The Barista

Michelle R. Johnson-Strickland has been in the coffee industry since 2012, when she started in hospitality at Bayou Bakery in Virginia. She did not arrive with the plan of becoming a coffee culture critic. She arrived the way most people arrive to any work that eventually consumes them — showing up, paying attention, and refusing to unsee what she saw.

In 2016, she founded The Chocolate Barista — a platform built for Black coffee professionals and anyone who has ever wondered why specialty coffee, an industry that sells warmth and belonging as its product, can feel so cold from the inside. The Chocolate Barista began as a directory of Black-owned coffee businesses and grew into the editorial platform it is today: part journal, part criticism, part business case for a different way of doing this work.

She is the first Black woman to compete at the national level in barista competition. She is the sole recipient of the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity's Rose Nicaud Award — named for Rose Nicaud, the free Black woman who sold coffee in New Orleans in the early 1800s and is considered one of America's first coffee entrepreneurs. These are not decorations. They are context.

Her core argument — the one she has been making, in essays, in consulting rooms, in keynotes, and in this journal, for nearly a decade — is that inclusivity is the key to making more money in hospitality. Not because it is the right thing to do. Because it works. The industry has been optimizing the wrong side of the ledger. She is not here to convince anyone that right is right. She writes only for the people who have already committed to change, and need a strategy.

Today, Michelle operates across several interconnected ventures under Ghost Town World. The Chocolate Barista is her primary editorial platform — where the writing, the YouTube channel, and the consulting practice live. Ghost Town Oats, now in its sixth year, is the oat milk company she founded and runs as sole founder and full-time team. And Block Standard — the hospitality education and credentialing program she is building for a January 2027 launch — is the architecture behind everything she has learned about what hospitality can be when it is treated as a cultural standard and not a service transaction.

She makes her coffee at home with an Ascaso Steel Duo PID. She uses Ghost Town Oats. She has strong opinions about both, and she will tell you about them at length.

Consulting inquiries, speaking requests, and press: use the contact form or email michelle@ghosttown.world.