D’Onna Stubblefield Leads By Example
The GM + beverage director at Sally in Philadelphia is full of Black joy (and wine).
As the general manager and beverage director at Sally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, D’Onna Stubblefield’s primary goal isn’t to build the best wine list in Philly (which she has), or even to make wine approachable to everyone (which she does). It’s to ensure the needs of her staff are paramount above all, including the needs of guests and overall business logistics.
This rare, but supportive approach remains in direct conflict with most of the hospitality industry today. But between her lived experiences with the industry’s systemic sexism and racism, along with a staunch advocacy for mental health among hospitality professionals, she knows that if she doesn’t cultivate the culture she wants to see, no one else will.
D’Onna Stubblefield moved to Philly from her native Pittsburgh in 2016, where she hoped to leverage the service industry’s flexibility to make a living, as well as maintain that same freedom to nourish her creative pursuits. But it didn’t take long for the true cost of that flexibility to become apparent.
“It kind of slapped me in the face with the reality of what actual harm a company can place on an individual who is trying to do a good job, or how much your job can harmfully affect your life,” she says. “[I realized] how much the service industry can steal energy from the people that make it what it is.”
After going public with her toxic experience working in coffee, Stubblefield describes being run into the ground, where she stayed for years while “trying to put my heart back together.” Then, in the midst of rebuilding, COVID struck. She calls it “the best and worst thing” that could have happened, as it gave her—and so many service industry professionals—the opportunity to completely re-examine their relationships with hospitality as both employees and as human beings.
She faced a choice: whether or not to continue in an industry where she was consistently being harmed. So she made a promise to herself. In order to re-enter hospitality, it would be on her terms. She’d need to be one of the decision-makers actually working to build the culture she wanted to see—one that would prioritize people over profits. One where “empathy, concern, and compassion” permeate from the top down to counter the abuse pervasive in service.
“I wanted to prove a point,” says Stubblefield. “I wanted to prove that you could actually have a diverse workforce with all sorts of people from different backgrounds, different economic backgrounds, racial backgrounds, sexual backgrounds, and you can actually give a shit about them, and in exchange they will give your guests good service… You can actually have a workforce where people are happy to come to work to work for you.”
With the time and space to reinvent the status quo, she realized the idea of inviting marginalized people to the proverbial table was an inherently broken approach. “When you get into ‘Let's create a diverse table,’ for me it's: ‘Let's just destroy the table and start over, because I can't invite people to an established system when the established system is fucked up,” she laughs. “We're tearing the whole table down.”
She got that chance at Sally. When the sourdough pizza-slash-wine bar and bottle shop initially opened for takeout in December 2020, she knew it was a risk to redefine what work and the relationships between co-workers mean during such a volatile time. But if not her, who? And if not now, when?
Now nearly a year in, Stubblefield remains adamant about certain things at work, but first and foremost is that coworkers are not a family. “I don’t believe in that,” she says. “I believe in people having autonomy outside their jobs. But you are in a community, and when you’re in a community, it's sometimes better than a family would be because you want to take care of each other and you want to help each other.” It’s a refreshing and increasingly popular sentiment among hospitality workers, and to her, it’s a win-win-win for businesses, employees, and guests.
“Let's just destroy the table and start over… we're tearing the whole table down.”
This mentality shift has also allowed her to use the skills she’s honed both in coffee and in wine to help make ancient beverages more approachable for people who might be intimidated by a snobbish culture. “My whole philosophy is meeting people where they are,” she says. This philosophy of approachability, coupled with her commitment to both individual and collective preservation, allowed her to fully embrace something precious: Black joy.
“Black joy is very deeply important to me because I think that it's not something that American society is very familiar with,” Stubblefield explains, citing society’s tendency to fixate on topics of trauma rather than triumph. “That’s not the totality of what being Black is.”
