Iconic owner of White Dog Cafe looks to new life

Judy Wicks went to a diner for breakfast the other day. Reading the fine print, she set the menu down, appalled.

"Bummer," Wicks said, sighing. "I can't eat the eggs. They're not cage-free."

It has been one month since Wicks sold the White Dog Cafe. For a historical change in an iconic city eatery, the handover went down with surprisingly little fanfare.

No flags lowered to half-staff. No tearful loyal customers stopping by for one last plate of organic salad with goat cheese from a local farm and a burger made from humanely raised cattle.

This is partly because the restaurant has not gone anywhere. It's open for business, and the name and logo and the progressive principles that have become synonymous with it remain unchanged.

Even Wicks hasn't entirely left the scene.

First of all, she still lives upstairs in the charming brick rowhouse on Sansom Street across from the University of Pennsylvania's Law School.

She has also maintained rights to the White Dog name and logo, plus 5 percent of the restaurant business.

Still, a sale is a sale. And Wicks will no longer be the impassioned host of candlelit dinner-lectures with lefty intellectuals and medical ethicists and labor organizers. She will no longer be found breezing through the warren of wooden booths and lace-curtained nooks to greet the masses who want their dinner without a side of guilt.

For 26 years, Wicks ran the restaurant with a mission. Her goal was to address every environmental and ethical concern, to ensure that every bowl of chili, every kilowatt, every contract, and every glass of wine, beer, and water came from sources that were clean and paid their workers fairly.

To maintain those high standards, she said, requires personal conviction and stamina. She tries not to be judgmental about businesses that don't. She just wishes that more of them would.

So now she's taking her mission on the road.

Letting go of the White Dog was difficult, said Wicks, 61. "But I felt relieved."

She had treated the restaurant as an auxiliary heart - pumping socially conscious ideals into the community. She ran mentoring programs, organized trips to educate her customers and staff about the effects of American foreign policy on other nations.