Grace Corbin on Leading Casa Nueva’s Worker-Owned Cooperative Restaurant in Athens, Ohio

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Coduspoti and today’s guest is Grace Corbin. She is a co-owner and vice president of the board of directors at Casa Nueva in Athens, Ohio. They are a worker-owned cooperative restaurant that has been serving Mexican inspired cuisine since 1985.

They focus on fresh, local ingredients and foster a close-knit community by hosting live music, art shows, and supporting area nonprofits. Under Grace’s guidance, Casa Nueva has received multiple local awards from the Athens News. She has seen the business grow to include many member owners and more than 30 associates who share a passion provo-

Do that sentence again. She has seen the business grow to include many member owners and more than 30 associates who share a passion for providing great food and service. Grace has been part of Casa Nueva since 2009, bringing her background in cooperative governance, marketing, and front of house management. Before joining Casa Nueva, she managed Bagel Street Deli and earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Ohio University.

Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your restaurant employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications. And here’s the fun part. The program actually puts more money into your employees’ pockets and the company’s too.

One recent client was able to increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the Vice President Board of Directors of Casa Nueva, Brace Corbin. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Grace Corbin (02:14)
Thanks for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (02:16)
So Grace, you graduated from Ohio University, OU, in Athens, Ohio in 2006. And you found your way to Bagel Street Deli. Was this your first introduction to the restaurant space?

Grace Corbin (02:29)
It was not. I actually got my first restaurant job when I was 15 in ⁓ my hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio. ⁓ I walked into a restaurant called Pearl of the Orient and asked if they were hiring and the owner, Long’s response was, when can you start? So I worked there ⁓ throughout high school and then ⁓ once I went to OU, at that time OU had six week long winter breaks.

I would go home and work for winter breaks as well at Pearl De Orient, ⁓ which really solidified my destiny in restaurants, if you will.

Anthony Codispoti (03:08)
Okay. You know, in my experience, Grace, a lot of times ⁓ our biggest lessons come from really powerful experiences. Is there one that sticks out in your mind from your time at Bagel Street?

Grace Corbin (03:22)
⁓ my-

Well, Bagel Street is a ⁓ small locally owned business. They’re open seven days a week. ⁓ Probably the, well, the coolest thing about that place where I actually still work part time, I’m not sure if you knew that, ⁓ we have parties. We have two parties a year, one’s on Halloween and one is called Picklefest.

which is a pickle eating contest. You eat as many large dill, kosher dill pickles as you can in 10 minutes. And it is insane and fun and loud.

Anthony Codispoti (04:06)
And what’s the record?

Grace Corbin (04:08)
13.

Anthony Codispoti (04:09)
In how many minutes, say again? ⁓ Okay. And give me the size. We’re looking on screen here.

Grace Corbin (04:15)
They

vary, right? So like not all pickles are the same. We put pickles in baskets and put them in front of the competitors. it’s not always fair. Sometimes they’re a little smaller, sometimes they’re a little bigger. It’s just the luck of the draw. So people who have eaten 10, let’s say, like, yeah, the year that they ate 13, I heard that they were really small. Well, sometimes they’re small ones and sometimes they’re big ones. just depends on what comes in the bucket.

Anthony Codispoti (04:31)
Okay.

I might have to bring my 11 year old son for this competition. Dill pickles are actually his favorite food. that’s the reason.

Grace Corbin (04:51)
My five-year-old, my five- to four-year-old competed last, competed, yeah, competed last year and she consumed one pickle.

Anthony Codispoti (04:58)
Okay,

that’s a good starting place.

Grace Corbin (05:01)
Yeah, but that’s it’s such a morale builder. It’s such a fun time to just kind of let loose with your coworkers and get kind of crazy.

Anthony Codispoti (05:09)
Okay, all right, so how did the opportunity to join Casa Nueva come about? How did that door open?

Grace Corbin (05:15)
So that is sort of a funny story. So I left Bagel Street in 2008 because I moved to Colorado Springs for a little while. And when I came back to Athens from Colorado Springs, my apartment was above the apartment that I was moving into was above the bar that’s across the street from crossing the wave. And I had been there a couple of times and I had some friends that worked there. And when my dad and I pulled up

with the U-Haul and everything right in front of Casa to load into my apartment above the bar across the street. My close friend and president of the board now, Joss Brown, he was standing outside having a break from work and he said, great, so you’re back in town. I said, yeah, he’s like, you should apply at Casa right away. And I was like, all right, because I didn’t really know what I was gonna do. So I got the job like a week later and the rest is kind of history, but we’ll talk about that history.

Anthony Codispoti (06:10)
Yeah, let’s get into the history little bit. But first, paint a picture for me for someone who’s never been there before. What’s the customer experience like?

Grace Corbin (06:19)
So our main entrance takes you right into the bar, what we call the Cantina also, which is our largest. We have three main customer areas and the Cantina or the bar is the largest. It doubled in size in 2004 and it’s a big, huge space. The walls are reddish orange. There’s 25 or so tables and a big, huge horseshoe bar that takes up most of the room.

