Paradis Lost

It’s about noon on a warm January day, and a group of five men and one woman pour into the small box on West Dixie Highway in North Miami that is Paradis Books & Bread. They settle into the corner booth, beneath a floating bookshelf with sections bearing labels like Carceral Studies, Histories of Capitalism, People’s Movements, and French Theory and Its Fallouts. Audrey is working alone in the café we run as a trio; Brian and Bianca will take the later shift. She’s admittedly more frazzled than usual. Earlier this morning, the dough mixer made a noise like a thick plastic sheet cracking in half and began spewing black smoke, and now a faint smell of burnt plastic hangs in the air.

“No, man, I’m pro-life no matter what,” one of the men says, piercing the silence.

“I hear you, bro, but think of it like this—it’s proven that poor women who shouldn’t have had kids were able to get abortions, and now 18 years later we don’t have those people who would’ve been criminals.”

Their voices fill the small space, sharply out of place in a room otherwise meant for study or light conversation. A young person sits in the opposite corner, attempting to read a book, but is continually distracted by the group’s blunt commentary. Audrey winces as she finishes taking a customer’s order at the register. By the time she’s done making the customer’s drink, the group has moved on to another topic.

“That bitch is crazy, she’s crazy. She was obsessed with me. That’s why I had to get that bitch fired.” Chuckles erupt from the others. “Man,” one of them says lightly, “you do need to be a little careful about how you talk about women in public. I know you’re a good guy, but you could get in trouble.”

Audrey walks over to their table, which is covered in plates holding three half cookies and four entirely untouched slices of frittata. “Excuse me,” she says. Only the woman at the table turns to make eye contact. “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation, and I’m extremely troubled by almost everything you’ve said. I don’t really know what you’re doing here, but you’re clearly done eating and it’s time for you to leave.”

The woman’s eyes grow large as one man in the group bows his head, laughing nervously. “I don’t really know how to respond to that, but OK,” she says matter-of-factly. Audrey walks away as the woman gathers every plate at the table and leaves.

But the men stay. Audrey gives them ten minutes, then returns to the table. “Hi, excuse me. I’m deeply troubled by the offensive things you’ve said. You’re making myself and others here uncomfortable. We’re clearly not politically aligned and I don’t know why you feel so comfortable here.”

“So you were triggered,” one of them quips. He’s wearing a too-tight, bright red collared shirt.

“No. I wasn’t triggered. But I am the owner and I’m not going to tolerate this sort of language in here.”

“Well, that’s your business model and I respect that,” the man says. The group gets up and leaves.

Well, that was unpleasant, but at least it’s over now, Audrey thinks. But within the hour, Google reviews for our small radical bookstore and café start pouring in. Debra from Connecticut: I tried dining at this restaurant and it was INFESTED with RATS. Phil from Tampa: This place is bigoted! Go woke go broke! Hundreds of reviews in under an hour.

As it turns out, the guy in the tight red shirt was a Fox News analyst named Gianno Caldwell with over 150,000 Twitter followers, and he’d decided that what happened that morning at Paradis deserved serious attention.

At first, we laugh. Hell yeah, let these fascists scare each other away! But the reviews keep coming in by the handfuls, and the Paradis Instagram is flooded with new followers and nasty comments. Laughter turns to worry, then to dread, and eventually to fear. Under one of Caldwell’s Instagram posts about us, a man whose account features several photos of guns asks for the address and says, “I live near there. I will make them uncomfortably famous.”

We immediately decide to close for the evening. Tears welling in our eyes, we start turning people away. Before we go to bed that night, we have an email from the Miami New Times, asking us if we’d like to make a comment on the story. We decline. This isn’t a story, we tell them. We wake up the next morning to their piece: “A Fox News analyst walks into a Marxist Miami wine bar. No, it’s not the opening line to a joke but rather the impetus for a local small business being put on blast on network TV and social media for ‘lack of tolerance.’”

The harassment ramps up over the next several days. We begin getting calls on our personal phones and countless emails with some variation of the subject line “hope you’re ready to die.” We battle waves of sadness, unease, and confusion. We had started Paradis out of a desire to bring a place of learning and exchange to our hometown. But suddenly it’s all too real to us how vulnerable we’ve made ourselves by attempting to create a leftist space in a conservative state, the incessant threats calling to mind the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Did it make sense to be a meeting point for the marginalized and radical, yet still behave like a business serving a more general public? Could we keep ourselves and our community safe when it felt like we were hanging a target on our door? It seemed Fox News had lobbed a volley of questions at us to which we had no good answers. We wondered: Is this a viable political project? Should we stop doing this?

We are all from Broward, the county north of Miami-Dade, and we all went to college in New York City—angsty teenagers who could not have been more eager to leave Florida. But after several years in New York, we were ready for something new: Brian and Audrey were becoming disillusioned with academia, and Bianca was starting to feel her passion for wine grinding against the gears of a toxic restaurant industry. Perhaps the foundation of our friendship is that we are always talking, engaging with each others’ ideas. In countless conversations in dimly lit bars, we returned again and again to the idea of a space, the surprising, energetic magic of people coming together at a physical address, in a forum designed to nurture exchange and study. Audrey had worked for many years at Bluestockings—the then-volunteer-run, radical bookstore in Manhattan’s Lower East Side—and wanted to create a community space like the one she’d been a part of there, a place of accessible learning, reminiscent of Lise Weil’s writings on 1970s feminist bookstores where people “heard each other into speech.” But we also fell in love with the camaraderie we’d felt sharing a bottle of natural wine around a table; a complicated product to be sure, but at its best and most basic, a beverage made by and for the laborer to enjoy the fruits of their labor. We aspired to capture the essence of sitting alongside the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, where the sharing of wine can be casual, where nights can expand inward. We had a particular affection for Molasses Books in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where you could read a used book well into the night, with a glass of wine or small cup of coffee keeping you company. These beloved places affirmed our belief in the role of shared physical space as the foundation for the creation of new, livable worlds—a place where we could enact a “modality of fellowship,” in the words of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and “practice it in order to protect it.” And so we decided to move back to South Florida, to feel a bit closer to where we came from, and to try to forge something new.

