After over four years of operation, Story and Soil Coffee will close permanently at the end of June 2025. The decision came after the University terminated its contract with the cafe, which is located in the Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore on Main Street. The cafe’s Middletown location was its second location; its original location opened in Hartford, Conn. in 2017.
The University leased the kitchen and dining space in RJ Julia to the coffee shop in exchange for a percentage of sales as rent. Students were able to pay using meal plan points, which were then repaid to the cafe each month. Along with Red & Black Cafe, WesWings, and The Star and Crescent, Story and Soil became a popular off-campus location for students to eat and drink. However, unlike other eateries that accept points on campus, some of whom have recently unionized, Story and Soil was a private contractor and unable to unionize.
Story and Soil co-owner Michael Acosta said that the cafe was blindsided by the decision to terminate the partnership between the cafe and the University.
“Conversations concerning our future in the space were not on our radar,” Acosta said.
Rumors of the closure began swirling last month after the Wesleyan Student Assembly included an update in their Sunday, April 27 committee reports regarding a meeting between the WSA Dining Committee, Director of Auxiliary Services Michelle Myers-Brown, and Bon Appetit Resident District Manager Michael Strumpf that occurred on Thursday, April 10.
“The café at the Main Street RJ Julia Bookstore (Story and Soil) will close at the end of this month,” the report read. “The administration is currently seeking a replacement vendor.”
However, Chair of the Student Life Committee and the Dining Subcommittee for the recently closed 46th General Assembly Paul Quach ’26 denied that this was discussed at the meeting.
“The correct report should have been along the lines of we have heard concerns with Story and Soil, and [the manager of RJ Julia Bookstore] joined our meeting to elicit Story and Soil feedback,” Quach wrote in an email to The Argus. “The Dining Committee was not involved with the ultimate decision, nor did we know that this would be the result; we actually were excited to collect feedback and find ways to improve the student experience at Story and Soil.”
Despite WSA plans to work with Story and Soil on addressing an influx of student customers, Acosta said that there had not been any communication from the University regarding improvements in almost a year. According to Acosta, the last time that any concerns were discussed was in June 2024, during an annual meeting with Myers-Brown, who served as a regular point of contact between the University and Story and Soil.
“[The] things that we discussed [in the meeting] were just basic upgrades for us to keep up with demand as we had just continued to get busier, particularly on the food end,” Acosta said. “They were productive suggestions so that we could provide a better experience and prepare for success, but there was never any follow up about that.”
The following week, WSA Vice President Tanvi Navile ’25 visited Story and Soil, hoping to seek an explanation for the cafe’s abrupt closing. She asked members of the staff if they had been informed about any changes to the cafe. According to Navile, the employees told her that there had been no communication to the Story and Soil team regarding a potential closure.
“They should be the first to know about this, not us,” Navile said.
After speaking with Story and Soil Store Lead Alice Ryan and co-owner Michael McCoy, Navile met with the rest of the Executive Board, including WSA President Jonghwa Kim ’25, Chief of Staff Molly Connolly-Ungar ’25, and Quach.
“I communicated with Paul and the president and chief of staff at the time, and our game plan was to create a direct line between [Myers-Brown and Story and Soil] by sending an email from the WSA to make sure this communication happened,” Navile said.
But before the executive board was able to organize this meeting, Story and Soil posted on Instagram that they were officially closing the RJ Julia location after receiving notice from the University.
Story and Soil received formal communication from the University on the termination of the contract on Friday, May 1. The termination referenced Section 12 of the Food Service Vendor Agreement between Story and Soil and the University. The Argus obtained a copy of this agreement.
“This agreement may be terminated by either party by giving the other party not less than sixty (60) days’ written notice that it will terminate the Agreement on the date specified,” the agreement said.
This means that Story and Soil is required to vacate the property by the end of June. Because moving out of the space takes almost a month, the owners said, they chose to close the shop to the public on May 26.
The letter emailed to the Story and Soil ownership team by Chief Financial Officer Christopher Olt did not provide an explanation for the closure. The Office of University Communications did not respond to a request for comment, and Myers-Brown declined a request for comment.
Acosta speculated that the timing of the contract termination was meant to align with the end of the school year, but that rumors spreading from the WSA and students to the Story and Soil team forced the University to adjust their timeline.
“When all the students are gone from campus, then they would give us this news,” Acosta said. “It’s almost certainly what they intended to do so that these things would happen a bit more quietly and they could more readily get ahead on the narrative. But it seems like someone made a mistake in the administration and shared information with the students at that meeting.”
Without any clear communication from the University, the Story and Soil team will be left to wonder why the University terminated the contract.
Acosta, McCoy, and their third co-owner, Sarah McCoy, received separate communication from RJ Julia Store Manager Kathryn Mosquera and Olt regarding pro-Palestine signage and symbols posted in the storefront.
According to Quach, Mosquera was at the April 10 meeting between the Dining Committee and Myers-Brown, though her name is not mentioned on the April 27 Committee Reports. While Mosquera and Olt both reported student complaints about the signage, only Mosquera asked the team to remove the posters and drawings.
Ryan emphasized that Story and Soil has been outspoken on other political issues. In the past, according to Ryan, the cafe has hosted fundraisers for a transgender mutual aid organization. In addition to Palestinian flags and stickers bearing political messages, the store is decorated with pride flags.
“I’ve tried to make it a safe space for the queer community in general, because that doesn’t really exist in Middletown,” Ryan said. “A lot of people come specifically to us because they enjoy that aspect of our business. That’s going away too.”
Acosta hypothesized that the University might have been afraid of national backlash for its ties with a politically outspoken cafe.
“There has been nationwide criticism and retribution for DEI practices at universities, so that very well could be it,” Acosta said. “That’s speculation, but I’m just unsure why this would be done so surreptitiously if it didn’t also involve some sort of PR nightmare.”
While the University has not responded to requests for comment on the decision and process behind the contract termination, Olt confirmed that plans are underway to replace Story and Soil as the cafe for RJ Julia.
“Over the summer, RJ Julia will seek potential new vendors to provide food service to students, faculty, staff and the broader Middletown community,” Olt wrote in an email to The Argus. “We hope to have more details soon and a new vendor in place by Fall 2025.”
This is not the first time that the cafe occupying the kitchen and dining space in RJ Julia has suddenly ceased operations: Story and Soil’s predecessor was Grown Café, which opened in May 2017 and closed in January 2020. Future vendors will likely face the same challenges around the small dining and kitchen area that Story and Soil did.
“We had people coming in every single day for breakfast and lunch, but we have a small space, so it was hard to accommodate all that,” Ryan said. “We felt like there was a little bit of a bait and switch in that we ended up being like Wesleyan spillover dining service.”
Story and Soil staff are scrambling to close the business over the next two months while finding new employment. A GoFundMe to fundraise for the employees and general transition costs was posted to the Story and Soil Instagram page on Friday, May 2.
“We are launching this GoFundMe to help in this time of transition,” the post said. “This includes supporting our Middletown employees as they seek to find new employment, unexpectedly…. With no notice and a lack of communication all year, Wesleyan is putting a largely queer staff at risk with no opportunity to plan for their future.”
Anabel Goode can be reached at agoode@wesleyan.edu.
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