That’s where you’ll be greeted and ⁓ you know, you’ll let the host know if you’re just there for the bar or if you want more of a formal dining experience with service and stuff. And then through a little doorway to the right is our first dining room, what we call the right room. From the kitchen, there’s the right room and the left room. So the right room’s next. There are seven tables in there. The walls are light green. The art is all by Passion Works Studio, which is the local art studio that

has resident artists of all different developmental abilities. They have passion flowers and all kinds of painted guitars. They do a lot of reused ⁓ media. So anyways, so then that’s that dining room. And then the far room, what we call the left room, has a pink floor, light green walls, a couple of booths. It’s the smallest of our spaces. And it’s the original space actually, we’ve expanded three times over the years. So that in 1985, the left room is the only dining room that we have.

⁓ so depending on where you choose to sit or where you’re guided to sit by the host, depending on what tables are already occupied, the vibes of the room can be a little different and people sometimes don’t like to in the bar. want to sit in the old room.

Anthony Codispoti (08:04)
Like

is one like more loud and energetic like music or what? Okay.

Grace Corbin (08:10)
Yeah, so the canteen is the most lively, generally speaking, with more of like a homey community vibe. Well, they all have a community vibe, I guess, but the dining rooms, like the more formal dining rooms, can be a little quieter until you get a party of 10 in there and then the marble floor and the tin ceiling make it a lot louder.

Anthony Codispoti (08:33)
Lots of echo there. Yeah, I could see that. And what’s the food like? Tell us about the food.

Grace Corbin (08:39)
So we serve what you would look at the menu and think, okay, this is like a normal Mexican restaurant, right? enchiladas, burritos, queso dip, tacos. But our spin on those items are a little different because we, ⁓ every single thing that we can make by hand from scratch, do. So our flour tortillas are made in-house. All of our vegetables are hand chopped. queso, we make it in-house. It’s not the white liquid that you might expect from a Tex-Mex joint. It’s more of a

chunky, spicy, tomatoes, hot wax peppers, cream cheese, butter, Monterey Jack. ⁓ Sometimes when I know it’s people’s first time and they say, let’s get some queso, I sometimes hesitate and sometimes don’t hesitate to tell them, it’s not what you’re expecting. It’s really good. You’re gonna like it, but it’s not that white liquid that we all know and love from traditional Tex-Mex restaurants. You’ll also find

items on our menu that you might not expect. So we have a rotating cast of vegetables of the day. ⁓ We always have normal Mexican food things, right? Bell peppers, onions, tomatoes, black olives, rice. But then we’ll take anything that we can source locally as far as produce goes. Kohlrabi, cabbage, bok choy, and those are part of our rotating cast of vegetables of the day.

which we will put into our house made flour tortillas. And what we call a burrito is a big, big square situation that you eat with a knife and fork, not so much a pick up with your hands and feet kind thing.

Anthony Codispoti (10:17)
And

so we’re recording this middle of November 2025. so what do do in months like this for locally sourced produce? Is that just something that kind of gets put on hold or are there greenhouses that you source from? How does this go?

Grace Corbin (10:33)
It’s a little bit of all of that. we, mushrooms are a common player in our vegetable of the day rotation, even though they’re not technically a vegetable, they’re a fungus, but people love mushrooms. We always have two. Mushrooms are a very frequent staple in that rotating cast. Right now we have spaghetti squash, we have butternut squash. You know, the summertime we’ll have zucchini and things like that, but there are also some greenhouses

⁓ and other sources. So, ⁓ cabbage is a very big one. have cabbage, cabbage and mushrooms is what we joking to our, to our regulars. When we greet a table, we always lead with what the vegetables of the day are. And a lot of times if I’m waiting tables, which I do occasionally, I say to a regular, do you want to guess what the veggies of the day are? And they’ll say cabbage and mushrooms. And I’m like, surprise. But people love the cabbage and the mushrooms though. Those are our most readily available items. But yeah, we try to just keep it local and whatever we can get.

no matter what time of year is what we get.

Anthony Codispoti (11:36)
So I live in Columbus, Ohio, which is, I don’t know, probably been an hour and a half away from you guys. And I have the good fortune to interview folks from all over the country. So it’s pretty rare that I can say, oh, I’ve been to your restaurant. But in this case, I can say that. My sister Alexandria is a resident of Athens. She recently graduated from Ohio University. So I was down there for her graduation dinner several months ago.

And so I asked her, I said, hey, if you had one question you would like to ask, what would it be? She’s like, ⁓ the story about how they became a co-op employee owned. She’s like, that should be really fascinating. So on behalf of my sister, Alexandria, that’s the question I posed to you, Grace.

Grace Corbin (12:22)
Okay, so before we became Casa Nuevo, the space, the left room, just the small space, was a restaurant called Casa Que Pasa. And it was small. I think they did breakfast also. And then one day in late 1984, the owner sold proprietor. The legend is that he left under cover of nightclubs.

⁓ but regardless, the main, the main takeaway is that he shut the restaurant down with little to no notice whatsoever. ⁓ so his employees nor the community. it closed and there were eight employees there who I’m not sure how many employees total there were when it closed, but eight of them said to themselves, you know, between the eight of us, we probably make this work ourselves.

How much experience do you have? You do a little bit of money stuff. I know some how to order things and build a menu and I think we can do it. So they realized that between the eight of them, they had over 100 years of restaurant experience. ⁓ And then in ⁓ October of 1985 is when they officially got their ⁓ license or whatever. So the summer and fall of 1985,

they reopened the restaurant as a co-op called Casanueva. And that’s the short version, I guess. There was a lot of trial, a lot of tribulation, a lot of figuring it out as they went. But that’s kind of how people learn best sometimes, think. But that was 1985, and here we are in 2025, and we’re still at it.

