Nabolom Bakery & Pizzeria opened in 1976 as a worker collective in Berkeley, California. It survived disco, Reaganomics, the dot-com bust, the 2008 crash, and a full closure in 2015 before co-owners Sabra Stepak and Julia Elliott brought it back to life a year later.
It could not survive a "defund the police" mural.
The bakery is now $30,000 in debt and two months behind on rent, according to reporting from KRON4 and the San Francisco Chronicle. Stepak and Elliott are shutting the doors for good — half a century of continuous operation in one of America's most expensive cities, ended not by the rent or the economy but by the owners' own political choices.
The timeline is a case study in self-inflicted damage. The bakery displayed a "defund the police" mural. It put up a "Teach Palestine" poster. Then it reposted an anti-ICE message featuring a BART car on Instagram — which got the account removed from the platform entirely. Sales dropped 20 percent after the Instagram removal alone.
Twenty percent. From a single social media post.
Stepak and Elliott also opposed a local upzoning effort in Berkeley, which sparked boycott discussions among the very progressive customer base they'd spent years cultivating. When your clientele is the Berkeley left and you still manage to get boycotted by them, you've achieved something genuinely impressive.
The bakery had already died once before. It closed in 2015 after the original collective model finally ran out of gas. Stepak and Elliott reopened it roughly six months later, investing their own money and reputation into a neighborhood institution. They had a functioning business. Loyal customers. A brand that had survived since Gerald Ford was president.
Then they decided the bakery needed a foreign policy position.
The "defund the police" mural wasn't a business decision. The "Teach Palestine" poster wasn't a business decision. The anti-ICE repost that cost them their Instagram account and a fifth of their revenue wasn't a business decision. These were political statements made from behind a cash register — and the cash register noticed.
Berkeley is not exactly hostile territory for progressive causes. This is a city where you can find a Che Guevara flag hanging from a $1.4 million Victorian. The customer base was already sympathetic. The owners didn't need to signal anything — the zip code did the work. But signaling wasn't enough. They needed to escalate. Mural. Poster. Instagram post. Boycott of a housing project.
Each one a little louder. Each one a little more expensive.
The progressive coalition that Nabolom courted is the same coalition that eats its own over zoning disputes. The upzoning opposition put Stepak and Elliott on the wrong side of the Berkeley YIMBY crowd — people who believe housing density is a moral imperative — and suddenly the bakery that checked every other progressive box was getting protest-reviewed on Yelp.
Fifty years. A worker collective founded the year Jimmy Carter was elected. A neighborhood institution that outlasted three recessions, a pandemic, and the entire rise and fall of Jamba Juice.