Southport Grocery & Cafe’s Good Food Awards Draw a Community

By Lorrie Baumann

Southport Grocery & Cafe offers its guests a seat at the table for breakfast and lunch as well as a few shelves of specialty groceries in Chicago, Illinois’ Lakeview-Southport Corridor on the north side of the city. The location is just two blocks from Wrigley Field. “That’s important because it brings energy to the neighborhood. We have a lot of people who come in before the game because they want breakfast before they go to the afternoon game,” said Lisa Santos, Southport Grocery’s Owner and Chef. “It’s a magnet. When they [the Chicago Cubs] are doing well, you just can’t beat it – it’s a nice add-on.”

The 2,500 square foot cafe seats customers at around 22 tables, which expands to 40 in the summer when an outdoor area is available. The menu emphasizes breakfast, but Southport also serves sandwiches and salads. “We kind of call our food ‘comfort food but with a little bit of a twist,’” Santos said. “It’s still approachable but something a little bit different.”

With a staff of 25, the cafe has full-time bakers who make most of its breads as well as a preservationist who makes the pickles and mustards. The specialty grocery shelves stock a carefully edited selection of candies and chocolates, pastas and sauces, pancake mixes, and some craft beverages. “We make some drink starters,” Santos said. “Craft cocktails are really popular right now.”

Santos curates the products in favor of small, local producers who make products that are different from what her own staff makes to sell. “I have to look at pricing and margin, but I do the first first – the taste, where they’re from,” she said. “If it’s really good and really special, my company will buy it.”

The neighborhood around Southport Grocery & Cafe is a family-friendly urban center with a mix of independent businesses along with some retail anchors, and Southport Grocery draws its clientele mostly from that immediate neighborhood. “Sometimes you look down the row along the banquette, and it’ll be all women and their kids,” Santos said. “Another day, it’s all men having business meetings.”

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After she’d finished culinary school, she started drawing up a business plan for a cafe of her own, but she got a little stuck on her first pass through it until her friend Darleen read through it and made a suggestion. “I couldn’t figure out how we were going to differentiate ourselves from other businesses,” Santos said. Then Darleen pointed out to her that she had noticed that when the two of them went on business trips together, Santos had wanted to spend some of the time they could spare away from conference sessions and appointments poking around in artisanal grocery stores. She suggested that what Santos needed in her plan was a few shelves for some artisanal grocery items. “It is true. I did not come up with it – she did,” Santos said. “It was really a way to differentiate against other restaurants.”

Something else that differentiates her business from most others is that Southport Grocery & Cafe has been winning Good Food Awards since 2013. With seven Good Food Awards already to its credit, Southport Grocery has two products among this year’s finalists for Good Food Awards, Backyard Relish and Bread and Butter Cauliflower. Past winners have all been for pickled and preserved products or for mustards, which are sold on the grocery shelves and served in the Cafe. “We wholesale a little bit to other small Chicago places,” Santos said. “We can pretty much sell what we make.”

She entered her first products into the Good Food Awards in 2013, when her preservationist at the time heard about the program. “The things that they stand for, we stand for as well,” Santos said. “It’s more ingredient-driven and sustainable practices-driven. That kind of production of foodstuffs reminds me of what my grandmother did.”

The awards matter to her customers as well as her staff, according to Santos. “People love the things that we preserve,” she said. “The Good Food Awards just give us a little bit more national recognition that we’re doing what we say we’re doing. It’s like street credibility.”

Participation in the Good Food Awards and in the Good Food Mercantile trade shows that are produced by the same organization, the Good Food Foundation, also gives Santos the opportunity to associate with like-minded people, and that’s helpful to her business as well, she said. “This business is hard. It’s the passion behind the products that gets me going, and when people love your products, it makes you want to keep doing it,” she said. “When well-known national people [like Alice Waters and Ruth Reichl] who have believed these things for so long – it just reminds you why you’re doing this.”