Cafe Fresh Adds to Farmers Market

If browsing the bounty at the Santa Fe Farmers Market gets your tummy rumbling, you soon may have another option for quelling those hunger pains.

The Market is working on opening Cafe Fresh, a spot to grab some breakfast or lunch, not to mention a selection of scoops from Taos Ice Cream.

“It will feature items sourced from the vendors themselves,” said Bryan Adams, executive director of the Farmers Market. Selections will include bread, sandwiches, salads, soups, smoothies and fresh juice, he said.

“They won’t be full meals in the traditional sense,” he said, noting that you won’t sit down at a table and get waited on. You’ll order at the counter and get wrapped food that already has been prepared by local restaurants, ready-made for to-go orders.

But the cafe also will have tables and chairs inside to seat 40 to 50 people, along with warm-weather outdoor seating on nonmarket days, Adams said.

“It will be six or eight weeks before we have an opening,” he added on Thursday.

The cafe is an anchor and completion of the Santa Fe Farmers Market Shops, an expansion of the Market into space between its pavilion and the Second Street Brewery in the Railyard. That 2,500 square feet of space had been vacant for almost four years, he said.

Late last year, the Shops opened with Artful Tea, ChocolateSmith, Gardens, Farmers Market Gift Shop and Vivac Winery. “It was a really great Christmas season,” Adams said.

Currently, the shops are open 8 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturdays and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Sundays, and occasionally for special events. The same will be true for the cafe, at least in the beginning.

“We hope to have them open full time, as the Railyard gets more busy,” Adams said of the shops.

But the Market has run short on money for the cafe, so it’s holding a fundraiser on Feb. 16 to help buy equipment and furnishings for the space. Music, dancing and dinner will be featured, with food from Atrisco Cafe, The Tea House, Chocolate Maven, Annapurna’s, 315 Restaurant and Wine Bar and Tree House. Drinks will be provided by Vivac Winery and Second Street Brewery.

The event, to be held in the Market Pavilion, will cost $10 for kids under 10, and $25 in advance for adults, or $30 at the door.

The Market developed the shops to help raise money to support its building at 1607 Paseo de Peralta without having to raise fees on farmers selling on market days, Adams said.

“We would like to have it all local, but we need to make money,” he said, noting that some shops have carried items from other countries. “The irony of us having a store with imports is kind of glaring.”

The shops include items from Africa, Nepal and other international sources, but Adams said many items are produced by village cooperatives. “We still support farmers from other parts of the world,” he said.

But some of the shops, such as Vivac and ChocolateSmith, do make their products locally, he noted.

Cafe Fresh, besides using locally-sourced food, will sport a mural by Dominic Arquero (Cochiti) that features a scene imagining Santa Fe back when it was a pueblo. When finished, it will show the “three sisters” — corn, squash and beans — growing in waffle gardens, with the Sangre de Cristos in the background.

Adams said the scene will be framed with a lintel and adobe bricks, to give the impression that viewers are looking outdoors from inside a pueblo building.