Robert and Arielle Ashford: Speakeasy Dreams and Sober Spaces

AS A YOUNG PERSON WORKING IN BARS and restaurants, Robert Ashford dreamed of owning a hip bar-restaurant one day, a speakeasy-style place he would call Volstead, tongue in cheek, after the 1919 act of Congress that prohibited the production, sale, and transportation of alcohol in the United States. In other words, the law that launched Prohibition.

More than a decade later, Ashford made his dream come true, together with his wife and business partner, Arielle. In 2022, the couple opened the doors to Volstead on Main Street in Manayunk. His restaurant and bar is very different from the one he had imagined: Like all their food businesses, Volstead doesn’t serve alcohol. It’s Philadelphia’s first zero-proof bar and restaurant. It also happens to be vegan. All the cooks, bartenders, and servers are either in recovery or have been involved with the criminal justice system. Volstead is a sober-friendly workplace and the ideal place for anyone who wants to hang out in an alcohol-free environment.

Volstead is actually one of the Ashfords’ more recent concepts. It joins Unity Taco, Unity Yoga, Unity Java, and Unity Recovery in their growing collection of social enterprise concepts.

But to understand this duo of community-minded entrepreneurs, you have to go back to their first concepts, Unity Recovery and Unity Yoga: a side-by-side pair of centers focused on supporting those with substance abuse disorder through peer support. It makes sense for the Ashfords to launch these service-centered projects. The two, both with degrees in social work and years of recovery under their belts, met at a White House summit on recovery in 2015. Arielle was an invited speaker, and Robert was there as the director of a national recovery nonprofit. “It’s where our fates intertwined,” says Robert.

Arielle imagined that after grad school, she’d become a talk therapist. A yoga teacher, she uses her skills to support people on and off the yoga mat. “Yoga isn’t therapy, but it's a lot of coaching and guidance and cheerleading and teaching, a lot of sharing of wisdom. I think the social work degree helps in that,” she says.

As those projects flourished, they were already dreaming up what would come next. They knew they wanted to provide jobs for people in recovery from substance abuse and those who had been incarcerated. “There are a lot of transferable skills that go into hospitality restaurants, with a low barrier to entry,” says Robert. “But these are also skills that can benefit people longer-term.”

The question that has always guided the Ashfords is: How are we going to help our community right now? “Yes, there’s federal support and City support. Politicians and others try to do things. But I think what we learned through the lived experience of having been through recovery ourselves is we knew we wanted to give back because recovery is heavily stigmatized. Nobody’s coming to save us,” says Robert.

“The question that guides us is, ‘How are we going to help our community right now?’ Nobody’s coming to save us.”

As soon as Unity Taco took off, Robert and Arielle were imagining ways to grow so they could offer good jobs to even more people. No one who works for their businesses earns less than $15 an hour, which is more than double Pennsylvania’s current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, and their average hourly wage is $21.

Good jobs for the recovery community, in addition to his long-held dream of running a speakeasy, was a driving inspiration behind opening Volstead. To date, their businesses have employed 140 people in Philadelphia who are in recovery or coming out of the criminal justice system. And Robert himself is putting his years of hospitality experience to use as Volstead’s executive chef.

Arielle and Robert have no plans to slow down. There are so many people they still want to employ, to help with recovery support and services. Their next social enterprise concept—a burger joint—will be opening in Roxborough this spring.

“It’s going to be called Lone Star Burgers by Unity. Which, if you know that I’m from Texas, it won’t come as a big surprise,” he says. “What might be a surprise for someone who owns a vegan restaurant is that I love red meat.” Lone Star Burgers will be as inclusive as the rest of their restaurants, with ample choices in the meat and meat-free categories.

There’s no doubt Lone Star Burgers will find its fans. But at the end of the day, like all their businesses, it will be the kind of restaurant they themselves would want to visit.

“People don’t really build stuff for our community. Somewhat selfishly, we built these spaces for ourselves. We set out to build things that we wanted because nobody else would build them for us,” says Robert.