I first met Rosebraugh face-to-face on a drizzly, gray morning last January. It was early, around nine, and he was in Calendula's kitchen, wearing a white chef's smock as he minced broccoli on a white plastic cutting board. His weight was up to 165 pounds, but still there was a certain severity to the tableau I beheld, as though it were part of a film shot by Stanley Kubrick. The stainless-steel countertops were all gleaming and impeccably clean, as were the silver pots neatly racked on the wall, and I was distinctly aware that Rosebraugh was alone, hacking small objects to bits. This is his métier, really: Rosebraugh is not a people person. He's an independent guerrilla. "When you're running a business," he told me, "every force in the world is pushing against you to avoid ethics. I go into Cash 'n' Carry, where they sell wholesale goods to restaurants, and I see people packing out huge crates of subgrade produce. Everything's incredibly cheap, but you can't buy it if you're trying to be ethical. And I don't. I occasionally get recycled paper products there, or maybe some soy milk, but that's it."
Rosebraugh invokes very precise operating procedures at Calendula. He explained as he began chopping carrots. "I've taken full color digital photos of each entrée," he said, "so hopefully the kitchen staff can copy the pictures as they're putting food onto plates. I've also implemented a system for tracking waste." His workers were digitally weighing each morsel discarded during preparation and keeping a weekly waste tally. Meanwhile, Rosebraugh was taking produce poised to go bad and concocting impromptu specials--for instance, the seitan sausage fajitas he was making now. "The goal," he told me, "is to keep both food and labor costs below 30% of total costs. Now I'm at 27 and 26."
Rosebraugh is the executive chef at Calendula, as well as the owner, and until he recently hired two managers, he was working 100 hours a week--and all the while sequestering himself in a sort of political isolation ward. Rosebraugh has never voted in an election. Even now, as he feeds Portland's most well-heeled liberals, he scoffs at the left, which by his lights achieves only incremental change. Groups like the Sierra Club, he feels, just let "the beast of injustice" grow, instead of working toward the future he craves--a heady era in which a new American government provides universal health care and endeavors to wipe out global warming as it fights illiteracy and poverty.
Rosebraugh kept chopping, and soon he spoke of his revolutionary ambitions. He was careful. "I'm not advocating that all the black-hooded anarchists go out and start shooting government officials," he said. "And I'm not saying we should go door-to-door in Portland, Oregon. If you went around saying, 'We're signing up people to be part of the revolution,' they'd call the counterterrorism task force on you."
The key to overthrowing the government of the world's sole superpower, Rosebraugh stressed, is education. To this end, he hopes to produce a documentary film that would deliver a primer in revolution to mainstream America. "I'd like to interview Assata Shakur, of the Black Power movement," he said. "And Nelson Mandela, and Fidel Castro..."
"Fidel Castro?" I said. "Do you know Spanish?"
"I'm learning," said Rosebraugh. "I have the tapes at home."
Craig Rosebraugh situated his restaurant in an optimal spot. Portland may well be the nation's most radical and steak-hostile city. The activist community here is not one small troupe of worrisome dweebs gnashing their teeth in the back of a single café. It is, rather, a gathering of tribes: grungy tree sitters, pacifists, urban gardeners, anarchist skateboarders. The phrase "Got Kucinich?" still commands a wistful cachet in certain quarters of Portland. It sings, especially, on Hawthorne Boulevard, where Calendula sits near scuffed-up old record stores, coffeehouses, and boutiques selling aromatherapy candles. But still Portland's political landscape is uneasy terrain for a firebrand like Rosebraugh.
Portland's radicals inhabit, as most people do, a closed little society. When a guy like Rosebraugh comes along--pontificating, with dollar signs in his eyes--he will be made into organic mincemeat.
Portland's radicals may extend their hearts to small farm animals and disenfranchised molybdenum miners worldwide, but they inhabit, as most people do, a closed little society that knows its share of rancor and backbiting. When a guy like Rosebraugh comes along--pontificating, with dollar signs in his eyes--he will be made into organic mincemeat. The attacks, however, will be kept inside the community. When I asked other local activists about Rosebraugh, I found very few people willing to talk about him in a national business magazine. But a popular bulletin board, portland.indymedia.org, bristles with venom.
"All bosses are f--faces," one indymedia correspondent wrote recently, discussing Rosebraugh. "Calendula is a 'guilt-free' politically correct reification of capitalism."
"I can't believe people haven't f--ing torched the place already," added another scribe.
