TOLEDO – With the closing of a donation based, nonprofit restaurant in Downtown Toledo, it won’t be the SAME for those who face food insecurities.
The SAME Café – an acronym for So All May Eat – closed its doors in Toledo’s Main Library on April 23 after providing meals for 2½ years on a participation model, where people either donated money or volunteered their time to receive a healthy meal.
“This café has had a big impact. I have seen some life-changing impacts on a lot of people,” said Claudia Annoni, executive director, on the café’s closing day. “It’s been participation-based. People have come together for meals. They are not eating for free; they are helping out by wiping the tables, serving the food. It’s a welcoming place. It’s someplace safe.”
Toledo’s SAME Café opened on Nov. 4, 2022, and typically served about 80 meals at lunchtime from Monday through Friday.
“During the summer, with families and children, we were seeing 160 or 165 people of all ages, all backgrounds,” Annoni said. Of the 80 people eating at the café on a typical day, about 20 paid for their meals, she said.
The café operated on an annual budget of $450,000, and the financial challenges led the board of directors to decide to close the Toledo location. It was one of only two SAME Cafés in the nation. The original SAME Café was founded in Denver in 2006 and continues to operate.
For the cafe’s last day, patrons lined up single file, about 30 people deep, for the cafe’s final meal. One of those patrons was Kelly Cunningham, 49.
“I’ve been coming to the café a lot for several years. When nobody has no money, they can eat here. It helps people,” she said, adding that when she didn’t have money for a meal, she would volunteer by sweeping, mopping or wiping down tables.
Her favorite meal? “Pizza!” she said with enthusiasm. “Pepperoni pizza and cheese pizza!”
Cunningham said she has an apartment near the Toledo Museum of Art and “I probably won’t come down here no more” to the downtown library.
Nathan Keller, 50, said he ate at the café “whenever I [could]. I tell everybody to come down here.”
Holding a stack of printouts as he waited in line, Keller said he was reading his daily Substack content.
“I’m astonished that the café is closing,” Keller said. “In fact, I’m nonplussed.”
One person sitting at a table on the café’s last day said he was not sorry to see it close.
“It’s a self-inflicted closing,” claimed Tyler Hartman, 31, who brought his own carryout meal to the SAME Café. “The food is gross. Only people who have no money came here. People who had money, they weren’t coming here. It sounds brutal, but it’s true. If they could afford Subway or something, they wouldn’t come here.”
Hartman was the only naysayer among those interviewed at the café. All the others said they were grateful for the meals and sorry to see the venue close.
“I come here a couple times a week,” said Kelly Osman. “I really love coming here. I love the way everybody here treats everybody. I feel really blessed.”
She described the food as “a number one. I love the food here, especially the cake.”
Alex Martinez, 18, a senior at St. John’s Jesuit High School, was serving soup from behind the counter at the café’s last lunch as part of his senior project.
“I wish I could have volunteered here more,” he said. “When I could, I worked double shifts. But I’m glad we are serving meals today. It’s one last hurrah.”
James Caldwell, president and CEO of the Toledo Northwestern Ohio Food Bank, said it was “unfortunate” but not surprising that Toledo’s SAME Café had to close.
“We are living in tough economic times, especially since the beginning of the year,” Caldwell said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty as far as the business environment going forward, the social services climate, the abundance of cuts that appear on the horizon.
“So, while I’m disappointed that a sustenance provider of meals is closing, unfortunately that’s the reality of the times.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 47 million Americans, including 7.2 million children, lived in food-insecure households in 2023, the latest year that statistics were available.
Dennis Fernandez of Toledo, a member of SAME Café’s national board, said the local café served 25,000 to 28,000 meals in 2024.
He said the idea for opening a Toledo location was inspired by a group of local businessmen who visited the Denver café during a conference in Colorado.
“They saw it and said ‘we’ve got to get this in Toledo.’ It took about six years from start to finish to get it open here.”
Fernandez said the financial situation led the board to make the difficult decision to close its Toledo location.
“We need corporate sponsors, more local buy-in to be sustainable,” he said. “There are talks about bringing it back, but not under the SAME umbrella. It might not happen right away, but hopefully we can bring something back here.”
The SAME Café always strived to serve healthful meals, he said, but on the final day the menu included treats such as pizza, cookies and cake.
“We thought we’d go out with a bang,” Fernandez said.
