Former Celesta employees say they received little notice of the restaurant’s closure, plus faced poor working conditions and racial insensitivity – adding to a post-pandemic increase in union and workers’ rights activity on Milwaukee’s Eastside.
Celesta Restaurant, a plant-based restaurant that opened on Farwell Avenue in 2018, announced that it was closed on May 20 in an Instagram post – and many in the comments expressed surprise at the abrupt news. One commenter said, “I didn’t see this coming. Heartbroken is an understatement. It seemed like you were thriving in spite of the pandemic! What happened?”
After speaking with the UWM Post, owner Melanie Manuel deleted the Instagram and Twitter accounts associated with the restaurant, as well as the website.
Both the Instagram account associated with Celesta Restaurant and Manuel’s personal brand account have since been deleted.
Five former employees of Celesta came forward to speak with the UWM Post, and four have requested to remain anonymous and expressed fear of retaliation from owner Melanie Manuel, or fear of her influence in Milwaukee’s restaurant community.
According to those employees, most of the kitchen staff received just 12 days’ notice from Manuel that the restaurant would be closing – most did not return to work to finish out the final weekend, forcing the restaurant to close almost a week early.
“There’s already a new business lined up to take over the space, so how long did she know she was going to close? It’s not right” expressed one former employee.
The reports from Celesta’s kitchen staff aren’t unfamiliar on the east side of Milwaukee, where union activity in the service industry has been on the rise in recent months amid the pandemic. Notable efforts have been the workers at Likewise Coffee in the Third Ward, who signed a contract this month with Teamsters Local 344, workers at Colectivo, who have persevered through sharp opposition from the owners of the company, and former workers at Comet Cafe who were laid off in July of 2020 before their effort could get off the ground. Celesta’s situation is most like Comet’s, as both left locals confused and workers dissatisfied.
Days after the restaurant closed, Celesta workers came forward on the Instagram account “86dlistmilwaukee,” just as Comet employees did in July of 2020. One person said in an anonymous report to the account that Manuel stated she simply did not want to reopen “with the pandemic and everything” when asked.
The Instagram account utilizes the term “86’d,” which is used in the food industry to indicate a product or ingredient has spoiled or has run out. The account’s bio section says it is “Run Anonymously by We/Us/Them to Call Out Workplace Abuse.” Service workers in the Milwaukee area submit their experiences via email to the individuals who run the account, and those stories are posted, unedited, for the public.
In the last year that the account has been active, 12 local business have been “86’d” for issues ranging from workplace racism, sexual harassment, transphobia, union busting tactics, ServSafe violations and more.
For Mecca Vaughn, the only Black woman who worked at Celesta, her experience went beyond gossiping. In her two years of working at Celesta as a dishwasher, Vaughn said she felt she was treated as a stereotype because of her race.
“Sometimes I do feel like I was like a mammy because I expressed to her and I told her that it is just too much work for me because I’ve been going through stress and depression but she ignored that” Vaughn said.
Vaughn also expressed that she felt like Black workers were meant to do the cleaning, as she said she was steadily given more cleaning tasks as her time at Celesta progressed including cleaning the office, cleaning the floors in the dining room and kitchen, and even going into work to clean the toilets.
“I wanted to become a waitress instead, but Mel said that it may not be the right job for me,” Vaughn said. “So she encouraged me to stay on dishes because I didn’t have the waitress experience.”
Vaughn was terminated from Celesta in September of 2020 after Manuel saw on her personal Instagram story that she ordered takeout and went to the grocery store when she was meant to be under a 14-day quarantine due to a friend visiting from out-of-state..
“I know I should have been in quarantine, and I regret it – I wish I had been in quarantine, but I didn’t cry when Mel fired me, no I did not” Vaughn said.
In an interview with Media Milwaukee just four months ago, Manuel said that while Celesta has not been immune to the effects of the pandemic, the restaurant was still doing very well – and her employees were her top priority.
Issues at Celesta began long before closing was on the horizon, though, as detailed by the five employees that came forward on the 86dlistmilwaukee account and, later, to the UWM Post.
Those sources detailed personal stories of times when highly subjective performance reviews conducted by Manuel left them in tears, when Manuel gossiped about them to other coworkers and disclosed personal health information in the process, and when her favoritism was shown clearly in the working environment.
Several employees also alleged that most of the recipes used in the restaurant were taken from other popular vegan blogs and published cookbooks, though there is little evidence to confirm this claim.
“I think she passes other people’s work off as her own,” one such former employee said.
Though Celesta Restaurant is already closed, Vaughn and her coworkers agreed that the only way for institutions in the vegan community to be better going forward, is for them to be held accountable now.
Manuel disagrees with this sentiment, saying in a brief conversation over the phone with the UWM Post that there is “nowhere to go from here.”
At the end of her interview with the UWM Post, Vaughn urged Manuel to apologize to her former employees: “We deserve your respect, and if you don’t want to apologize to us, then to your customers who have been loyal to you. Be honest with them about what happened here.”
Manuel has declined to comment on the accusations and claims made against her, stating just that “they can say whatever they want.”
Having known and worked with Mecca for years I can tell you that Mecca is a super unreliable source that dramatizes so much of her life and to have her as the only person you mention on the record shows how bad of an argument this is.
The employees were given a two week notice to find a new job, which while not ideal is still better than what Urban Beets pulled before closing their MLK location. That would be a great story, as the owner of UB is actually racist and transphobic and they are actually still in business and taking money from people in our city under the guise of being open to all.
I’ve worked with Mecca and she showered praise on Melanie up until she was fired from Celesta. Aside from that, the fact that she is the only person quoted in this entire article shows a lack of skill as a journalist. Did she happen to mention that she was actually given a chance as a server and wasn’t able to fulfill the requirements of the job? While it is understandable that the other former employees interviewed did not want to be named and while I strongly believe in uplifting black and brown voices within the community, having known Mecca for as long as I have, she is not a credible source of information and CERTAINLY not as the sole person to base an entire “exposé” on a business that is now closed regardless.