Anthony Codispoti (14:10)
40 years later. And so what is this co-op experience looking feel like today?

Grace Corbin (14:17)
So it’s a very interesting kind of business model where we, ⁓ the main thing is democratic decision making. ⁓ people sort of in our community joke about Casa has meetings to have meetings. We’re closed on Tuesdays and that’s our main meeting day. So that’s every Tuesday we have a board of directors meeting ⁓ where it’s very much big picture. It’s yearly projections, it’s business plan.

It’s check in with our coordinator team. ⁓ And then once a month we have a member meeting where we go over in depth ⁓ the finances from the month before, how we did, what it looked like, what we sold a lot of, where we maybe took some missteps. ⁓ And then also on Tuesdays, any number of committees can meet. We have a part of house committee and menu development committee, the finance committee.

⁓ an operations committee which sort of came out of coven and we’ll talk about that some more later and sure but The decision-making process is what really is what really makes us I think interesting because ⁓ takes a long time to get things done with the democratic decision-making process But it means that the resulting decision that’s eventually made has been weighed in on what if

and really, really taken apart piece by piece and put back together in a way that everybody can agree on. So, whereas a sole entrepreneur, sole proprietorship, you might have a person that owns the business that makes the decision about a marketing scheme or a menu change or an hours change or something about the operations that they’ve made a decision, they’ve relayed that decision and now everyone has to deal with it, whether they like it or not, whether it works or not, whether they agree with it.

But at CASA and our co-op model, everyone’s opinion counts, whether you’re an owner or an associate, whether you work in the back of house or front of house, AM versus PM, ⁓ everyone has an opportunity to talk about the issue at hand, what they think would work, what they think won’t work. And then we come to a decision that again, has been thought through countless times by countless people.

then we implement it.

Anthony Codispoti (16:42)
So you have some folks that work there that are owners, some that work there that are associates, so not owners, and you say everybody has input. Does everybody get a vote? Just the owners.

Grace Corbin (16:55)
No.

Yeah, so in board meetings, the board members can vote. In member meetings, the members can vote. ⁓ But it’s our responsibility as owners of the business to take into account the opinions of our staff, our associates, our non-owners. ⁓ Because sometimes their ideas are better than ours. know, everyone has equal rights to voice opinions, come up with ideas.

influence decisions. Everyone can attend meetings. Every single meeting that we have is open to anybody. It’s not just nothing is a closed door meeting.

Anthony Codispoti (17:33)
Yeah. And so how does somebody get to be an owner?

Grace Corbin (17:38)
So the process to ownership is, ⁓ it’s gonna sound complicated, but hear me out. So if you’ve worked there for a year or two, ⁓ and you’ve been participating maybe in some committees and giving your opinion and getting into sort of ⁓ the bones of how our operation really works, and you are interested in beyond just coming in for your shift, clocking in, working your shift, clocking out and going home,

⁓ and you want to have more of an active role in the business and how it functions, then you ⁓ apply to be a trial member. So you put up a letter and you say, have an intention to become a trial member. once you make that step, then you’re interviewed by the board of directors. And the board of directors interviews you about why do you want to become a trial member? Where do you see your niche, if you will, on where you

where you wanna most help or influence the business or where do you really see your place? ⁓ And then the board of directors after that interview makes a recommendation to membership or not that that person can then be a trial member. So if the person gets the board recommendation, then it’s a strong vote of confidence from the board that membership should give this person a chance to be a trial member. If the board does not recommend that person, that person can throw in the towel and say,

Maybe the board’s right, it’s not a great fit right now. But they can also say, I don’t agree with the board’s non-recommendation. I’m gonna go to membership anyways. So then at the next member meeting, that person is interviewed again, this time by all of membership, which does include, of course, the board of directors. ⁓ Our decision-making at the membership level is consensus-based, so unanimous. So one no means it’s a no, but 100 % yes is.

Obviously it’s yes. So if that person is voted into trial membership by membership, ⁓ then they become a trial member and the trial period can last anywhere from three to nine months generally, but you can fast track it. You can take more time if you need it. There’s no real set expectation, but usually it’s about three to nine months. During the trial period, you go to one of at least every meeting. So all of the committee meetings, of the board meeting, all the member meetings in that period.

You also do some finance workshops with our finance coordinators. You learn how to read a profit loss statement, a balance sheet. You take some cooperative communication classes. You learn about the ins and outs of the decision making process at CASA. You have access to, everyone has access to, but it’s more formally presented to you. The operating rules, the bylaws, all of our articles of incorporation and our documents that really govern our business.

After all that, if you decide that you’re still interested and you want to become a full member, you put up a letter again and you say, I’m through the trial period. I’m all in. Let’s do this. The board interviews you again, a recommendation or not. And a non-recommendation in this scenario can mean we don’t think that you’ve done enough in your trial period yet. We want you to really dig a little deeper, get in there a little, a little more before you apply for full membership. We don’t think you’re quite ready yet or know what you’re signing up for in some cases.

⁓ and then if the recommendation comes, they go to membership again, membership votes, get to interview it again, membership votes again, and then you’re a full member. If you like, let’s say you become a member in, in the first hour of a member meeting, any votes that come after that interview, you get to vote. Your vote becomes valid immediately after you’re voting.

Anthony Codispoti (21:28)
And so when they’re voted in, is there some sort of a financial buy-in?

