A little rain doesn’t stop a shopper from looking over tomatoes at the Old Town Farmers Market.
This is not picnic weather. The rain is coming down hard enough that nobody could reasonably mistake it. Which makes it an excellent morning to test a theory.
I’ve spent decades treating the Old Town Farmers’ Market the way I assume I’m supposed to. I buy tomatoes. I buy honey. I admire apples. I carry home pastry that is usually missing a corner by the time I get there.
Market Kitchen in the rain in Old Town.
But I suspect I’ve been doing it wrong. What if the farmers market isn’t simply where I buy ingredients? What if it’s where I eat the meal? Not metaphorically. I mean like a restaurant. A sprawling decentralized restaurant with several kitchens. No reservations. No pesky tables. And right now, no roof, which admittedly may be a nice touch.
A shop owner I know just off the market does not find the idea particularly radical.
“You totally could,” she says when I explain my plan to eat a complete breakfast without leaving the market. She points me toward Kiwi Kuisine and Ana’s Twist Empanadas. Already I’m looking around at folks hunkering over pastries under whatever shelter could be found and beginning to think my experiment isn’t so experimental.
Delicacies from Kiwi’s Pie Shop at the Old Town Farmers Market.
At Kiwi the spinach-and-feta roll comes first. Sharp and creamy inside pastry I already know well enough to crave. Then I encounter the sausage roll. “Yeah, so we bring about four trays of sausage rolls,” John tells me. Four trays. This causes me to consider my cholesterol for approximately four seconds.
A customer beside me has a more useful relationship with it. She tells me the sausage roll is her go-to before donating blood. That is not medical advice. It is, however, an admirably efficient Saturday itinerary. Sausage roll. Give blood. Sip something sugary. Done.
“It can be both,” she says when I ask whether she comes to shop or eat. “Depending on how much time I have to get back and put things away.” Vegetables if she has time to take them home. Sausage roll if she has blood to give.
The rain gets heavier. Nobody leaves. Nobody seems to care.
On a sunny October morning, eating something outside proves very little. People will picnic when given blue sky and a bench. But now customers are wedged beneath tents. Pressed against buildings. Maneuvering their nosh with one hand and umbrellas with the other. Nobody appears to consider this irrational. Certainly not me.
John at Kiwi points me toward Hollin Hall Bakery’s pumpkin muffin. Another item that arrives in volumes. Volumes that sell out quickly. Cream cheese in the middle. Crusty sugar on top. It tastes somehow of falling leaves.
Behind the scenes at the Hollin Hall Bakery spot at the Old Town Farmers Market.
Not the leaves themselves. That would be mulch. The color. The season. The particular pleasure of eating a gourd while October is pouring out of the sky. A pumpkin-muffin day, inside and out.
Here someone finally challenges my thesis. I ask whether people really come to eat or whether breakfast is a lucky happenstance of buying provisions. “I’d say the latter,” the baker tells me. “People like doing that.” They do. Fair enough. One vote against. “I’m having a good time just eating,” I say.
I keep going. At Ana’s Twist, I learn that there is apparently an evolutionary cycle to the empanada customer. First-timers buy one to eat immediately. If they like it, they return later and begin buying them for home. Don’t call it a sampler. It’s breakfast.
Naturally I order the breakfast empanada. Egg. Cheese. Bacon. Apparently the sausage roll has not scared me straight. The wheat dough is crisp and salty enough to matter. A proper shell for the softer filling. Tiny pleats run around its edge, each one considerably neater than anything I am capable of producing before noon. In the rain.
Empanadas at Ana’s Twist at the Old Town Farmers Market.
I mention to David behind the table that I have always thought of empanadas as morning food. “Most people eat them for breakfast,” he assures. Excellent. I am no longer inventing the rules. I am merely conducting research.
Breakfast stops behaving like breakfast. This is turning into a progressive dinner held several hours too early. One kitchen leads to another, and I’ve apparently abandoned any ambition of finishing a single course neatly before beginning the next.
Rain doesn’t stop the crowd on a recent Saturday at the Old Town Farmers Market.
And then somebody offers me kimchi. This is where lesser breakfast theorists might retreat. The vendor tells me that handing out samples of bracing fermented cabbage can present a challenge if people are looking at the clock.
“Having spicy as your first thing in the morning is, you know, not what everybody wants.” “Weaklings,” I say.
The vegan version leaves out the fish sauce and shrimp paste but keeps the chile flakes. They add a little extra salt and apricot sauce. I expect to miss something with this plant-based model. I don’t. It is bright and tingly and whole. Almost refreshing. Which is the direction I like my kimchi to walk rather than being smothered by the heft of its own umami.
Who needs orange juice? Well, perhaps my blood donor friend.
Ducking his head beneath the kimchi tent is another eater. He’s eating a steak and stout Kiwi pie. I am not the only one willing to stretch the definition of breakfast. I ask my question again. Is the farmers market somewhere to shop, or can you simply come here and eat? “Might as well have breakfast out, right?” he says.
And there it is.
I’ve been looking for a dining room that isn’t here. That may be the mistake. Restaurants train us to think the room is part of the definition. Front door. Host stand. Tables. Kitchen hidden somewhere behind a wall. Here, somebody has taken the restaurant apart and scattered it across the block.
The kitchens sit beneath tents. The menu is whatever they brought that morning. The people serving the food are often the people who made it. A regular knows her sausage roll. A first-timer discovers an empanada. Someone else comes for provisions and finds themselves caving to meat, egg, and cheese on an English muffin..
And on a rainy Saturday the dining room is wherever you can find six dry inches beneath a swath of plastic overhead. A couple of hours later, considerably wetter and substantially fuller, I realize I asked the wrong question. The problem isn’t finding breakfast here. It’s getting the restaurant to stop feeding me.
Photo courtesy of Howie Southworth
Howie Southworth is a seasoned denizen of Old Town Alexandria and the best-selling author behind “A Taste of Alexandria: Modern Restaurant Recipes That Echo Our City’s Past,”
Southworth is also the author of a new book, Hemingway’s Spanish Table (Insight Editions), released March 17.
Past works include “Chinese Street Food,” “One Pan to Rule Them All,” “Kiss My Casserole!” and “How to Cook Anything in Your Dutch Oven.” Howie is also a regular essayist for Salon.com.
