It’s 8:00 am on a rainy Saturday morning. Kevin Shinn, owner of Bread & Cup, sits at a table inside his restaurant and finishes the eggs and sausage breakfast he made for himself.

“Haven’t had time to eat yet,” he says with a smile.

Shinn gets his eggs from a guy in Valparaiso who drops them off every Friday.  He estimates they go through about 28 to 30 dozen eggs a week. Of course, buying his inventory locally is nothing new for Shinn; he’s been doing it since the restaurant opened in August of 2007.

“I’ve built my business model around it. I’ve planned my menu, my idea, my concept around sourcing things locally; so to me, it’s indispensable,” he says.

Shinn runs his cleaned plate back to the kitchen and says goodbye to the other chefs doing prep work. He then emerges with his trusty green wagon which he’ll use to help carry all of the food he buys from the Farmers’ Market back to the restaurant.  Donning a cap with the Bread and Cup logo, he heads out the front door into the rain.

The restaurant is located on the corner of 8th and S in the Haymarket, and it’s only about a 100-yard walk to their booth at the Farmers’ Market. On the way there, Shinn talks about how important it is for Bread and Cup to have a presence at the Farmers’ Market.

“The Farmers’ Market is what helped us get started and helped advertise and market our business. We had a booth there just to familiarize people with our name, our product and our faces. Every week, people would come by and ask if we were open yet. It really helped us get our name out there in the very beginning.”

A tent with a banner that reads “Bread and Cup: Simple Food and Drink” is now in sight, and Shinn waves to a couple of his employees who are standing underneath.

He continues: “The people that are shopping here are going to be the people that eat at my restaurant so I want to make sure that I’m close to them and familiar to them, and that just helps build our reputation. So it’s certainly worth our while to have a booth here even though we’re so close to the market.”

“Mornin’ guys,” Shinn says to his employees that are running the booth.

The smell of fresh flowers and produce is in the air; it’s intensified by the rain. The sounds of a string quartet are heard off in the distance. Signs that read “Bluff Valley Farm”, “Shadow Brook Farm”, and “Martin Farms” all hang overhead families that are tending to curious marketgoers. 

“It’s quite a bit of work to put a booth together for the whole season,” Shinn says. “But we’ve found a rhythm, and we’ve done it enough times that we know what we’re going to need and what to take with us to set up. I can come down here and get the booth set up in 15 minutes, and the crew comes in and brings all the baked goods while I do my shopping.”

As Shinn makes his way deeper in the market, one of the women at an asparagus booth yells out to him: “Hey Kevin!”

Shinn says hello and asks how she’s doing, he parks his wagon next to the booth that’s run by the two women. He grabs around 20 bundles and put puts them in the wagon. He then pulls out his checkbook from his shirt pocket, writes the women a check and thanks them.

“People really seem to like our asparagus fritters. We make this fritter batter, put fresh asparagus in it and then fry it; it’s pretty good. Of course, you could fry anything and it’d taste good,” Shinn says with a laugh.

He then stops at Harvest Home’s tent that offers a wide variety of fresh flowers. As he approaches, a woman calls out to him: “Hey there, Kevin.”

He smiles and greets her and tells her what he wants. Another woman there puts together a bouquet for him; he writes her a check and says he’ll be back next week.

“We get fresh flowers from them every week; it’s a symbol of the season,” Shinn says.

He loops around to the other side of the market and approaches a father and son who are standing next to several coolers filled with frozen lamb shanks.

“There’s just so much flavor in them. Who knows why there’s so much flavor in a tough cut of meat like that?” Shinn says.

He buys 18 shanks, but says he won’t cook them tonight because they’re frozen, and they’ll take all day to cook. He’ll use them next week.

The restaurant owner loves shopping at the Farmer’s Market and getting to know the people that grow the products he uses.

“People can see me shopping, they can interact with me and can also ask me what’s on the menu tonight; it’s a lot of fun that way.”

Shinn makes his way to a few more booths where he picks up some oregano, thyme, herbs, dill and basil among other things.

“I try to visit some of the farms,” he says. “I went out to one Thursday and you see what it takes to run a farm and deal with the weather, and how you have to get your product out of the ground, get it cleaned and get it to the market. That takes a lot of work, and yeah, you might pay a little bit more, but should you base your decisions solely on economics or should you base your decisions on that and on your connection to the community?”

The string quartet, which is made up of a group of young students, is much louder now. They’re all huddled underneath an awning so their instruments don’t get wet, even though the rain is letting up a bit. Never trust the weather in Nebraska.

Shinn makes his way back to his booth. He does a quick overview of the all the different farm vendors and their produce in the area and speaks about one of his passions: gardening.

“But I haven’t been able to get my garden in yet. It’s been raining. So if it’s raining on my day off, then I have to wait another week.”

Shinn grows produce for the restaurant a lot in his garden at home. Mainly smaller produce like microgreens, cherry tomatoes, herbs and edible flowers; usually he only grows things that don’t take up a whole lot of room and from which he can get a significant amount from.

The rain has completely stopped now. He arrives at his booth and shows everyone there what he bought for the restaurant. He then takes a picture of what’s in his wagon and tweets it to all of his followers on Twitter. After making sure things are running smoothly at the booth, he hauls his green wagon back to the restaurant to show his chefs so that he can work with them to prepare the menu for the day.

“We collaborate on ideas. I’ll have a cook that has an idea and asks: ‘Can we do this?’ and I’ll say: ‘Sure,’ because the menu is not set in stone. Being able to have input like that is really valuable to them.”

Shinn lists all the vendors and items he purchased from on the menu to help provide a little more attention for them. After finalizing the menu, he’ll bring copies of it down to the market and puts them up on the vendors’ booths so that people can see that Bread and Cup uses their products.

He usually bases the menu off of what he buys at the Farmers’ Market that week. 

“Every week, there’s something new that we’re trying that’s based on the produce we got at the market, so the menu will change every week. Like last night, I had a brand new dish that we just put on that utilized the fresh turnips that we have.”

While Shinn says there are a few downsides to changing the menu a lot, he’s glad that people won’t get bored with it. 

“Sometimes it’s very easy for cooks to get burned out because they’re making the same dish over and over, and it doesn’t stay interesting and you lose that joy of cooking. That’s why I like to change the menu so often, so that I don’t get bored with it. I know it frustrates my customers; sometimes they come back and say: ‘Hey, where’s that at?’ and I tell them: ‘Sorry, we took that off.’ But I’ve learned to keep some things stable, like the apple butter. I’d be an idiot to take that off.”

After talking with some of the chefs in the back, Shinn walks by a couple eating breakfast in the dining area and puts the fresh flowers he bought in a vase that hangs on the wall.

“Oh, I thought those were for us!” the man says.

Shinn laughs. “Yeah, I bring everybody flowers!” he says as he walks back to the kitchen.

Bread & Cup is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., with the bar open until 10:00 p.m., and on Fridays and Saturdays, the kitchen is open until 10:00 p.m. and the bar until 11:00 p.m.

Visit Bread & Cup online here for their daily menu listing, or to read Kevin’s blog click here.

The Haymarket Farmers’ Market runs every Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to noon rain or shine through October 15th. 
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This is the final story in a three-part series about the Haymarket Farmers’ Market. 

To read Part 1 of the Farmers’ Market series, click here.

To read Part 2 of the Farmers’ Market series, click here.