Grace Corbin (21:34)
Yep, there is a buy-in. I don’t think it’s secret, so I can just tell you it’s $1,800 and it comes as a payroll deduction over a two-year period if you want to extend it that long. That’s about how long it takes to go the slow way. If you want to fast-track your member fee contribution, you can tell our Personnel Finance Coordinator, our payroll lady, if you will, ⁓

Hey, sign me up for a hundred bucks every two weeks instead of whatever it is. ⁓ Once you get it paid off, then you start accruing interest as soon as it’s paid off all the way. So some people like to just get it out of the way, get it out of their face.

Anthony Codispoti (22:18)
And so then once you’re an owner, are you taking part in quarterly or annual profit distributions, dividends? How’s that work?

Grace Corbin (22:31)
So it’s annual, yep. And the process that we do is no surprise to me anyway, that it’s a little bit confusing. So any year that we make a profit, the following year, so any profit that we make, 60 % of it stays with the business and 40 % of it, other way around, 40 % stays with the business, 60 % is divvied up, excuse me, among the owners from that year.

So even if you leave, we’ll get to that in a second, I guess. the following year, so let’s say 2004, we make a profit. The following year, 2005, October of that year, you as an owner will receive 20 % of your portion of the 60 % of the profit. Four years later,

in May at our annual member meeting where we selected important directors, we solidified the business plan, you receive the remaining 80 % of your share of the 43 % of the profit from that year.

Anthony Codispoti (23:41)
Do

you only receive that 80 % if you’ve been with the company the entire time? Like, do you forfeit that if you leave early?

Grace Corbin (23:49)
Even if you leave, as long as you update your information with our payroll lady, she emails you a check four years later. So once you’ve been there for a long enough time and we’ve been profitable long enough, then pretty consistently you get a little check in October and a big check from four years before in May. So we get our little ones in October and our big ones in

Anthony Codispoti (23:56)
Okay.

Got it. Now during that initial, hey, I wrote my letter. I want to, I’m applying to be ⁓ like a probationary member. I forget the exact terms. If the recommendation from the board comes down as no, do you see a lot of those folks get angry and just quit?

Grace Corbin (24:33)
only seen that happen once. I mean, I’ve only seen someone not receive the recommendation once. ⁓ And that person just, they did not quit. They were disappointed. They were a little angry because they felt a little blindsided as to be expected, I guess. ⁓ But they kind of just said, fine, nevermind. I’ll just clock in, do my work and clock out.

Anthony Codispoti (24:40)
⁓ Okay

Yeah.

Grace Corbin (25:00)
And

really we want more members. We want people to pursue that path.

Anthony Codispoti (25:05)
I would guess that folks who choose that path, you’re going to have a lot less turnover from them. The restaurant industry is one that’s notorious for high turnover. I think as I’m listening to you talk about this model, reducing that turnover seems to be one of the big advantages. The disadvantage is the complexity of the decision-making, which I heard you allude to. And as somebody who’s been a business owner for a number of years, I’m like, wow, that could be

really difficult to change the direction or make decisions on new ideas and you’re not in your head. So that’s true.

Grace Corbin (25:43)
Yeah, things notoriously take a long time and we always have, ⁓ you know, people do really what ifs something to death. Especially big change. we’re gonna make a big change, I can’t even think of what one might be, but there’s always gonna be people that are like, what if this happened? What if this happens? What if this happens? And sometimes it’s worth it to entertain those what ifs.

And sometimes those what ifs are so obscure and unlikely that it’s like, okay, that will probably never happen. if it does, well, Crowdslippers will be coming.

Anthony Codispoti (26:24)
Yeah. Okay. But clearly it seems like there’s no thought to sort of change the structure of what’s going on. It seems to be working relatively well. Yeah. 40 years. you know, I know from having been there, the experience, the customer experience is great. My sister and her boyfriend love the place. They’re there on a regular basis. So if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it kind of a thing. Okay. So tell me about the…

Grace Corbin (26:35)
We’ve been there for 40 years.

Kinda.

Your

sleeping changes, I wish that we could make sometimes. You sometimes I want to throw out the book and rewrite it, but…

Anthony Codispoti (27:00)
What’s an example of one of those big sweeping changes that you would like to make?

Grace Corbin (27:01)
One of them.

Well…

So we have three dining rooms. We have two small traditional sit at a table, sit there, your server comes over, they bring you your food, blah, blah, blah. And then in the bar, it used to be much more casual. Sit wherever you want, order at the bar, pick up your food from a window. When COVID happened, and we’ll probably talk about this a little bit a little later, but when COVID happened, we had to change that completely and we serve.

the full menu and with table service out in the bar now. I would love to go back to people coming in and sitting wherever they want in the bar, ordering their food at the bar and then have a food runner bring it out to them with a number on their table, which sounds so simple to me. ⁓ But we would need probably a couple more bartenders and we would need a couple table attendants to wipe tables, to make glassware, to bus, you know.

Um, and for some reason that idea sounds very simple to me. And I know I have a couple of my co-owners on board with that idea, but some other owners are so hesitant to make that change because they really believe that our customers love being waited on at a table in the bar. But we consistently have our customers say, when are you going to go back to back to normal? And sometimes when customers say that to me, say, what part of

before do you consider normal? And they can’t really explain it. It’s very kind of like, well, you know, like it was before. And I’m like, before what? What was it like before? It was chaos before.

Anthony Codispoti (28:59)
It was chaos because people were going up to the window to get their own orders.

