Shona’s Food Company: How a Local Chef's British-Inspired Café is Crafting Community
A girl walks into a yarn store— sheep’s milk creamery— British-inspired café and coffee shop in the charming downtown shopping district of Chehalis, Washington. Her mission was to investigate the fresh cheese she’d heard Naomi Pomeroy was sourcing for her (much-missed) Portland restaurant, Beast, which highlighted a cheese course to end the meal in lieu of dessert (and I adored it). That girl was me. And while I thought I was just on the lookout for cheese, what I discovered was a fierce yet tender-hearted chef, hell-bent on building up a community and feeding people physically and spiritually.
I like to think that I “found” Shona, but if I’m honest, she found me. Professing I was new to town and a fellow locavore, she promptly took me under her wing, introducing me to her regulars and the steady stream of purveyors she’d been slowly cultivating since she opened the shop in 2020.
What do a yarn store, sheep’s milk creamery, and Shona’s Food Company have in common? For starters, they’re all under one roof. Initially founded as a space to utilize wool from their sheep dairy in Adna, WA, Meg and Brad Gregory opened the Ewe and I yarn shop in downtown Chehalis in 2015 that also housed their Black Sheep Creamery in the back. The Ewe and I quickly became a community haven and they recognized an opportunity to incubate other small businesses in the space. Walls came down, a kitchen went in, and the spirit of “giving back” that was birthed there continues to grow with every new connection Shona forges between farmers, growers, and the people they feed together.
How It Started
Shona Smith hails from a family steeped in European food culture. Her mother, born in England and raised in Scotland where she went to culinary school, opened a Mexican restaurant in Ireland which might not have seemed conventional, but it put Shona on a path that would become her passion. Helping her mother open the restaurant before school every morning and then closing it in the evening, cooking and running a restaurant came naturally to her, but she intentionally wanted to be very different with her own café here in America.
In Ireland, direct access to small farmers and local butchers allowed restaurants and cafés to highlight fresh produce, meat, grains, and dairy. Shona kept that farm-to-table model top of mind as she gained experience in America, but she was bucking the trucked-in, frozen, and pre-cooked method of sourcing ingredients most restaurants here rely on long before she opened her own place.
After high school, Shona moved to the Midwest. Culinary school wasn’t in the budget, so she researched restaurants where she felt she could learn serious skills and began working at the French-inspired Kennedy’s in Urbana, Illinois. Shona had serious restaurant experience already, but that didn’t keep her from understanding how important it is to start at the bottom and listen and learn. “Working under my mom for so many years, I knew the value of being obedient in the kitchen,” says Shona. “Even if you might disagree, it’s more about having respect for the process and learning a solid set of skills, and you get to see techniques firsthand these chefs learned themselves at culinary school.”
When Shona moved to Washington, she was immediately drawn to Jeremy’s Farm To Table restaurant in Chehalis, a down-to-earth spot preparing local fare made with area-sourced ingredients. She was working in a region full of farmers and growers but for places that weren’t implementing their ingredients. “Whenever I had the opportunity to head kitchens,” recalls Shona, “I reached out to these farms directly and started creating these connections.”
Those local connections made it possible for Shona to begin cutting ties with the more traditional but out-of-area supply chains and start spending the food budget at local farms. After Jeremy’s, she took the position of head chef at Riverside Bistro and changed the entire menu to highlight regional ingredients.
The opportunity to create a space of her own came from a friendship she made at the Riverside Bistro. Working in a space she was leasing inside the Ewe and I yarn store and Black Sheep Creamery, Shona was invited to help her friend develop an uber-fresh and out-of-the-box grab-and-go concept that once again highlighted the bounty of fresh produce and ingredients available in Lewis County. But when COVID hit and the lease was up, Shona’s friend asked if she was ready to create her own space. “I thought about it for 24 hours and said okay, let’s do this.” She met with Meg and Brad to discuss logistics, and Shona’s Food Company was born.
