The smell of ribs cooking floats out of the unassuming kitchen in Sparrow Market. During lunch, CHS students and community members alike are enticed by the Taste Our Goods Friday special.
Taste Our Goods at Sparrow Market opened up last summer when Nora Feldhusen and Suzanne Lipton graduated from the University of Michigan, and Bob Sparrow, the owner of Sparrow Market, offered them the opportunity to open up a lunch counter in his store.
“We started [out] baking,” Katherine Oshman, an employee at Taste Our Goods, said.
Sparrow provided the former employees with a quaint kitchen, which, miraculously, more than one person can work in. Soon their baked goods began appearing in Sparrow Market’s checkout display.
The cupcakes and cookies must have been well received, because Sparrow offered for an expansion. “Bob [Sparrow] proposed the idea of a lunch counter, and we got started,” Oshman said.
Lipton and Feldhusen started it, coming up with a menu, and Oshman and Ariel Nathanson work as their core staff members.
Taste Our Goods has a convenient set up. Being supported by Sparrow, they girls don’t own anything. “It works really well because we don’t own the place so we don’t have to pay rent or anything, it’s basically part of the market. We cook out of the market so we don’t buy anything extra.”
All of the products they use come from Sparrow Market, so all their dishes are local and organic.
The girls were all friends in college and lived together for four years. “We all liked to cook,” Oshman said. “It was a really nice thing too, that we could all stay together.”
The girls graduated from U of M last May with degrees in Art History, Russian Literature, Organizational Studies, and Psychology. But don’t be fooled — although they didn’t major in culinary arts, they make a mean sandwich.
Lipton got into baking during college, making cookies for her boyfriend, and her interest grew from that. Eventually, she started working in a kitchen. “Suzy [Lipton] really is an excellent cook,” says Oshman. The others draw their experience from waiting tables and cooking for themselves.
Community High Students are offered a lunch discount, moving the price of salads and sandwiches from seven dollars down to five dollars. Most of the sandwiches are not too adventurous, but Oshman finds students still go for sandwiches off of the Kid Friendly menu. The Drew Brown is especially popular amongst students: banana and crunchy peanut butter grilled on farm bread.
Taste Our Goods provides delicious sandwiches made of local food at a respectable price; there’s no reason not to get one.