Grace Corbin (29:04)
Yeah, so you would order at the bar and we had a bingo board in the cantina where when your food was ready, the cooks that were in that little kitchen back there would turn on the light for your number and you would come pick up your from the window. The main problem with that is that people wouldn’t always remember what they ordered. Couldn’t remember what their number was, even though we’d give them a card with the number on it. And they would come.

They would come up to the window. They ordered from the bar, right? So the cooks that are in the window have never laid eyes on this person before. There’s maybe two or three orders in the window to be picked up. And the customer comes up and says, is this mine? Well, who are you? What did you order? What number are you? I’ve got 40 tickets in front of me. I don’t have time to help you sort out what you order.

Anthony Codispoti (29:46)
You

So why do you want to go back to this model, Grace?

Grace Corbin (29:57)
No,

no, don’t want to go back to picking up their food in the window. None of us ever want to go back to that. That is the one thing that I believe 100 % of membership will always agree on, that we never want go back to that. But I do want to go back to people being able to sit wherever they want, push some tables together if they want to, grab chairs, rearrange our furniture a little bit, which is very much frowned upon right now because we have a floor plan and a seating chart and server section.

which does sort of make sense and it’s organized chaos right now, but I want people to go up to the bar, order their food, put a number on their table and rather than picking it up on a window, someone brings their order to them. They don’t have to get if it’s their food. We know what they ordered. We know what number they are. We know where they’re sitting. bring them.

Anthony Codispoti (30:43)
Yeah,

gotcha. Okay. Yeah. So you’ve alluded to this a couple of times. Let’s just go ahead and dive in. There was the big challenge of COVID.

Grace Corbin (30:54)
So ⁓ I believe it was a couple of days before St. Patrick’s Day, March of 2020. It was a normal day. was at work. It wasn’t a normal day. COVID was encroaching. was happening. Some of us were masking, some of us weren’t. People were getting nervous. And then the governor decided no more dining service. Everyone has to get everybody out of there.

⁓ that happened at like two in the afternoon or something like that. so the word spread like wildfire and we immediately said, anyone whose food hasn’t come out yet, we’re going to pack it up to go. Everyone’s got to get out right now. And now we need to figure out what to do. So we had that night an emergency member meeting. So any member that could make it on short notice showed up and we sat in the left room.

and pretty much cried through a two hour long meeting of, my God, what are we going to do? We knew that we had to make carry out our primary revenue stream and we needed to figure out, we needed to A, order a ton more carry out supplies, boxes, healthy containers, bags, napkins, blah, blah, blah. And we needed to

get more actual physical telephones because we weren’t doing online orders at the time either. We were pretty basic. Carryout was not ⁓ a big, huge thing as it is now. I mean, we did carryout sales, but we didn’t do a very high volume of carryout sales. ⁓ We also needed to figure out what to do with our staff. Did we keep everybody? Did we lay people off? Did we furlough people?

And at the time we kind of thought it would be a couple of weeks, maybe a month. ⁓ And that quickly turned into almost a year. ⁓ So ⁓ we shut the Cantina and we shut the right room and we operated all of our carry out operations through just our old original very small space. So we shut the main entrance and we made our one of our emergency exits.

exits the one and only entrance. We got more phones. We answered the phone like crazy. We boxed all the food. We did curbside service because people were nervous. They still wanted our food, which felt great. And it was really nice to have business still, but we did curbside service. You know, we put up plastic barriers everywhere. And then when

When we discovered that we were allowed to sell to go cocktails, which was a huge help, I’m sure every business with a liquor license can probably attest to the fact that once we pulled the trigger on to go cocktails, it pretty much saved us.

Anthony Codispoti (34:05)
So yeah, I wanna hear more about that because I remember hearing that and I’m not in the restaurant industry. ⁓ And if I wanted a cocktail, I would just prepare it myself at home. And so I wondered, like how many folks are actually gonna leave their house, go down? Because part of the reason I go to a bar to have a drink is I wanna be around people, I wanna meet some friends there. But now am I going to a bar to get…

a drink that I could have made at home and then take it back home. But you’re smiling and nodding and you’re saying it saved you. So clearly a lot of people were up for that.

Grace Corbin (34:41)
Yeah, so we’re pretty famous for our margaritas. We make a really good margarita. We always make them by hand every time. don’t really, I mean, when it’s like a really crazy dance set or something, we will make a batch of them, but we still make the batch by hand. People really love our margaritas and they love our drinks. know, restaurants make a lot of money on alcohol and we’re no exception. So we bought like a palette of 12 ounce glass jars and lids.

and we made huge pots basically like a cauldron of margaritas. We would ladle them into these jars. But we didn’t want to ice them, you know, because someone’s not going to maybe drink it until half an hour later. We would put, so in a 12 ounce jar, we would put, you know, four ounces of liquid and then put the lid on. So it’s a jar that’s not even half full. And

Anthony Codispoti (35:26)
Let’s go.

Grace Corbin (35:38)
We’d put them in the bag with the to-go food and people would get, we would, we read little instruction sheets for a little while that were like, hey, take the lid off, fill it with ice, put the lid on, shake it up, take the lid off, enjoy. Because sometimes people would call and they’d be like, uh, I think you just gave me like a lot of tequila in a jar. we’re like, no, no, that’s the margarita, it doesn’t have the ice in it. We didn’t want it to be watered down. We want you to enjoy it whenever you want to. So people would, people would order 12 of them and just take a case home and then they would just have them.

