pockets of REAL Freedom in a socialist society.
Dylan Alverson changed his restaurant’s business model early this year, frustrated by Operation Metro Surge but also the dire state of the restaurant business. “There is something wrong in our economy,” he said.Credit...Caroline Yang for The New York Times
Dylan Alverson stood amid tear gas and flash-bang grenades, on the frozen street where Alex Pretti was shot and killed by ICE agents in January, when he got the idea for what he later called an “absurd business move.” He decided to stop charging for food at Modern Times, the south Minneapolis cafe he’s run for 15 years.
“For the remainder of the government occupation, we will function as a free and donation-based restaurant,” he wrote on social media, two days after the shooting. The original intent of the change was to stop paying sales taxes to a government he said was “actively inflicting daily harm on its citizens.” The pay-what-you-wish restaurant would also have a new name: Post Modern Times.
Mr. Alverson’s decision came in a moment of forceful, widely publicized local resistance to Operation Metro Surge, which brought 3,000 federal immigration agents, along with widespread unrest, to Minnesota last winter.
More surprising, though, is what ensued in the weeks and months that followed. Post Modern Times thrived, even as the number of customers who don’t pay for food now hovers between 40 and 50 percent.
Mr. Alverson opened his restaurant in 2011. It’s a neighborhood institution, known for its diner-style food.Credit...Caroline Yang for The New York Times
The breakfast rush usually begins as soon as the restaurant opens, at 9 a.m.Credit...Caroline Yang for The New York Times
“I have succeeded more than I ever did when I was running a conventional business employing 22 people,” said Mr. Alverson, who decided to make the change permanent. “I think that’s proof that something is wrong.”
On one of the first warm days of spring last month, the breakfast rush began as soon as the doors opened at Post Modern Times, at 9 a.m. Mr. Alverson, a married, nose-ringed father of three, paused between tasks as diners took their seats.
Among them was Antonio Malone, a video artist who said he’s eaten at the restaurant every day for three weeks, drawn by the quality, free food. Sofia Padilla is a neighborhood regular whose son loves the pancakes. She doesn’t believe the city has fully healed from the turmoil of the winter.
“The whole neighborhood felt like a war zone,” she said. “I want to support a business that cares so much about the community.”
Mr. Alverson is both host of and spokesman for his diner-style restaurant, built inside the former offices of an alternative newspaper and literary center. He has articulated his evolving vision to numerous inquirers, including journalists, documentary filmmakers and members of an experimental theater troupe.
Antonio Malone said he’s eaten at Post Modern Times every day since he first discovered it this spring, drawn by the quality, free food. He comes to the neighborhood to eat and read at the nearby library.Credit...Caroline Yang for The New York Times
What started as a workaround to paying sales tax has evolved into a business that verges on performance art: a restaurant that might offer a solution to a broken industry-wide business model as well as a critique of that model.
“I’ve been fighting to make a profit for 15 years, and I don’t think it’s possible without taking advantage of people,” he said. “We’re stepping out of the system.”
Donation-only and pay-what-you-wish restaurants are not new. What makes Mr. Alverson’s approach novel is his determination to center his business on an expanded concept of hospitality driven by more than economic survival. Serving customers who don’t have the means to eat at most restaurants brings an ethical component to his recalibrated definition of success.
“It’s kind of this unspoken agreement in America that there’s a group of people that are not worth anything, and they’re treated as such,” he said. “I disagree with that.”
Diners sat at communal tables on the sidewalk outside Post Modern Times, on one of the first warm days of spring in the Twin Cities.Credit...Caroline Yang for The New York Times
Mr. Alverson shortened his menu after removing prices, to help the small kitchen keep up with increased demand. But the features that distinguished Modern Times from other daytime cafes with diner-style menus — homemade bread and buttermilk, local ingredients, everything made-to-order — remain at its successor.
One customer, Juvie Harper, said he visited Post Modern Times for the first time in April, expecting the premade, packaged food he has found at food banks. He was amazed, he said, “to see that it’s actually freshly made, and you got the options of different drinks, and then pastries.”
He’d just eaten a bacon cheeseburger with eggs on the side. He had spread the word about the restaurant to James Ray Everett Sr., whom he’d met outside the nearby Social Security office just that morning.
Mr. Everett, a truck driver in his 70s, appeared surprised to be receiving tableside service when he ordered eggs, bacon and toast. Diners are not presented with bills at the end of meals, just an opportunity to donate, if they can. Mr. Everett could not. The server thanked him for coming.
“This is a blessed place,” he said.
James Ray Everett Sr., who goes by “Sugar Ray,” ate his first meal at Post Modern Times last month, having heard that it served quality food for free.Credit...Caroline Yang for The New York Times
In an adjacent dining room, Mr. Harper was placating two diners who felt other customers had been served more quickly than they had, they explained. One of them had received the wrong order.
“Can you eat the sausage and eggs while we put one on the grill for you?” Mr. Alverson asked.
The interaction was typical of his new role, he said, mediating conflict between employees and diners who often feel disrespected in other public settings.
“We have a lot of customers that are very used to being discriminated against,” he said. “It’s a lot of big, deep human emotions.”
Mr. Alverson’s calm demeanor was shaped as he grew up an outsider in rural, conservative Wisconsin. He used the $35,000 he made selling a used bike business outside Olympia, Wash., to start Modern Times in 2011.
In the years before the pandemic, Mr. Alverson said, the restaurant was profitable every year except one, but never exceeded a 10 percent profit margin. He sees his days as a young punk anticipating societal collapse as an asset as he continues to confront forbidding odds as a restaurateur.
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