Ritual Coffee Roasters Blasted by Employees Over Workplace Culture Issues | Eater SF

"Arguably born into controversy when it was co-founded in the Mission by Jeremy Tooker—an alleged sexual assailant who later founded Four Barrel Coffee—and Eileen Rinaldi (née Hassi), I found that Ritual Coffee Roasters was created to cater to, as Wired put it, 'a new wave of software innovators.' Over the years it expanded to six locations but remained beset by criticism: Rinaldi sent a bizarre letter to an artist whose work was hung at the café saying the art 'was too serious' and 'the curator made a mistake, I fired him,' and that piece was replaced by Rinaldi’s husband, the outspoken 'Chicken John,' with a BDSM-themed work about conflict in the Middle East. Chicken John has also publicly opposed a Dolores Park food truck from immigrant- and female-focused nonprofit La Cocina and threatened that during a planned parks concession with Blue Bottle 'a thousand people there spitting on them on their opening day.' Employees say they often felt uncomfortable when he was in the shops—'his reputation was known within the entire company'—especially after he allegedly tackled a Black patron who reached into the tip jar in 2019, allegedly yelling that the man 'was going to jail, that he was going to die in jail.' When staff raised that incident with Rinaldi there was 'a defensiveness at first because everyone was attacking her husband,' and in June employees sent an email demanding cultural change; Rinaldi now says, 'The world has changed, I have changed,' adds 'I have work to do,' and promises 'We will all be better for it when we envision a future through this lens.'" - Eve Batey