After two years back in South Florida, we found a small, perfectly square, stand-alone building in North Miami, covered in chipped, light blue paint; inside, a cramped, dusty computer equipment business. We saw the future in it, and got to work. Anything we could do ourselves, we did—tiling floors and backsplashes, sanding and refinishing wood beams, building bookshelves, painting, well, everything—often in the blistering heat. We filled the place with our favorite books and some of our most coveted wines, and learned to make bread on a large scale. When we finally opened our doors in July 2021, it felt like we were inviting people into our house, but over the course of that year, Paradis took on the shape of a heavily lived-in place, belonging as much to our customers as it did to us. The floors and upholstery accumulated stains that just wouldn’t come out. The side beams of two of the wine shelves turned into makeshift corkboards, housing flyers for local actions, organizations, and bands, as well as short love notes to Paradis. Suddenly we had “regulars,” people whose lives we came to know and vice versa. Local chapters of leftist organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) began meeting in the space. Things weren’t perfect, of course; we battled the exhaustion of running a business amid personal hardships and professional disagreements. But even so, the experiment seemed to be working, and we felt Paradis blossoming into a radical community hub.

The promise of that first year and a half was profoundly troubled by the Fox News debacle. When we reopened in March 2023, about a month after Caldwell’s visit, a newfound tenuousness hovered over the project like a dark cloud. At one point, we genuinely considered buying guns, but were deterred by our visceral overwhelm at the prospect of defending our bar in such a way. Instead, we put privacy screens around the exterior fence that encircled the building and its outdoor seating area, set up security cameras, and changed our hours so that none of us were ever there by ourselves. We were more careful with which events we made public, requesting that radical organizations hosting meetings at Paradis advertise them only within their own circles.

Security concerns weren’t the only thing wearing us down. The distance between our vision of radical communal space and a certain kind of customer’s desire for a traditional dining experience was annoying at best and depressing at worst. While we were honored by the recognition we received in national food publications, the fact that we served pizza quickly eclipsed all else, drawing patrons who were more consumers than community members, participants in a Miami restaurant culture often predicated on displays of wealth. People would come in complaining that we were too hard to find, demanding the food menu before saying a simple hello, expecting us to order for them based on “what is the best, most popular thing.” Their entitlement seemed built into the geography of the city itself, inherent in its stark class segregation. In a place so spread out and so lacking in reliable public transportation, people leave their high-rises in Brickell or their suburban mansions in Kendall and get right into their cars, only interacting with people of other classes when those individuals are in service roles. We were well aware of these dynamics, and of the way they have accelerated with the rate of gentrification, but still, it was more suffocating than we had expected to experience them through the day-to-day interactions in our small shop—and deeply disheartening to realize that we’d built something that attracted this milieu.

And still, cherished experiences of togetherness pierced the fog of disappointment. At our two-year anniversary party, Cher’s “Believe” blasted on two outdoor speakers as a crowd of people—skin slick with sweat and the thick July rain—jumped, screamed, sang, danced, believed in life. For a film festival on Palestine in mid-December, a handful of people spent the day in the café, chopping cucumber, tomato, mint, and parsley; toasting pita; and laying out hundreds of rolled grape leaves that they’d assembled the night before. Focaccia doughs turned into chicken musakhan, and our popcorn machine churned out za’atar popcorn. We carried platters of food across Dixie Highway in the misty rain, to a co-working space we’d transformed into a small theater, where our dear friends read poems and essays, and we sat together inside the desire for a free world not-yet-here.

There was joy, too, in the mundane, the everyday running of the place. Sundays at Paradis were our favorite, the days when people brought things into the space, making it their own. JVP meetings would take up the afternoons, and the members would linger into the night, sharing a meal or a bottle of wine. Come 5:00 pm, a small intergenerational group of introverted queers would gather at our longest outdoor table for Yarn Club, bringing their knitting needles, embroidery pads, and spools. Our friend Jon, a librarian by trade and DJ at heart, would set up at the corner bar, and fill the space with music to match the energy of a given evening. On these days—the ones we were always chasing—Paradis was a place of intentional, reciprocal use, rather than one of mindless consumption and entitled extraction.

This opens up a tangled question: Who was Paradis for? We opened with a loose desire to be a place of use for radical folks in Miami, as well as a reservoir of educational materials to bring others further into a revolutionary fold. We decidedly did not open Paradis to try to reach the conservative masses, Republican and Democrat alike, though we found ourselves operating a business that catered to them as much as to the clientele we’d imagined. There were some moments when it seemed that our tiny space could be capacious, hold all of it together—when a JVP teach-in could give way to a Miami Heat NBA Finals watch party with little friction (or at least, with some new lessons learned). But far too often, the customers’ narrow desires made the space feel empty, evacuated of our original intention. We frequently found ourselves having a version of this conversation with someone who had just walked in the door:

“I’ve never been here before, can I see the menu?”

“Well, we’re not starting food service until 5:00 pm, but we have pastries and retail bread, and there’s a wine tasting going on outside right now.”

“Oh. So you have nothing?”

In moments like these, we would look around the room at the walls covered in books, the corner shelves stuffed with hundreds of bottles of wine, the basket above the oven brimming with loaves of freshly baked sourdough bread, and feel utterly demoralized.