Since 2015, Toad Style has been serving Brooklyn its signature scratch-made vegan food, from burgers layered with almond cheese to jackfruit burritos and breakfast buns filled with chickpea-tofu scramble and maple sausages. But now, after 11 years in business, the restaurant is being forced to close its doors.
“The closure was immediate, indefinite, and without notice due to a legal crisis with the building,” co-owner Jillian Camera, who ran Toad Style with her partner Tyler Merfeld, wrote on the restaurant’s GoFundMe page. According to Camera, the fundraiser is intended to help provide staff with severance pay while also covering closing costs and outstanding bills. The couple still runs the popular vegan coffee shop Familiars in Brooklyn.
Many restaurants have been forced to close recently due to rising costs, declining foot traffic, and a challenging economic climate. Just recently, Millennium, one of the most influential vegan restaurants in the US, announced it was shutting its doors (but will reopen as a new, smaller concept in June). Stuff I Eat, an Inglewood institution, also announced its closure in April.
Toad Style
But Toad Style appears to have a very different story behind its closure.
A lawsuit filed in Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn at the end of April alleges that the restaurant’s use of the space is illegal. According to a 1975 Certificate of Occupancy, the building is only approved for use as a printing store. The suit claims the NYC Department of Buildings improperly allowed Toad Style to operate as a restaurant for more than a decade.
“The landlord told us what was going on and that the best thing would be to shut down immediately,” Camera told VegNews. “Our first reaction was that we would need to return the produce order we had coming that day. We wished that we at least had a week or two’s notice to tell our staff and our community, and sell off the food we had already bought and prepared.”
“All our feelings were very ‘of the moment,’” Camera added. “That’s how we live as small business owners. I still don’t think we’ve been able to process the big picture because there’s so much to do.”
Toad Style
What’s next for Toad Style?
Many customers were devastated by the news. “The toad will rise again,” one Instagram user commented on the restaurant’s closure announcement. Another wrote: “When I moved to the neighborhood a few years ago, having Toad Style literally around the corner was genuinely a big part of why I picked my apartment.”
“We’ve received so many amazing messages,” said Camera. “People telling us how often they used to come when they lived nearby or how far they would drive to get our food. A lot of people are talking about being nourished and grateful, which makes us really proud. We want to honor each one, so we’re taking our time going through them.”
The community quickly rallied around the restaurant and, at the time of writing, Toad Style has raised more than $11,000 toward its $13,000 fundraising goal.
“Grief is the price we pay for love, and it really means so much to have been loved. And we join [our customers in their] sadness. I wouldn’t say that we’re adverse to change, but we are very comfortable doing things for a long time and are finding that it’s a good practice to accept that nothing lasts forever.”
But according to Camera, this may not be the end for Toad Style forever. “At the moment, we are consumed with the logistics of closing this iteration of Toad Style and continuing to run our vegan coffee shop, Familiars,” she explained, before adding that with a nine-month-old baby, the couple is already at capacity. “But we have received so many generous leads on potential new spaces and pop-up opportunities,” she continued. “So once we settle in, we will absolutely start exploring.”
Keep up to date with the fundraiser on the restaurant’s GoFundMe page.
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Charlotte is a VegNews editor and writer based in sunny Southsea on England's southern coast.
