Selma Miriam, Founder of the Feminist Restaurant Bloodroot, Dies at 89

Selma Miriam and Noel Furie were unhappy housewives, as they put it, when they met at a gathering of the National Organization for Women in Connecticut in 1972. Soon after, they divorced their husbands, came out as lesbians and set about creating a place for women to congregate.

Ms. Miriam was a talented and adventurous cook, and at first they held dinners at her house, charging $8 for a weekly buffet of lush vegetarian dishes — a culinary choice they made because a friend pointed out that a feminist food enterprise should not contribute to the suffering of animals.

In 1977 they opened Bloodroot, a feminist restaurant and bookstore tucked into an industrial building on a dead-end street in Bridgeport. They had no waiters, no printed menu and no cash register, and they did not advertise. Against the odds, the business thrived.

“The people who need us, find us,” Ms. Miriam always said.

Selma Miriam died on Feb. 6 at her home in Westport, Conn. She was 89.

The cause was pneumonia, her longtime partner, Carolanne Curry, said.

“We don’t just want a piece of the pie, we want a whole new recipe,” Ms. Miriam declared in “A Culinary Uprising: The Story of Bloodroot,” a feature-length 2024 documentary about the restaurant. (Another documentary, “Bloodroot,” came out in 2019.)

She was determined to live her values, as she put it, and Bloodroot was the embodiment of those values: a place for good conversation, activism and terrific food. It was also a non-hierarchical endeavor; customers served themselves and cleared their own tables.

At first, Bloodroot was run as a collective, though the early members eventually moved on. In recent decades, it has been a collective of two: Ms. Miriam and Ms. Furie. (They dated very briefly many decades ago, and they remained fast friends.)

An avid gardener, Ms. Miriam named the restaurant for the native plant that begins flowering in early spring and spreads through a root system that grows underground, forming new colonies of flowers. “Separate but connected” was the metaphor she was after. She also liked the toughness of the name.

With help from her parents, along with $19,000 she had squirreled away from her 75-cents-an-hour work as a landscaper and an onerous mortgage from the only bank among the many she approached that would loan to a woman in Connecticut in the 1970s, she bought a former machine shop in a working-class neighborhood in Bridgeport for $80,000. It was a funky space, but it had room for a garden in the back, and it overlooked Long Island Sound.

She and her colleagues filled the place with thrift-shop furniture, political posters, and vintage photos and paintings of women. Over the years, customers contributed photos of their own mothers and grandmothers. “The wall of women,” Ms. Miriam and Ms. Furie called it.

The space had cozy nooks for armchairs, and the bookstore was filled with the feminist canon, as well as handwritten notes from fans, including the writers Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, among the many who gave readings there. The house cats were named for feminist heroes like Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem.

To create her ever-changing menus, Ms. Miriam drew on vegetarian culinary traditions from around the world, using food she sourced locally and grew in the restaurant’s garden. The women who joined her in the kitchen — immigrants from Brazil, Ethiopia, Mexico, Honduras and Jamaica, among other countries — contributed dishes from their national cuisines. One of the women, Carol Graham, who is Jamaican, came up with the recipe for their jerk “chicken,” made with tofu and seitan, which has long been one of Bloodroot’s best sellers.

Soups like Cambodian kanji, with rice, potatoes and cashews, were a mainstay. In recent years, Ms. Miriam had begun experimenting with vegan cheeses made from cultured nut milks. The New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, who visited in 2017, just before the restaurant’s 40th birthday, wrote that she was partial to a “deeply flavored Cheddar-like number with a ripe, softly alcoholic aroma, named after the writer Willa Cather.”

Bloodroot was conceived as a women-only community, but it drew men, too. Customers captivated by the homey atmosphere and the evolving menu stayed loyal for decades, which kept the place afloat in lean times.

“When we started,” Ms. Furie said in an interview, “it felt like we were jumping off a cliff.” Paying homage to that spirit, a framed photograph from the 1991 movie “Thelma and Louise,” about another pair of women who went rogue, hangs in Bloodroot’s open kitchen.

“There are people who come in with their 3-year-old and say, ‘I came here when I was 3, and now I’m back with my child,’ and I think how amazing that we had that impact, without even planning it,” Ms. Miriam told The Washington Post in 2017. “We followed our political and social beliefs, and had an appreciation for the earth and the animals — all the things that fall under the broad umbrella of feminism.”

Selma Miriam Davidson was born on Feb. 25, 1935, in the Bronx, and grew up in Bridgeport. She was the only child of Faye and Elias Davidson, who opened a fabric store, Davidson’s Fabrics, on Main Street in Bridgeport the year she was born.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Jackson College, then the women’s school at Tufts University in Massachusetts, in 1956. (She majored in biology and psychology, but she said the best thing she learned in college was how to knit continental style.) She met her husband, Abe Bunks, who would become a lawyer, while she was in college. When they divorced in 1976, she began using her middle name as her surname.

Ms. Miriam was frank about her history. She spoke of the illegal abortion she had at 15, with help from her parents, who did not want their only child to drop out of school. She talked about becoming pregnant in college, the result of an ill-fitting diaphragm, which curtailed her hopes of pursuing a Ph.D. in biology.

She was preternaturally tough. The week Bloodroot opened, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctor removed the lump in an outpatient procedure, but told her that if she didn’t have a radical mastectomy, she would be dead within three years. She refused because she didn’t want to miss work.

“I was the only one who could cook,” she pointed out.

The cancer never recurred, and she remained suspicious of the medical profession, preferring to treat herself with homeopathic remedies. For most of her life, she did not have health insurance.

In addition to Ms. Curry, Ms. Miriam is survived by her children, Sabrina and Carey Bunks. Ms. Curry said she met Ms. Miriam when she came for lunch one day in 1988 — and she stayed for dinner for 37½ years.

“There’s no reason we should have made this work, and in a lot of ways we didn’t make it work,” Ms. Miriam said of the restaurant in “A Culinary Uprising,” noting that Bloodroot was not always a moneymaker. “But we’ve had a life.”