There was a stipulation that it had to be with food. It was like three alcoholic beverages per meal, but meal was sort of loosely defined. So there was a lot of wiggle room.

Anthony Codispoti (36:20)
So it could be a bag of chips or something perhaps. For some people that’s all they want for dinner. So what you’re saying there makes a lot of sense, especially like margaritas. Not that they’re rocket science to make, but making a really good one. There’s a little bit of art and science that goes into that. I’m curious though about why go for the extra expense of the glass jars? mean, glass is a nicer experience, but it’s certainly more expensive than a plastic cup.

Grace Corbin (36:26)
Absolutely.

Right. So part of the reason we did that is because we could seal them, like seal seal, not just like a disposable with a little snap on lid. You you shake that thing or you throw it in the back of your car, it’s going to be a mess. So that was part of it. The other part is that environmentally friendly, they’re reusable. I mean, they’re obviously recyclable, but they’re very much reusable. ⁓ And environmentalism and environmental sustainability is a big part of who we are and what we do.

We haven’t really talked much about that yet, but the environmental impact of a reusable item versus a disposable item was a factor. Now, eventually when we sold all those jars and people would bring them back and we would clean and sanitize them and reuse them a little bit, but people kind of liked them having this cool little drinking vessel that they got from us that they could reuse forever. ⁓ Eventually, one

Once things opened back up a little bit, we were doing dining service and we weren’t selling as many of the to-go cocktails, we did switch to what looks like plastic, PLA compostable vessel instead ⁓ because we just couldn’t justify spending that much money on the glass jars if we wanted.

Anthony Codispoti (38:01)
Yeah. Tell me more, Grace, about how the environmental aspect of your approach to the business plays out.

Grace Corbin (38:11)
Sure. So environmental sustainability is something that I’ve been talking about since I learned what recycling was when I was 10 years old in fourth grade. That sort of changed my whole mindset on.

throwing things away. So we at CASA don’t have any styrofoam ever. Everything is reusable, right? So we don’t really do ketchup packets. We have bottles of ketchup on the table. All of our to-go wear is either reusable, recyclable, or compostable. Our bags of paper, no plastic bags. When we serve water, it’s in

We use little plastic cups that we wash and reuse a thousand million times until they chip or break. ⁓ One reason that we focus so much on locally sourced food is the environmental impact of that, right? So we’re not, it’s not using gas to travel from California to us. It’s not ⁓ sprayed down with a bunch of pesticides to preserve it until we use it. We get things that are fresh harvested a couple of days ago.

brought in from the person that grew them who lives 30 miles away directly into our restaurant. We write them a check and they go on their way. not even, you know, we’re not even mailing them a check. We’re just handing it to them. Also a benefit of having locally sourced products ⁓ environmentally is that ⁓ for your body, know, like allergies have a big, you know, local honey is legendary and helping save off seasonal allergies and things like that.

⁓ but yeah, it’s always been a huge part of what we do. We compost at Casa too. I should definitely mention that. our, local recycling center does a curbside compost program. ⁓ my household participates in that, but it’s great because they do it for restaurants. So we have, ⁓ his name is Ben. It’s a, it’s just one guy that works there that comes and picks up all the compost from all of the many restaurants in.

that participate in the program. We have very large carts on wheels. I don’t know how many gallons they are, but they’re big. They’re like a big trash can basically, but we put compostable items in them. And what’s cool about the compost center where we live is that they can take meat and cheese and other like PLA plastics, plant-based compostable plastics, plastics in quotes, of course. ⁓

Whereas you’re not going to throw that in like your home compost pile, right? You throw chicken bones in your home compost pile, you’re going to get raccoons and possums everywhere, which I like raccoons and possums, but you necessarily want them in your yard all the time. So it’s a huge, huge compost facility and it’s fantastic and it’s turned by hand. so we compost all of all of our food. So anything that we create from our preps, hand chopping all of our vegetables.

post-consumer food. So we scrape plates from our customers that don’t want to take their leftovers home or their little whatever’s on the plate. You scrape that into the compost. All of our napkins, the thin paper that we line our chip baskets with, all of that gets composted. So at the end of the day, when we take out the trash, we have a minimal amount of trash, especially considering the fact that we’re a restaurant. It’s like, I would guess like three to five

big bags of trash at the end of any given day.

Anthony Codispoti (41:47)
And then what does Ben do with the compost after it’s fully broken down?

Grace Corbin (41:52)
They package it and sell it as a revenue stream for the recycling center because funding, as you can imagine, is not abundant all the time. So they sell it. And I’ve never looked into it myself because unfortunately I don’t have time to garden. But I think that as a participant of the program, my household, I think has a bit of a stipend, if you will, a ⁓ quota maybe is the word that I could probably go and pick up.

for a soil amendment for my own yard or garden.

Anthony Codispoti (42:25)
Got it, because you participate in the program, you have some sort of a credit with them that you could get.

Grace Corbin (42:30)
Anybody

can go out there and buy stuff. Yeah, it’s a great program.

Anthony Codispoti (42:34)
Tell me about how the no tipping policy came about.

Grace Corbin (42:38)
Great question, great question. So in the before times, meaning before September of 2012 when we made the switch, we pulled all of our tips that came in and divided the total equally among the number of shift labor hours. So that included the cooks, that included the dishwasher, it included the preps. It wasn’t just for servers and bartenders. We divided that number up among the number of labor hours.

