Market, café thrive off beaten path

PONDERAY — It’s lunchtime and the parking lot outside this little café has been pretty much packed from late morning through early afternoon. Inside, a fire crackles agreeably in the corner woodstove while friends chat over soups and wraps and sandwiches in the natural light of floor-to-ceiling windows near the entrance.

Right beside them, rows of shelves are stocked with health foods, as are the three coolers — labeled “Live, Laugh, Love” — that sit filled with gluten-free specialty products and organic take-home dinners.

The back door opens and the room is swept up in the scent of coffee beans tumbling fresh from the roaster. One almost has to stumble upon the place to find it, but with that discovery comes a tasty, new world where healthy menu items are served in an environment that is as eclectic as it is mellow.

Earth Rhythms Natural Market & Café owners Jonah and Megan Lucht opened the business on the Kootenai Cutoff Road this month in the wake of their already successful coffee drive-through business, Bongo Brew. When they purchased Bongo Brew three years ago, it was a thriving concern that had surprised those who said it was too far off the beaten path to make it when it first opened in 2003.

In that time, however, the couple proved how big a draw great coffee and baked goods can be, especially when an entire business district in Ponderay springs up around your profitable little coffee hut. There is such a thing as too much success, however, and the Luchts experienced that when they added breakfast and lunch items to their menu.

“Bongo Brew was getting busier every year and we were selling so much food out of there that we thought, ‘We need to open a café,’” Megan said, adding that the number of vehicles waiting in line grew on curve that matched increased food sales. “We were missing the chance to visit with our friends because of the whole drive-through experience.”

Late last year, the owners enlisted the help of Megan’s parents, Annie and Basil Kendrot, to remodel part of the structure next door to the coffee business and convert it to the new cause. Earth Rhythms started up with a limited menu of deli food and cold sandwiches to go, but quickly shifted course when customers let their voices be heard.

“People wanted hot food and they wanted to be able to sit down,” said Megan. “They wanted a restaurant.”

In came the tables and up went the breakfast and lunch menus. Morning business is driven mostly by call-ins and orders taken over the intercom connecting Earth Rhythms with the Bongo Brew hut. Lunch, meanwhile, becomes a mad dash to keep up with mid-day walk-in traffic and the arrival of customers who call ahead with their orders.

“Right around 11:30 every day, Monday through Friday, we get a rush of calls,” Megan said. “And then it gets a little crazy in here for about two hours — the tables are all full.”

Jonah has come inside to talk coffee — a subject he has been passionate about since helping to open a solar-run coffee shop in Portland, Ore.

“That’s where I fell in love with the coffee industry,” he said. “I started out custom-roasting in the drive-through, but realized that we’d need a larger roaster.”

He now runs small batches of six pounds of coffee at a time through a three-kilo roasting machine located on site.

“It’s the Bongo Brew Roast,” he explained. “That’s our signature roast and you can’t get it anywhere else.”

Gluten-free baker Jennifer Ott filled the counters with displays of muffins and pastries earlier in the day, while cooks Annie Kendrot and Diane Miller are starting to gear up for the lunch rush. The Mediterranean and Southwest wraps, along with the vegetable curry, have become house favorites. The rock star lunch menu item, though, has been the Earth Burger veggie burger.

Earth Rhythms currently is awaiting approval for its beer and wine license, which will usher in the addition of dinner offerings in the café. For now, dinner has turned out to be a fast-growing part of the business through healthy take-home meals, phone orders and — the most recent spike in food sales — on-line orders through the Six Rivers Market.

When the local food cooperative first listed Earth Rhythms’ lasagna and pizzas under its “prepared foods” category last week, the response was instant.

“The take-home dinners have been huge for us,” Megan said. “Yesterday, we sold eight lasagnas and a pizza within two hours on Six Rivers Market.”

The health food section at Earth Rhythms is still catching on, according to Megan, who said the organic products are there for “just-in-case” shoppers.

“You can pick up a dozen eggs or some milk or cereal while you’re here, or you can place an order when you drive up to Bongo Brew and we’ll bag it and bring it out to you,” she said. “But we’re really mostly a restaurant.”

As summer rolls around, the owners plan to expand the business to include outdoor seating in what Megan describes as “one of the last treed areas in Ponderay.” Think of it, she said, as a kind of forested haven amid the retail growth that surrounds it.

“We have so many ideas, like a community garden out front and outdoor dining with a pavilion and a stage for live music in back,” she added. “We want it to be the coolest property on this side of town.”

A customer looks up from his MacBook and leans around to find out the source of a resonant, low note that has suddenly filled the café. The massive tone pours out of a didgeridoo that Jonah crafted from hand-hewn local cedar. He keeps the note alive by using a difficult “circular breathing” technique that leaves no gaps in the music. Later, he demonstrates the sound of the hand drums he also builds as a sideline to the restaurant business.

Among the outdoor activities planned for warmer weather is a regular gathering of what Jonah called “a family friendly drum circle” where all ages are welcome to join in the music making. Facing one another as they prepare to play two of the owner’s hand drums, Basil Kendrot and Jonah Lucht talk about their shared love for drumming and the prospect of future expansion that might include a dedicated space for instrument sales.

The immediate task at hand, however, is staying in front of the rapid trajectory that comes with Earth Rhythms springing up in the wake of Bongo Brew’s popularity.

“This has been an exciting project,” Kendrot said. “It’s about the health of our family, the health of Sandpoint and, ultimately, the health of the planet. Earth Rhythms — it’s all one thing to us.”

For more information on Earth Rhythms Natural Market & Café, call (208) 255-4863 or Google the business name and click on the Facebook page link.