Beloved Sydney cafe Cornersmith is closing its doors this month, crunched by increased business costs and reduced spending by customers.

“I think hospitality is a bit broken,” says Alex Elliot-Howery, who owns Cornersmith with her husband, James Grant.

“Every week it has felt harder and harder to make the right decisions, to keep our customers happy, stay creative and have the environmental focus that has always been fundamental for us. Since COVID, it’s felt like we’re in survival mode. The cafe is simply not profitable.”

Cornersmith has been a shining light for community and sustainability since it opened in 2011 in Marrickville. Honey from a beehive on the roof was drizzled over juicy peaches. Bountiful zucchini was pickled for piling in a cheese toastie. Backyard produce could be swapped for coffee credits.

A “picklery” up the street (which closed in 2021), workshops, cooking classes and books followed, creating and fostering a passionate Cornersmith tribe, not only the diners who started jarring their own windfall fruit, but also the workers, who carried their KeepCup keep-it-real ethics to other restaurants and cafes.

The original cafe closed in 2019, overlapping with the current Annandale premises, which opened in 2016. “People still haven’t forgiven us for closing the Marrickville shop. They still come in really upset about it, so we’re a little bit scared to let everybody know about this closure,” says Elliot-Howery. “So many of our customers, and obviously our beautiful staff, they are family for us. They’ve been on the emotional journey.”

Cornersmith has been a barometer of change. Thirteen years ago, not everyone in gentrifying Marrickville welcomed a cafe selling soy lattes and homemade jam. Some weeks after opening, a brick was thrown through the corner store’s window and ‘f–k off yuppies’ was painted on the wall. Nascent fans of the business responded by bringing flowers and produce in a show of welcome.

‘We are losing diversity in the industry. That’s the thing that makes me really sad: we won’t have businesses that are run by passionate people who are just trying to make it work.’

Alex Elliot-Howery, owner of Cornersmith

Over the years, Alex Elliot-Howery herself has ridden, and led, different waves of environmental awareness. “In the early days, I was all about preserving and doing everything from scratch, even canning my own tuna,” she says. “But more recently, I’ve focused on food waste. How do we make the best use of the food we already have?”

Now Cornersmith may well be a cafe canary in the coalmine, pointing to the extreme difficulty of running a family business in hospitality. “Unless you’re a tiny little shop with barely any staff or you are part of a bigger restaurant group, I don’t know how anyone survives,” she says.

“What I worry about is that we are losing diversity in the industry. That’s the thing that makes me really sad: we won’t have businesses that are run by passionate people who are just trying to make it work. It felt like you used to be able to have a nice life from that, whereas I don’t believe it’s possible any more.”

What exactly isn’t working? “It’s a combination of everything. Everything is going up in price, but we’re also in a cost-of-living crisis so we can’t just keep putting our prices up. We’re a cafe: people want coffee and they want a breakfast they can afford, which I totally understand because I’m that person too. But the reality is, you can’t really make money from what you used to be able to make money on.”

Cutting costs is the obvious answer. “But we don’t want to cut corners; we don’t want to be the cheapest offering because I know what that means for our food system on a bigger scale. I literally wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if we used factory chickens or didn’t pay our staff properly.”

Hospitality is in a particular bind because it’s all about creating experiences. “You do have to keep it looking like it’s all awesome and amazing and looks great on social media and that’s really tough,” Elliot-Howery says. “That’s why I think it’s important to speak out. It’s so we don’t feel super-alone but also we know that others are finding it hard. No one should feel like they are the only losers who can’t figure it out.”

Cornersmith is trading until the end of February and a new cafe operator will take over the space. “It’s a huge change for us to no longer have bricks and mortar, but Cornersmith will still exist in some form and I will still be teaching cooking classes,” says Elliot-Howery. “We’re trying to now figure out what we do with this brand that we built.”