So when you started working at Costa, you had a base wage and then you had a tip wage. ⁓ And those two combined gave you your total hourly wage. And we divided it among the number of labor hours so that it was the same for every hour. So people that worked 40 hours versus people that worked 20 hours, it’s the same for each hour that you worked.

Well, in 2012, we were investigated by the Fair Labor Standards Act agency. ⁓ And even though everyone that worked at CASA knew what the system was, agreed to the system, was fine with the system, at least outwardly, ⁓ we were not doing things by the letter of the law according to the Fair Labor Standards Act, FOSA.

So the intricacies of that law stated that you weren’t allowed to force traditionally tipped employees like bartenders and servers to share their tips with non-traditionally tipped employees like cooks, dishwashers. So we had a big decision to make because equity and, ⁓ you know, we want everybody to be treated the same way and we want everybody to make it the

wage and we want everybody to have opportunities and access to the same wages. We didn’t want to make things inequitable by only letting the servers and bartenders split the tip pool. ⁓ The other complicating factor is that a lot of our staff, the overwhelming majority of our staff is cross-trained into different positions. So John, my coworker, my successor as the marketing coordinator, actually, he’s a great example. Sometimes he does dishes.

Sometimes he cooks, sometimes he hosts, sometimes he bartends, sometimes he runs sound for the shows. He’s sort of a jack of all trades. So what of his hours would be eligible for that tip pool and what wouldn’t? And figuring that all out. I mean, on its face, it sounds kind of easy, but really the complexity of it is vast, especially when you consider that the majority of our staff is the same in terms of complexity of shift wages and trainings and cross-training, et cetera. So.

we decided that we’re not going to take tips anymore. And we’re going to, what we did in 2012 is we raised our menu prices 16 to 20 % per item. And we raised up, we eliminated the tip wage and we raised everybody’s base wage. Um, in 2012, don’t remember what it exactly was, but it made it comparable to what we were making before. Um, and then we just took a percentage of our sales.

and divided that up the same way that we were dividing up the tips before. And we called it a revenue share wage. ⁓ A few years after that, we said, let’s just take the average of what everybody’s wage was and just make that the wage and stop doing this whole math thing every pay period. Let’s just make it easier on everybody. And then everybody can also know what to expect on their paycheck. We took the variable out completely. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (46:01)
Hmm.

Grace Corbin (46:25)
So here we are 13 years later, we don’t take tips and it’s pretty normal to us. It’s normal to us. It’s normal to our customers, except for every once in a while, we have people say things like, but I really want to tip you or, and then we just say, well, just keep coming back. Just keep us in business. That’s good enough or buy another dessert or take a t-shirt home with you or get a gift card, whatever. If you want to give us more of your money, we’ll gladly accept it in any form you want to do. ⁓

of a weird way to say that. But so yeah, that was in 2012. And when we first started it, it was a little jarring and a little abnormal. And I actually had a guy one time say to me at the very beginning when we stopped seeking tips, a customer said, what if my server did a bad job and I want to punish them? he used the word. And I thought to myself…

Anthony Codispoti (47:19)
Ha ha ha!

Grace Corbin (47:22)
You are a great example of why tipping culture is sort of messed up in general. ⁓ That we’ve never gone back. We’ve talked about because the intricacies of the FLSA that sort of led to that decision have changed a little bit. And there are some allowances now where we could potentially make a system where we accept and share tips work. ⁓ But we’ve done it this way for so long.

Anthony Codispoti (47:47)
Now your customers are trained for it. imagine it was jarring to train them when it first came in in 2012. Wait, what? I’m accustomed to tipping people. But now your regulars are like, yeah, you don’t tip. And they tell their friends when they go with them. is, know,

Grace Corbin (48:04)
Right, so to reverse that decision now I think would be a marketing nightmare and it would probably take a long time for people to get back used to it to where it’s giving us good wages again. Understandably, people wouldn’t be used to it, would take a while.

Anthony Codispoti (48:21)
Yeah. Grace, what advice would you give to someone who might be thinking about creating their own worker owned cooperative?

Grace Corbin (48:34)
That’s a great question. So the thing that I love the most ⁓ about being a worker owner at a co-op ⁓ is that there is an inherent level of trust among my co-owners and I. So I’m not a very numbers minded person, but we have finance coordinators. There are three of them. They know what they’re doing.

They’ve been doing it consistently for a long time. I trust them to do it. They tell us the numbers, the numbers make sense. That’s what they do. My forte is front of house operations. So any customer complaint or customer challenge or seating challenge or big party or whatever, people know to come to me. They trust me to handle the customer side of things a lot of the times. Our menu development coordinator and the people that, the team of people that

source our produce. I trust them to find the best products for the best prices that we can get. And that’s really what I love the most because in a sole proprietorship, one person is in charge of all of them. And they get overwhelmed and they may cut corners and they may just pick the cheapest option because it’s the easiest and they are subject to salespeople, salespeople-ing them.

⁓ it’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re the only one making the decisions. So while sometimes things can take a long time to make decisions or make changes, ⁓ it’s really a well thought out trust based business model.

Anthony Codispoti (50:22)
What does the future hold in store for Casa Nueva? Any growth plans, any particular initiatives or projects that are on the horizon that you’re excited about?

Grace Corbin (50:32)
Well, you know, people ask us all the time if we think about opening another location and the answer is always not a chance. you know, we’re five and a half years post-COVID now and we’re still sort of not 100 % recovered from that. And we’re still sort of clawing our way back to what feels normal.

