Thursday, July 05, 2007
Food

07/08/07 FOOD, BLOCK: To market, to market

To market, to market By Suzanne Wright Located on quaint Carroll Street, just up from Agave and Carroll Street Café, Cabbagetown Market and Little’s Grill is a neighborhood grocery, grill and ...

Cabbagetown Market and Little’s Grill co-owners Maria Locke (left) and Lisa Hanson CREDIT: Spark St. Jude

To market, to market
By Suzanne Wright

Located on quaint Carroll Street, just up from Agave and Carroll Street Café, Cabbagetown Market and Little’s Grill is a neighborhood grocery, grill and deli featuring baked goods, gourmet products, local meats, cheeses, breads and produce. The Sunday Paper recently bellied up to its counter and spoke with co-owners Maria Locke and Lisa Hanson about community, good eats and recycling the store’s frying oil for fuel.

You’re both Cabbagetown residents. How did you meet?
Maria Locke: Through our boyfriends, who knew each other.

What are your backgrounds?
Lisa Hanson: I worked for the American Craft Museum in Manhattan and had a small catering business. My brother owned a restaurant and I grew up in the south of France.
ML: I made pizza. But I wasn’t breaking into my film career, so I went to work at Watershed. I worked with really great people and decided that this is what I wanted to do.

You assumed ownership in March, but the market has been here since 1929. How do you differentiate your products from big-box retail like Publix, Whole Foods and Wal-Mart?
ML: Everything is so homogenous. When you drive down the highway, it looks the same in every town. I’m tired of going into a gas station and it having the same damn thing in every store. We’re still working on what we can and can’t sell. But we’re trying to put something else on shelf, something good-quality that people might be missing when [a brand like] Kellogg’s is always in your face.

Cabbagetown Market has such an appealing atmosphere—the old-fashioned screen door, being greeted by name. It’s intimate. What’s your community vision?
LH: We started with an outdoor green market, which we ran one night a week in the summer of 2005 and 2006, similar to East Atlanta. We saw the need in the neighborhood for a general store.
ML: We’ll get even more involved with the community, raising money and such. We are in a centralized location. I have the shortest commute ever—I live upstairs. It’s extremely energy efficient.

How diverse is Cabbagetown? It seems like a lot of young folks.
ML: That’s the urban pioneer thing. But it’s really diverse in terms of class. We have extremely poor customers, who are descended from the older residents [originally] from Appalachia. We have heavy smokers, which is why we have cigarettes, along with organic fruit.

I really liked the White Oak Pasture burger with pimento cheese and fried pickles.
ML: Some people still like the Leon’s (conventional) burger. He was the previous owner.

My pal turned me on to the ice cream sandwich. Yum!
ML: It was really hot that week, and we needed to make something cold. We make the cookies, not the ice cream. We might experiment with popsicles.

You carry a lot of local products.
LH: White Oak Pastures beef, Sweet Grass dairy cheeses, honey and bread from Glover Family Farm, Breadgarden breads, meat from Patak Meat Products in Austell and seasonal produce from other farmers. Some, not all, is organic. Plus we carry staples; we keep a balance in toilet paper and flour and stuff like that. And we have some local artwork, handbags, handmade cards, jewelry and cat toys under $25. We also make baked-to-order picnic boxes, baked goods and party trays.

What else are you looking to add?
LH: Organic chicken is something people have been requesting. And we’re working on our liquor license. We’ll have a small collection, mainly of craft beers—I publish a newspaper called Southern Brew News.

And you recycle your frying oil as biodiesel fuel.
LH: A local guy, Rob Del Bueno, collects it from a lot of local restaurants. Your car can run on peanut oil.

For more information, call 404-221-9186 or visit www.cabbagetownmarket.com.