The Good Bowl
March 4, 2010 • By Hana Uman,
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Local and organic products combine with vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free choices to create A Bowl of Good Café. Co-owner Katrina Didot has sold natural products for more than four years and opened the Café in August.
For no more than $7, Harrisonburg locals are now able to travel from continent to continent simply by stepping into a restaurant only a few minutes away.
Customers sit around dark wooden tables and chairs, drinking fair-trade coffee from Nicaragua, munching on coconut chicken from Thailand, or shoveling down rice and black beans from a colorful plate of Latin-American food.
“Globally inspired, local goodness” is the mission of A Bowl of Good Café, owned by Harrisonburg residents Katrina Didot, 42, and Rachael Dorsey, 31. Didot describes the café’s cuisine as “labor-intensive, handmade food.”
“Here you can sort of choose what part of the globe you want to eat from,” said customer Paul Yoder.
Less than 10 minutes from JMU, the café is on Mount Clinton Pike, across from Eastern Mennonite University. While the focus of A Bowl of Good is international, Didot and Dorsey try to use as many local and organic products as they can. Vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options are also readily available.
Didot, who has lived in and traveled to a variety of countries, said the name was inspired by her husband who suggested it while they lived in Guatemala.
“He loved my food and he would say, ‘Someday you ought to have a vending truck that drives around and serves people bowls of good, and you should call it A Bowl of Good.’”
The café’s motto of “Globally inspired, local goodness” is not limited only to its food. Didot and Dorsey, along with their family and friends, made the café’s tables and chairs from local wood and placed tiles in the center of the tables that Didot had collected from her travels abroad.
The two owners sit together, drinking coffee and reminiscing. They greet customers as they walk in and out of the café, knowing almost all of them on a first-name basis.
“Because we’re independent business owners, we’re able to reflect who we are as people,” Dorsey said.
Didot and Dorsey met a few years ago at Kate’s Natural Products, the café’s first location. At the time, Didot was the sole owner, and Dorsey asked her if she was interested in a business partner.
“She shot me down!” Dorsey said, laughing with Didot. After the café at Kate’s closed, Didot said she felt she could either let the business go or continue to grow it.
“I knew I couldn’t grow it by myself, so I called crazy Rachael and said, ‘Hey, do you want a life change?’ ”
They opened the café in August, but have sold the products for a few years in groceries and farmers markets, including those in Harrisonburg.
Brad Burrow, the manager of Artisans’ Hope, a shop next door to the café featuring fair-trade and handmade crafts, has worked with Didot and Dorsey to put on monthly events where food and crafts from a specific culture will be showcased.
“We’re looking to create a good community thing here for Harrisonburg in general, as a whole, as just a place where people can come, relax, have a good healthy meal and shop in a shop that supports fair trade,” Burrow said.
In January, the two businesses teamed up to hold a fundraiser in response to the earthquake in Haiti. One hundred percent of the café’s proceeds went to the Mennonite Central Committee’s earthquake relief efforts. The café served between 400 to 500 people and raised about $8,000.
“We had rice and beans up to our ears!” Didot said.
Keeping with their focus on community, Didot said she and Dorsey try to use as many local ingredients as they can. For example, freezing local peppers from the summer to use all year, buying hydroponic lettuce (lettuce grown using mineral nutrient solutions) and using only local beef and pork.
“It’s important for us to know the farmer and know how the cow or pig is being raised,” Didot said.
The café also uses green-friendly processes like collecting and using water from rain barrels, composting and using compostable products, using a solar water heater, and handmaking all of the food in the café’s kitchen.
While the local food and green movements are growing in Harrisonburg, Didot and Dorsey said buying local and organic has been difficult on their business financially. Didot said they have to pay two to four times more than they need to on some products.
Didot used the store’s sausage as an example. While sausage is normally around 99 cents a pound through a food distributor or from a grocery store, she pays around $4 a pound locally.
“It’s not the cheapest way to have a restaurant for us, but it’s what we want to do,” Dorsey said.
“We never open up a can and plop it in a dish and call it food.”
Contact Hana Uman at umanhr@jmu.edu
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Best of the 'Burg Supplement
April 29, 2010 Issue in Print
[...] newspaper, The Breeze, just published a nice article about A Bowl of Good here: http://breezejmu.org/2010/03/04/the-good-bowl/ Thanks to Hana Uman for the great [...]