Valley Restaurant Team
The majority of people working in local restaurants commute from towns with larger, more affordable housing stock. Most help sustain the local food and wine economy while remaining priced out of living in the community itself. Kitchen staff often endure longer commutes than front-of-house staff, who customarily take home a larger share of tips.
Valley’s staff is a team largely able to live within the community they serve. Sustaining this within one restaurant requires a commitment to this value, with personal and familial resourcefulness and unconventional business practices doing the heavy lifting.
The owners and almost all of the Valley staff live in Sonoma Valley. Despite the restaurant's competitive, equitable wages, team members earn too much to qualify for subsidized housing yet are priced out of most market-rate rentals, let alone home ownership. Many team members live in intergenerational housing arrangements or the increasingly rare, coveted small apartment units and granny flats that remain affordable.
Leveraging connections to find rentals, family support, and unconventional solutions—like equal payment for front and back of house staff and using company profits when take-home pay falls below Sonoma County’s living wage—all play a part in the majority of Valley’s people living in the community they serve.
Living close to where they work is part of how Valley’s staff are rooted in Sonoma Valley, with kids in local schools, neighbors and friends and coming into the restaurant, and being able to routinely support of other local businesses.
Sonoma Valley’s restaurants cultivate relationships between staff and the community. For some workers, those same relationships also shape access to housing, childcare, transportation, and the ability to remain connected to Sonoma Valley over time.
Valley’s owners have all had to navigate Sonoma Valley’s housing challenges personally, leveraging family resources and community ties to live where they work and run a businesses that strives to support a team to do the same.
Read co-founders Lauren Feldman’s housing story.