The Good Table Cafe & Nursery

Pay-what-you-can cafe, community center, and local food business service provider launching as a cooperative with UCC in 2024

Cooperative Partnership

The Good Table will launch in 2024 as the nation’s first combined pay-what-you-can cafe, commercial incubator kitchen, retail nursery, community gathering space, and arts venue, a cooperative formed in partnership with The Good Table UCC. This multi-use community center will provide a pay-what-you-can cafe, a retail space for local makers and artists, a commercial kitchen for urban farmers to make value-added products, and a venue and gathering space for workshops, organizing, and events. All of these offerings are being created in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a coffee shop, nor a farmer’s market, nor a community gathering space.

New Life for a Historic Nursery

For over a hundred years the Adachi family grew a successful nursery business and helped to incubate new Japanese-owned nurseries despite the internment camps and racism that they faced over generations. When the Adachi Florist and Nursery in El Sobrante went out of business, they approached us, but we didn’t have the funds to buy the place. They sold to a gas station developer who intended to demolish the building, but because of community opposition, the lot sat idle. Meanwhile, Pastor Melinda McClain of the Good Table UCC was developing a beautiful vision for a pay-what-you-can cafe. Planting Justice was so impressed by her vision and values that we formed a cooperative called the Good Table LLC and bought the location together in 2019. We intend to keep alive the critically important local history of Japanese nurseries and create a home for arts and sustainability for the East Bay for generations to come.