Bridgeport, CT, USA

Closed 2025

The Disappointed Tourist: Bloodroot, Ellen Harvey, 2026. Oil and acrylic on Gessoboard, 18 x 24″ (46 x 61 cm). Photograph: Etienne Frossard.

Why Bloodroot Mattered:

Bloodroot is significant for several key reasons, making its closure a notable event in the history of the feminist and vegetarian movements:

Cultural Center: The establishment operated as a feminist bookstore and consistently hosted events, readings by feminist authors, and workshops, making it a long-standing cultural and political outpost.

Lasting Legacy: It is considered the last of the major feminist-vegetarian restaurants and bookstores established during the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s and 80s. While hundreds existed, Bloodroot outlasted almost all of them, operating for 48 years.

A Space for Women: Founded by the Bloodroot Collective (primarily Selma Miriam and Noel Furie), it was created as a self-sustaining feminist community hub. In its early years, it hosted “women-only nights” to provide a safe, public space for women, particularly lesbians and activists, to meet, organize, and discuss issues free from patriarchal influence.

Pioneering Ethos: The restaurant connected food to politics. It served a globally diverse, seasonal vegetarian and eventually vegan menu based on the principle that a feminist enterprise should not contribute to the subjugation of animals.

Challenging Norms: The business model challenged traditional food service sexism. Customers were expected to self-serve, pick up their own orders, and bus their own tables, eliminating the traditional, often male-dominated, hierarchy of a restaurant kitchen and waitstaff. Anon.

The Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant and Feminist Bookstore opened in 1977 in Bridgeport, Connecticut and closed in 2025.

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