She sees it as essential to her generation, many of who watched their parents and grandparents resign themselves to unsatisfactory jobs in order to survive rather than to thrive. “I’m a recovering perfectionist and workaholic, but COVID helped me stop and be like, ‘No, I can actually enjoy my life… and I think that’s completely different from what our grandparents and our parents. They couldn't walk away [from their] responsibilities. So yeah, Black joy is a very, very defined thing for me, and I think it's a very defined thing for a lot of Black Millennials.”
But her search for joy isn’t always easy, and it’s rarely accomplished solo. Stubblefield credits a strong support system as one of the ways she’s been able to create an authentic life for herself.
“My group of college friends are people that I still look up to, because they will tell me the truth—specifically Black female friends that are my age and we're living through the same shit,” she says. “When you see a Black woman who is articulate in a very specific way about wine and food, I think people can become very much starstruck in a way, and it’s almost like another level of like tokenizing, so having these close friendships and relationships with people who are my family who will tell me the truth is important to me.”
“Black joy is a very defiant thing for me, and I think for a lot of Black Millennials.”
Does Stubblefield have it all figured out? She laughs. “It’s an illusion,” she says. “No one has their shit together.” But when I ask her if she considers herself successful, she pauses.
“That’s a hard one. I used to define success by accomplishment. Now, I think I define it a lot more by knowing I can accomplish anything I want, but if I’m not okay, it doesn’t mean anything,” she says. “Success in my career has been asking for help. That's a new thing for me: asking for help, demanding support, demanding space for myself… Success to me is ‘My life is good, I’m taking care of myself.’”
If she wasn’t back in the trenches, Stubblefield says she’d be helping other hospitality workers take care of themselves instead. “I see the ways in which my mental health has been challenged by working in a service environment, and how there doesn’t seem to be a lot of mental health related support, specifically for service workers,” she says. “There's so much abuse coming to the forefront that we all kind of knew about.”
[Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health related to beverage and hospitality, please check out and share this list of resources.]
Finally finding the right place for her to cultivate joy isn’t the end of Stubblefield’s journey. In early 2021, she launched the “Hype Juice” podcast, where she aims to take wine and make it “normal,” she says with a laugh. “All of them [wine podcasts] are so fucking boring! I was studying wine for 30 hours a week, and I had to do that in order to understand what the fuck these people are talking about… it felt like there was nothing for regular ass people who don’t know anything about wine, who just want to sit and have a conversation.”
With two episodes under her belt, she’s taking it slow. But I, for one, am certainly looking—and hoping—for lots more to come from D’Onna.
Prohibitchin' is made possible by a sponsorship from Hopsbauer, a woman-owned hops brokerage company based in San Diego. Hopsbauer brings the best hops from around the world to craft breweries. Find out more by visiting Hopsbauer.com, and thanks to Liz Bauer for her generous support!
What I’m Reading
I absolutely love Courtney Iseman’s writing and I absolutely hate some of the topics she’s had to cover lately—namely, the ongoing dangers women face working in (or simply enjoying) alcohol. Her Substack newsletter Hugging The Bar is a wonderful collection of insightful interviews, unflinching looks at the barriers marginalized people in craft beer experience constantly, and what we should all be doing about it. Subscribe (for free!) today for great commentary from a talented writer.
What I’m Writing
A book! I recently acquired an agent and am finishing my proposal that looks at the overlaps between beer and cider. There are a lot more overlaps between wine and cider, but hey, beer’s sort of my thing and there are already plenty of books about wine stuff. Anyway, stay tuned for more information about that very exciting (and very terrifying) project and be sure to email me your suggestions for cideries that have the potential to convert beer drinkers into cider drinkers.
Fun Fact!
Due to my status as an Extremely Basic Person, my favorite planet is the most obvious: Saturn. BUT, did you know that Saturn has the second-shortest day in the solar system (after Jupiter) and one Saturn year is around 29 ½ Earth years (or to be more precise, 10,756 Earth days). When is YOUR birthday on other planets?
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Get to know her and you'll realize how she herself is a racist, alcoholic, pathological liar. Aren't journalists supposed to do background work? You certainly didn't do your due diligence with this article. I mean the woman steals from her own job...Dismisses who she feels like, and is an all around disgusting bully