Iconic owner of White Dog Cafe looks to new life

Judy Wicks went to a diner for breakfast the other day. Reading the fine print, she set the menu down, appalled.

"Bummer," Wicks said, sighing. "I can't eat the eggs. They're not cage-free."

It has been one month since Wicks sold the White Dog Cafe. For a historical change in an iconic city eatery, the handover went down with surprisingly little fanfare.

No flags lowered to half-staff. No tearful loyal customers stopping by for one last plate of organic salad with goat cheese from a local farm and a burger made from humanely raised cattle.

This is partly because the restaurant has not gone anywhere. It's open for business, and the name and logo and the progressive principles that have become synonymous with it remain unchanged.

Even Wicks hasn't entirely left the scene.

First of all, she still lives upstairs in the charming brick rowhouse on Sansom Street across from the University of Pennsylvania's Law School.

She has also maintained rights to the White Dog name and logo, plus 5 percent of the restaurant business.

Still, a sale is a sale. And Wicks will no longer be the impassioned host of candlelit dinner-lectures with lefty intellectuals and medical ethicists and labor organizers. She will no longer be found breezing through the warren of wooden booths and lace-curtained nooks to greet the masses who want their dinner without a side of guilt.

For 26 years, Wicks ran the restaurant with a mission. Her goal was to address every environmental and ethical concern, to ensure that every bowl of chili, every kilowatt, every contract, and every glass of wine, beer, and water came from sources that were clean and paid their workers fairly.

To maintain those high standards, she said, requires personal conviction and stamina. She tries not to be judgmental about businesses that don't. She just wishes that more of them would.

So now she's taking her mission on the road.

Letting go of the White Dog was difficult, said Wicks, 61. "But I felt relieved."

She had treated the restaurant as an auxiliary heart - pumping socially conscious ideals into the community. She ran mentoring programs, organized trips to educate her customers and staff about the effects of American foreign policy on other nations.

"We went to Vietnam three times," she said. "Cuba five times. Ten times to Chiapas . . . Palestine, Israel, the Soviet Union . . ." Customers would pay their share, and Wicks would lead the way, covering half the expenses for at least one member of the staff to go along - not just management, but a dishwasher, the head busboy, and a bartender.

Gradually, Wicks grew more involved in national organizations, all connected to the principles of fair trade, sustainability, and organic farming.

As cofounder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, she has traveled to Australia and Scotland, Kansas, Maine, Florida, and Canada.

"Something had to give," Wicks said, cutting into half a fresh grapefruit. "I've always been a workhorse. You have to be in the restaurant business. But the White Dog needed new energy. New life. I didn't want to watch it go downhill. And I had to decide how to use my energy in a way that was most effective."

Her white hair shone in the overhead lights. She wore loose layers in inky purples and winey reds, and a knotted leather bracelet with a silver plate etched "Joy." It was a gift from her 29-year-old daughter, Grace, who runs a business setting up organic farms in Philadelphia and other cities. (Wicks' son, Lawrence, 27, is a film animator in California.)

When Wicks decided to sell the White Dog, she tried to turn it over to her 100 employees. But the process proved too difficult. "It was just a dream."

Last year, she began looking for a buyer. "It had to be someone who shared my principles," she said. After putting her soul into the place, painting the canine-themed murals on the restrooms (setters for women, pointers for men), donating up to 20 percent of annual profits to charity, installing solar panels, banning bottled water, and insisting on only local, organic foods, she was not about to fork it over to any profit-hungry entrepreneur.

By August, with no suitable takers, Wicks was ready to close up shop and say, "Twenty-five years is enough."

Then a friend put her in touch with Marty Grims, owner of Moshulu.

At 10 on the warm morning of Oct. 15, they met on the deck of her apartment over the White Dog Cafe, where she's lived since 1972. (She moved in shortly after splitting with her first husband, Richard Hayne, her childhood sweetheart, who became the billionaire head of Urban Outfitters.)

By November, she trusted Grims enough to move on the deal, as long as he signed a "social contract" agreeing to use sustainable energy and compost and buy materials from local, organic suppliers.

On Jan. 12, the sale was final.

"An old friend of mine flew in with caviar and champagne," Wicks said. And her new life began.

She still owns the building and plans to live off her income from the rent. It was just a block away - on Walnut Street - that she committed her first act of civil disobedience by lying down in front of a bulldozer to stop the city from building a mall. (She ultimately lost that battle. Evidence: the modern buildings behind the White Dog, occupied by the Gap and Starbucks.)

It looks as though Wicks will also lose her fight to save the White Dog's arts, crafts, and other cool stuff shop, the Black Cat, she said as she dipped into a bowl of yogurt and granola. She checked her iPhone for messages. (It went off several times, unanswered. The ring tone is a dog barking.)

From now on, she's dedicated to nothing less than world peace, through building self-sufficient communities.

Business is not the enemy. Nor are profits, she said.

"But we need to eliminate suffering from workers in sweatshops, from chickens in crates, from coal miners. For too long, our economy has been based on domination and violence. So I think it's the most important thing to be done in the whole world."