We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sutton Van Gunten a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sutton thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?

I’m the beginning I was in the food trailer and there were a couple of us dedicated to making the dream happen. My Sister, Bella, and my best friend, Clark, initially helped me get it going. They gave me as much time as they could afford while holding down their regular jobs. I mostly worked by myself in the first couple years except when we were invited to events or threw parties ourselves. Lots of long hours staring out the window dreaming up ways to market myself. Then when as we got more popular and found our niche I had a team of young folks who didn’t mind working late nights in the bar district. Those were fun days in Austin in the hey day of food trucks. When we moved to that area is when we finally saw traction with the business. We were one of very few healthy late night options at the time. The rag tag hipster kids we attracted were perfect for our vibe.

Sutton, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m just a hippy kid from a school bus family who grew up making food for those around me. I always enjoyed it and have gravitated back to it repeatedly in my life, even after trying other careers. I was the kind of kid who ended up making cookies and tortillas and whatever I could learn from my friend’s mother’s while they played in the other room. Just always loved it. When I was a teen in 1997 I inherited $60k and spent it buying a shell of a house and remodeling it into a coffee shop. After failing running a couple shops in different parts of the country over the course of a couple years I went to work for a French Master Chef, Lionel Garnier, in Taos New Mexico. That was a fantastic experience and I only left to move to Austin to find girls. After a brief stint selling cars I returned to the industry and worked for a handful of Austin places including a Mediterranean place called Pyramids. Delicious food, but the owner was a mess and going through divorce. Sadly the business closed and I ended up at a famous Austin Icon, Threadgills. A year there and then five years at Whole Foods Market where I was a safety trainer and supervisor on the prepared foods team. That was a fantastic time and everyone there learned so much. I pride myself on the customer service I took away from my time there. Then I opened Gonzo in 2011, moved to Lockhart to transition to brick and mortar in 2015 with Market Street Cafe and here we still are today. It’s been a wild road. Most recently in the last year we have installed a salad bar and weekend buffet where we focus on some of our international favorites. German, Indian, and Mediterranean each have weekends with a full buffet of offerings.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

Making payroll is the most important part of having a business if you have a team. You are nothing without your team. If you have a bad team you are probably going to have a bad time. I’ve had time when my team was not stellar, but I’ve also been blessed to have as great of a team as I have had during my time operating. We now have the best team we have ever had and we thank the stars everyday. After all of these years open we have never had a paycheck bounce. I’m proud of that because I’ve worked at places where that wasn’t true, and it sucked. The one time that I was in really hot water was in 2015. We trained for a couple weeks and open d for business on December 2nd. My team were all brand new and expecting a paycheck here right before Christmas. I had opened the place with $60k and it was 2015, so that money didn’t go super far. I’m fact I was broke. We were opening for business with no money and hopes we would make enough to pay labor and buy more groceries. I was sleeping in a fifty year old camper in the alley behind the cafe. Everything was going great until the sewage started backing up into the building. A backho or something had driven over the property in the back and collapsed the old pipe. We were closed. I was freaking out. My sister created a go-fund me account and it saved us by a narrow margin. Ugh. Been some tough times since then, like with Covid, but that was the worst. I barely knew any of my new employees because I had just moved to town five months earlier and spent that whole time living in the peace while remodeling it.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

We made it through the hardest part of Covid. We had the dining room closed all year till December 1st in 2020 and didn’t take any government loans or help (except our local city government grants. Thank you Lockhart. We love you) and we were very proud. I got so proud of myself that I decided to open a second business. A deli. We found a couple personal loans from friends and rented a space. I remodeled the space myself and hired a team. The food was great, but the customers never came. I thought for sure our built in clientele would surely go support the second business, but it was failing. It was a big beautiful space with a nice big walk in and dedicated parking. I was sad. I really needed Market Street Cafe, which was busting at the seems, to be in a bigger space. Bingo. I realized I could switch the two and get the successful cafe into a bigger space and get the deli down in town square where more people would find it. Yay. We closed on Sunday after service and completely switched the two restaurants and reopened for brunch the following Sunday. It was a worlwind effort. I was so nervous. Will it work? The deli still failed sadly, but the cafe blossomed in the new space like a flower that had been waiting for dawn. Bitter sweet to lose the investment and close the deli, but the new bigger brighter easier to park at space was embraced heartily by the community. Since then we have found the most wonderful team we have ever had and it really shows in the quality of the service and execution and variety of cuisine we are pushing out. A home run.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://marketstreetlockhart.com/
• Instagram: Marketstcafeltx
• Facebook: Market Street Cafe
• Yelp: Check out Market Street Cafe
• Other: https://www.toasttab.com/market-street-cafe-lockhart

Image Credits

All of these photos were taken by me, Sutton Van Gunten with my IPhone