When Mark of the Beastro, a vegan coffee shop in downtown Salt Lake City, shut down in October, patrons held out hope that the business would return.

This week, owner Andrew Earley said that the cafe won’t be coming back.

“We made the decision that it was time to say goodbye to [Mark of the Beastro],” Earley said in an Instagram video he posted Tuesday.

In the video, Earley said the cafe at 666 S. State St. — once a plant-based restaurant — had been closed in October by the Salt Lake County Health Department because it had developed a mice problem.

“It’s an old building in the middle of downtown,” Earley said.

After he had the mice taken care of, Earley got the all-clear from the health department to reopen. But that didn’t happen.

The past year, Mark of the Beastro had been “really struggling after making the switch from full-service restaurant to a coffee shop,” Earley said in the video. So, around the end of the year, they decided to stay closed, and then a few months later, when it came time to renew their business license, they decided not to.

“It just wasn’t really working,” Earley said in the video.

The idea to switch from a restaurant to a cafe was so Mark of the Beastro could run under a smaller staff, and sell pre-made food items, Earley told The Salt Lake Tribune on Wednesday. “But it really never caught on,” he said.

Earley ended up being the only employee at Mark of the Beastro, so he was working 60 to 70 hours a week, while also trying to book acts for the Beehive — the all-ages venue and third space in the same building — and run the Alternative Arts and Music Program Utah (AAMP), the nonprofit that oversees the Beehive.

“It was just outside of my capability,” he told The Tribune.

Other vegan businesses in Salt Lake City commented on Earley’s Instagram video.

“The end of an era,” wrote Roxy Carlson, who owns Buds, a vegan sandwich shop, and Monkeywrench, a vegan ice cream shop, with her partner, Alex Jamison.

“Running a restaurant is exhausting on a level most people can’t fully understand,” Carlson continued. “Thanks for helping make vegan comfort food accessible. Thanks for all of the animal fries, the fried seitan and the grilled cheese sandwiches.”

Ian Brandt, who owns Vertical Diner and Vertical Deli, commented, “We appreciate [your] impact [on] the vegan community and beyond. We know how hard this business is.”

Brandt went on to write that he would be closing his Portland, Oregon, location of Vertical Diner on Sunday. One of the reasons for the closure, he told The Tribune, is that people in Portland were “scared” to leave their homes and patronize local businesses after the pandemic.

Earley told The Tribune that things are “always hard” for vegan businesses.

“You’re still fighting a pretty significant stigma that has been around a long time, that vegan food is bad,” he said.

Sometimes people would come into Mark of the Beastro, say, “Oh, wait, everything’s vegan?” and then leave, Earley said.

“I think anytime that you’ve created that niche, you’re shrinking your customer base,” he said. “It makes things more difficult.”

But overall, Earley said he has received “lots of fantastic feedback” over the years from customers.

“I feel the things that people have said to me about our food and about our space and the community that have been built around it, it’s hard to understate how that feels,” he said in the video.

Mark of the Beastro, and, by extension, The Beehive and AAMP, has “always been a labor of love,” Earley said. “It’s always been something that I was incredibly proud to do. The Salt Lake vegan community is full of wonderful people. I’m honored to have been able to make a space so many people care about, so many people love.”

‘I want people eating good food’

Fans of Mark of the Beastro’s food will be happy to hear that Earley has started working on a cookbook featuring recipes for many of the dishes he served at his restaurant and cafe.

Earley said he got his start in the kitchen by cooking with his mom. The two of them would cook every day, he said, often preparing large, communal meals for their extended family.

After he went vegan and was living in punk houses, he’d cook large vegan meals for everyone in the house, he said.

Sometimes vegan friends from out of state would come through town and hang out in the punk houses where he lived, and Earley would get ideas for vegan dishes from them, he said. Some of those dishes, like the fried “mozzarella” sticks made with battered and fried hearts of palm, later were items on the Mark of the Beastro menu.

Earley said he thinks of vegan cooking as a “puzzle,” and will tinker with a nonvegan recipe in order to make it vegan, while making sure the food still has the same flavor, consistency and feel. Most of the time, though, his “research” happens by talking with friends about vegan food, the way vegans often do, he said.

The cookbook will include Mark of the Beastro staples and specials, like recipes for seitan, ranch dressing, sausage and tofu scramble, along with the oyster mushroom po’boy special and burger, made with Beyond Beef with seasonings, spices and binders added so it “has a better flavor and more complex and deeper flavor,” Earley said.

“I’m not trying to keep any secrets,” he said. “I want people eating good food.”

Earley said his cookbook will “bridge that gap” between cooking feeling “scary and intimidating, to like, ‘Wait, no, this is easy, and I can do this, and it’s fun.’”

‘A place to hang out’

Earley said he had to decide between running Mark of the Beastro or running AAMP and The Beehive, and “the nonprofit was, I think, a bigger priority.”

The Beehive opened in 2016 and hosts a monthly battle of the bands and a weekly open-mic night, as well as burlesque shows, drag events, weekly improv classes, slam poetry, yoga classes, monthly drawing classes, figure drawing sessions and other events.

Last year, The Beehive asked the community for help with rent, utilities and other bills during the slow summer season after its landlords alluded that the venue could be in danger of closing, Earley said at the time. The venue ended up raising more than $6,000 in a day.

Moving forward, Earley told The Tribune he wants to “diversify” the organization’s programming even more, making the space more available to the community and bringing more people in.

“I think that those third spaces, even without the cafe aspect and the coffee and food, [are] super important,” he said. “Of just having a place to hang out and places to go.” For example, on Wednesday night, The Beehive was hosting a game night where people could come play “Magic: The Gathering.”

Earley said he wants The Beehive to “double down” on being an arts organization and a “benefit to the community,” while making it all work financially.

“The loss of the restaurant leaves us with twice as much expense for the nonprofit, which has been definitely very hard,” he said.

To help with the financial side, The Beehive is hosting two fundraiser events for the venue.

The first will be a battle of the bands final on June 19, where 75% of the proceeds will go to The Beehive, which is behind on a couple months of rent, Earley said. The acts in the show will be a mix of bands and solo artists. The winning band will get a working tour van, and the winning solo artist will receive a medieval-style mace as a trophy.

The second fundraiser will be a poetry slam final on June 29, which will feature 10 of the highest-scoring poets from The Beehive’s monthly slam events, battling it out. About half of the funds raised will go to the venue, Earley said.

To buy tickets to events at The Beehive, visit 24tix.com.