The Plantiful Pantry officially opened doors Tuesday, Aug. 1, in uptown Mount Vernon.
The restaurant is an expansion of the offerings that Devon Olberding and Mariah Andrews have been running since early 2020, when they offered a subscription meal service with many of the menu items being things they found were popular from those or their own families inspiring the menu they’re currently working with.
Andrews said that the menu for the restaurant will be highly flexible depending on what ingredients are most in season, since many of their ingredients come from what is in season.
“Obviously, if sweet corn isn’t in season, we’re not going to offer something like a sweet corn salad,” Andrews said. “We want the ingredients that are at the peak of the season and freshness to inspire our menus.”
Those ingredients come from relationships the duo have cultivated with many local farmers over the years.
Andrews and Olberding said working with farmers is something that keeps the restaurant busiest at the moment, to know what is in season and available for them to work on their menus each week.
There’s also been a lot of work adding on to the subscription model and running a restaurant at the same time, and so they have brought on August Tweito to assist them. Tweito has a true passion of working with vegetables in the menus and meals he is cooking.
“I was told by someone early on in my career that I’d never find a restaurant that just wanted to work with vegetables,” Tweito said. “I’ve found that hasn’t been the case.”
He worked with Andrews with a food truck at Morning Glory in 2022 and Andrews and Olberding have assisted at a number of restaurants on top of their own subscription service over the past few years.
Andrews and Olberding said the opportunity for the restaurant space in uptown Mount Vernon was something they learned about in December. For the past year and a half, they had been using the professional kitchen over at Southeast Linn Community Center for their subscription meal services.
“SELCC was a terrific incubator for us,” Andrews said. “We learned a lot about what worked and didn’t work in that space, had access to a lot of commercial kitchen to work in and start envisioning what would come next. SELCC had wonderful volunteers and staff, always welcoming us and it allowed us to grow our subscription service quickly having a dedicated space we could use every week.”
When Jude Smith and Greg Raupp were looking for tenants for First on First, they were approached about potentially being one of the tenants for that space.
“Ultimately, our goal was to eventually find a space in uptown Mount Vernon with a kitchen to work with, and the former Sing-A-Long Bar and Grill space would work for us,” Andrews said.
The hours of The Plantiful Pantry’s café is currently 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Fridays. They offer grab and go options or sit down dining experience.
And in their first week, the trio admits they have been busy. There have been multiple days where they’ve run out of ingredients for one of the menu items forcing grocery runs to places like Gary’s mid shift, which Tweito notes is one of his least favorite things to happen. He wants as many people to experience these great dishes as they can.
“One of the comments we always get is how flavorful so many of the items we are making are,” Andrews said.
“People always are also surprised with how filling dishes can be as well,” Olberding said.
Tweito said that the goal of the restaurant is to continue to keep up with demand but also to make sure the chefs and staff also practice self-care to not burn out. The restaurant, because it uses primarily vegetables, has a lot more cutting and prep work than other restaurants which can be time consuming and harder work.
Later phases of the restaurant may include different hours, that this was just a soft launch for the trio getting used to the flow of the business. Andrews knows this restaurant could prove to be a destination type restaurant for Mount Vernon and Lisbon communities if done right.
Getting ready to open the space took more than a month for the crew. They took ownership in late June of the space, and at that point, work went into deep cleaning the kitchen which had formerly cooked a range of options ready to prepare and cook vegetarian options.
There was the installation of a new cooler bought at auction and the minor inconveniences encountered there, the replacement of a non working stove they had. As well as waiting at times for the construction work to the building being completed in other areas.
“We really needed all those days after taking ownership just to be ready for running a restaurant,” Olberding said. “We needed to see that we could flow our subscription services on top of the work of running a restaurant.”
The trio notes, however, that their skillsets work well with one another and even if one person comes up with an idea for a dish, the way they prepare certain items for that dish all contribute to the restaurant’s success.
Plantiful Pantry has also had working relationships with many of the restaurants in uptown Mount Vernon over the years, and doesn’t view them as competitors, but as collaborators with the same goal – feeding the community and the visitors to the town of Mount Vernon.
“There are very few options for grab and go in the uptown currently,” Andrews said. “Some businesses maintain carry out options if you call ahead, but our business has designed grab and go options for people who have just a few minutes for lunch and want to grab something healthy.”
“It has been fun watching people come into this new space and see how it changed from when it was the Sing-A-Long Bar and Grill,” Olberding said.
The staff noted in the first week, some of their favorite items have been the creamy dill salad and the Mexican Street Taco Bowl.
Sophia Andrews helps a customer check out at the restaurant in uptown Mount Vernon Monday, Aug. 8.