Christie Melby-Gibbons calls Tricklebee Café her full-time calling.
The inspiration hit her when she moved to Milwaukee from southern California with her young family in 2015. They bought a home in the Sherman Park neighborhood and Melby-Gibbons —an ordained minister of the Moravian Church— set out to find a way to serve. It didn’t take long for her to realize.
“There are more people today that are hungry," Melby-Gibbons says. "We see more people coming through who don’t know where their next meal is coming from and that is the definition of a food desert."
Tricklebee opened its doors in 2016 in a more than a century-old former bakery.
“Everything is fresh, you have a choice in what you order, and you pay what you can. If you have nothing at all, you can volunteer your time,” Melby-Gibbons says.
The menu is vegetable-based. And the ingredients are largely donated; it’s what hasn’t been sold and would otherwise land in the trash.
Since Tricklebee opened, the nonprofit has been able to purchase the building and double its café seating. Life now also spills onto a formerly neglected vacant lot. It’s adorned with raised bed plantings, seating, a stage and a whimsical mural.
“We’re passing by the two big herb gardens we have,” Melby-Gibbons says.
Those gardens along with a neighborhood orchard and a couple vegetable patches help fuel Tricklebee’s menu. The vast majority of ingredients the café uses are locally-grown produce, food from growers and stores that would otherwise go to waste.
Volunteer David Melby-Gibbons, Christie’s husband, is about to pick up some of that unwanted produce from the West Allis Farmers Market.
“We’re bringing our bins earlier in the day and then the assistants there fill up bins and we pick them up end of day. It could be a bunch of green beans, corn, potatoes, onions, squash, beets,” he says.
Some of the bounty sees Tricklebee through its winter menus.
In the kitchen, Carmen Quinlivan is preparing today’s lunch. “Today we’re going to make a rice and bean plate and I made a creamy sauce. And what else are we going to have? Oh. the a salad is like shaved beats, radishes and cucumbers that are all fresh. So It’s all pink and pretty,” Quinlivan says.
She joined the Tricklebee team last spring, but started coming here when the café first opened.
“I reached out to Christie, letting her know that I would like to get more experience as a chef and if there were ever any openings, I would like to work here because cooking is my biggest form of service. And it’s amazing to make people like healthy food and comes from the heart,” Quinlivan says.
Christie Melby-Gibbons says Tricklebee takes the discards and makes beautiful things.
“So this discarded soil became this beautiful garden and discarded food becomes beautiful soup. Discarded people become family to us. Too many people are pushed aside, forgotten, excluded … They come here as they are ... and their gifts are valued,” Melby-Gibbons says.
She calls the model 100% replicable.
“You could do this on every street corner in the city and there wouldn’t be a sense of competition because the need is that great … I would be willing to train anybody up on how to do it,” Melby-Gibbons says.
She’s had some nibbles from people interested in replicating the model —including from the far northern reaches of the state.
“In Ashland, Wisconsin. He just came down for like three Saturdays and said, ‘Teach me everything.’ And they’re off and running. And then a café out in Pennsylvania ... they’ve been up and running for several months now,” Melby-Gibbons says.
By the way, when it comes to the waste end of the food system, Melby-Gibbons reports, “We are at a point where we only put one tall kitchen trash bag of trash out a week and we’re serving like 100 people a day. The true waste is just one bag. The rest is composted, recycled or we just don’t buy things or receive things with a lot of packaging. So we get a lot of fresh produce – so there isn’t plastic and cardboard. So we’re sort of scavengers for the things that would be stuff that would be wasted.”
And it’s transformed into delicious meals that anyone can afford.
