Dozens volunteer their time to restore New Deal Cafe as a third space

Teddy Kish, in a stained work shirt and on his lunch break from the local Honda dealership, had just finished helping to install a fryer in the kitchen of the New Deal Cafe. Then he moved on to fixing a sink.

Passersby walking through the Roosevelt Center in the heart of Greenbelt on a recent weekday afternoon peered into the café’s front window. In years past, the restaurant and music venue typically would’ve been open for customers to grab a bite, continue community French club lessons or play mahjong.

But on this day all the looky-loos could glimpse were volunteers working alongside Kish, calibrating and cleaning the coffee equipment, helping with the sink and marveling at his handiwork with the fryer.

Stephanie Rizk was overseeing these efforts while pitching in. She also needed to monitor her phone for emails and messages from her job as the chief operating officer of a nonprofit.

Rizk, 49, certainly didn’t expect to land in this position when she came to an open mic night at New Deal in 2005 to sing and play pop-rock songs on piano.

More than 20 years later, she’s taking charge of ensuring the New Deal Cafe can stay open in the years ahead.

“[New Deal] just wasn’t firing on a lot of cylinders,” Rizk said. “It had not been professionalized in a lot of years where we got sort of procedures and stuff like that. I’m good at that sort of stuff.”

She had no idea what she was getting into.

The Greenbelt gathering spot has been rebuilding and resetting for more than a year because of issues that left the business with overdue rent and utility bills and unpaid sales taxes to the Maryland that totaled more than $40,000, according to reports from the Greenbelt News Review.

The café remains open for evening service and hosts performances almost nightly.

Rizk and dozens of volunteers — many of whom have day jobs as lawyers, administrators and federal government employees — have stepped up to reshape operations and envision a sustainable future.

New Deal, which opened in 1995, has operated as a nonprofit cooperative. It was born of residents’ desire for a coffeehouse in the heart of Greenbelt’s downtown commercial district, the Roosevelt Center, and has grown into a community hub.

Customers can become co-op members by paying annual dues starting at $30. Members can participate in meetings to discuss the café’s policies and goals and elect a board of directors, which steers the agenda. The shop is open to members and the public and solicits donations to stay afloat.

“The New Deal being a cooperative organization kind of bleeds into the ethos of everything that it does here,” said Rizk, who was elected president of the board of directors in June. “So, when you go to an open mic at some other place, maybe it’s a little competitive or maybe it leans in one genre and it’s just only a white-guys-with-guitars kind of place. That doesn’t happen here and never happens here.”

At the center of the dispute that has caused consternation for New Deal members is Kenny Hilliard. The chef began his contract as the café’s food and beverage manager in November 2024. (He also operates Kenny’s Kale in Temple Hills.)

The New Deal board told its members at a February meeting that Hilliard failed to pay the bills to maintain operations, and the venue had to cease hosting shows for a time because it couldn’t renew its entertainment permit.

The board paid some of the delinquent bills on Hilliard’s behalf, with the expectation that it would be reimbursed. Hilliard disputed that claim and told the meeting’s attendees the tax bill stemmed from an issue with changing the point-of-sale system.

Hilliard did not respond to requests for comment.

In July, the board wrote a letter to its membership that addressed the concerns.

“Kenny has been a change agent for the cafe over the past 18+ months and many of those changes were appreciated by our community,” the letter said.

“However, the stark reality was that significant financial missteps by the vendor and consistently declining revenue drained the Cafe’s reserves and has put the Cafe in a precarious position.”

New Deal’s board worked until the last minute to give Hilliard a chance to form a new business plan, Rizk said. It did not extend or renew his contract and has begun to run the food service operations itself. Starting Monday, New Deal is ramping up its morning operations to serve coffee while it games out a revised dinner menu and continues bar service.

Rizk has set out a transition plan for the next few months to get New Deal above water. She and the board are exploring other operating models, including a worker-owned business or using kitchen apprenticeships. But first she and her fellow volunteers needed to get things close to normal.

Kish, 42, has lived in Greenbelt his whole life but only became a café regular three years ago, he said.

“I started noticing really good bands playing in here, and I started coming more and more frequently just to see the bands,” Kish said. “I had a misconception that this place was just all senior citizens and old-people music.

“Once I popped in a few times and checked it out, I realized: Wow, it’s a lot more diverse than that. There’s all age groups. There’s all different types of music that cater to all audiences and all ranges.”

Rizk sees updating the perception of New Deal as essential to its long-term viability.

“Third spaces like this, they need to be protected,” Rizk said. “They are precious, and there are not enough of them. My kids and the sort of chosen family in this area that I take care of desperately need these kinds of places.”

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