Anthony Codispoti (50:41)
Ha!

Grace Corbin (51:01)
⁓ So I don’t think that there’s much energy or desire to focus on anything quite like that. ⁓ I think expanding our operations to more late night activity is a big area for potential growth. ⁓ We have a couple people that are really championing late night activity and the people that are passionate about it, we trust them to come up with ways to make that happen.

⁓ So that’s sort of what that’s sort of, think what’s next on the horizon in terms of growth. I mean, I can tell you, I’m very happy and proud to say that we are very much maxed out most nights as far as diners go. are consistently, it’s for Sam weekends. ⁓ We have a wait list, we have reservations. Sometimes it’s tough to get a reservation for people on the weekends, especially if they have a bigger party.

we don’t have a ton of room for dinner time growth, but late night sales and breakfast and lunch sales, take weekday lunch sales. ⁓ there’s room for growth and I would love to see that happen. ⁓ but a lot of times I think people don’t want to, excuse me, commit to trying to come see us for lunch because we make everything by hand and we make it, we don’t have any microwaves or heat lamps. We make everything by hand, every single order, every single time.

⁓ And while that is a huge part of why people really love us, it’s also why sometimes we can be a little, ⁓ it’s more of a time commitment and like a quick lunch.

Anthony Codispoti (52:43)
Right, yeah, so somebody comes in for dinner, maybe they’ve got a little bit more time to spend, they went a leisurely evening, they’ll have a cocktail while they wait for their delicious meal to be served. Somebody comes in for lunch, maybe they’ve got to be back at work in 45 minutes or something. Yeah. And so you got to turn that around more quickly. Yeah, I get that.

Grace Corbin (53:02)
Yeah, so

there’s definitely room for growth there, but it’s more of a challenge for her.

Anthony Codispoti (53:07)
And so the late night, what time do you guys close now?

Grace Corbin (53:11)
So the kitchen closes at nine every night. We’re closed on Tuesdays always. The kitchen closes at nine. Sundays and Mondays, that’s when the business closes. And then Wednesday, we have open stage every Wednesday at eight. So we’re open till 11 or 12 depending on how many people want to perform. We’ll go as late as two o’clock if there’s enough activity.

⁓ Thursdays we stay open until least midnight and then Fridays and Saturdays, most Fridays and Saturdays we have ⁓ live music. ⁓ So when we have live music, we’re open until two, a hundred percent of the time. ⁓ And then we also serve tacos, late night tacos from 10.30 PM to 2.30 AM ⁓ on Fridays and Saturdays. So our liquor license prohibits us from selling alcohol after two.

But a lot of the late night places in Athens stay open until three, sometimes four o’clock in the morning because once the bars close, the bar is let out and those people are hungry. So we serve tacos on Friday and Saturday nights until 2.30 in the morning. So the potential for growth late night would be having more live music at night ⁓ or extending our late night tacos into more nights per week. ⁓

But the bars aren’t always super busy in the middle of the week. So we might get a few stragglers and a few desperate taco customers, but is it really worth it to have our staff stay open? You know what mean? That’s kind of always the game we’re playing.

Anthony Codispoti (54:46)
Yeah, I get that. What’s something you like to do outside of work for fun?

Grace Corbin (54:53)
Well, I have a seven year old dog named Wally, who’s a little ⁓ Pog Terrier mix who has a very feisty personality that occupies most of my time when I’m not at work. So taking him on long walks and hikes is is a big one. In the summer, I really love kayaking on the Hocking River when it’s not polluted too much to do so. ⁓ Lots of stuff outside as much as I can.

I also probably watch too much TV because sometimes when I’m not on my feet at work, I want to just sit on my couch.

Anthony Codispoti (55:28)
⁓ It’s nice to unplug every now and then, isn’t it? I’ve just got one more question for you today, Grace, but before I ask it, want to do two things. First of all, I always let my audience know the best way to get in touch with our guests. And when I asked Grace what I should tell everybody, she said, hey, come down to Southeastern Ohio and have a great meal at Casa Nueva, so down in Athens. So that’s how you get in touch with them. You go see them.

Grace Corbin (55:31)
Absolutely.

Anthony Codispoti (55:57)
⁓ Also, I wanna ask everybody, if you would just take a moment, leave us a comment or review on your favorite podcast app. If you do so, you’ll have a special place here in my heart forever. Thank you very much. So last question for you, Grace, a year from now, you and I reconnect and you are celebrating something big, very exciting. What’s that big thing you hope to be celebrating one year from today?

Grace Corbin (56:23)
Well, we will have celebrated our 41st anniversary next year. Staying in business is a goal, detainable goal for certain. I’m very confident that that was a detainable goal. We will reopen for business on Tuesday, so we’ll be operating seven days a week. That would be a good milestone. We were open seven days a week before COVID, but then…

It’s nice to have a meeting day and it’s nice for our maintenance guy to be able to get in there on Tuesdays, but being open seven days a week would be a good one.

Anthony Codispoti (56:58)
When are you gonna do your meetings then? Maybe just have less meetings, huh?

Grace Corbin (57:05)
There’s no way we can have less meetings. We probably have to have 25 meetings to figure out how to reopen.

Anthony Codispoti (57:12)
All right, well, Grace Corbin from Casa Nueva, want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Grace Corbin (57:22)
Thank you so much for having me. This has been real fun.

Anthony Codispoti (57:25)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.