Enterprise for Equity Lends A Hand
Making the decision to create a space of her own felt like a risk Shona was ready to take, but she had little money to invest in building the café. “My children were still quite young, and I was pretty much a stay-at-home mom at the time with nothing to my name but a truck,” she recalls. And while she knew the ins and outs of the restaurant business, she didn’t have ownership experience other than the small family business she’d grown up in. “I worked myself to the bone but knew I had been giving away a lot of myself,” she recalls. “I loved what I was doing but I was taken advantage of a lot.” When a friend introduced her to the team at Enterprise for Equity, a non-profit organization based in Olympia, Washington offering historically marginalized but potential entrepreneurs the education, mentoring, technical assistance, and microloans needed to make their business dream a reality, everything changed.
“Suddenly I was surrounded by people who were so thoughtful, so community-driven, and so helpful,” says Shona. Growing up in the food industry, she struggled with a deep sense of needing to be self-reliant, so it was initially hard for her to admit she needed help. In fact, Shona didn’t have the money to go through the program, so Beth Henriquez, Excecutive Director of the program, directed her to the State of Washington Employment Security department, Shona qualified for assistance and was soon taking every class E4E offered, even exchanging food for extra classes like creative writing and life coaching sessions.
Building A Community
Shona’s desire to work with local makers, along with Ewe & I’s dream of creating space for micro-businesses, and the mission of Enterprise for Equity to help underserved individuals start small businesses, it’s easy to see a theme of community building and sustainability running through this story. But it’s not just a “feel-good” concept. The connections and relationships are truly beneficial to everyone who steps inside Shona’s.
“I’ve bonded with my suppliers,” she shares, “And we have a front door policy here.” That means farmers aren’t dropping off cases of product at a loading dock out back or in a walk-in, they’re bringing their goods in the front door where Shona greets them like any other customer who walks into the café; with a bear hug, a lively chat, and of course, some food. It’s more than just exchanging produce; it is relationship building that almost always results in both parties getting more from each other than you’d expect. “My suppliers are always bringing me extra stuff,” says Shona, “and I’m able to connect them with other suppliers who I know need help.” Like the micro-green supplier from Hop Frog Farms who had an abandoned dairy on his property. He’d applied for a grant but to be eligible he had to show that his farm was being used to its full potential, so he reached out to a neighbor who wanted cows but didn’t have the property. Soon, Black Sheep Creamery will be providing cow’s milk cheese from Hop Frog Farms in addition to their sheep’s milk cheese.
Shona’s gift of building connections has paved the way for her to showcase other chefs, bakers, and makers at the café, paying forward the knowledge she’s been given and highlighting some seriously amazing culinary talent cropping up in Lewis County. You’ll find organic produce from Boisfort Valley Farm and Star and Sparrow Farm, and if you’re in the know, you’ll discover pop-up oyster slurping opportunities from time to time, thanks to Minus Tide Shellfish just a few miles north on South Puget Sound’s Totten Inlet.
Shona’s Food Company
Opening a café during COVID wasn’t ideal, but Shona’s never been afraid of a good challenge. The grab-and-go concept she started in the space with her previous partner still made sense, but now, it’s she wanted it to be authentic to her heritage. She knew she wanted to highlight the bounty of local farms, but the food needed to be easily transportable. “It suddenly hit me,” she recalls. “You can throw anything into a “pasty” (the British word for hand pie) and it’s going to be brilliant.” Especially if what you’re putting inside a traditional hot-water pie dough and puff pastry are seasonal ingredients fresh off the farm.
You’ll find savory meat pies and puff pastry stuffed with fresh sheep’s milk cheese from Black Sheep Creamery as well as baps—the British version of the perfect breakfast/lunch/brunch sandwich. The freshly baked, tender pillows of dough are perfect for stuffing with shaved meats, fresh vegetables, and Black Sheep Creamery’s luscious cheese. While her menu is influenced by her British heritage (her Aunt Sharon’s Scottish Short Bread is legendary), Shona feels that everybody can relate to a meat pie. “They’re in every culture,” she admits, “I’m just using the café to highlight mine.”
Shona receives fresh produce weekly from Newaukum Valley Farm and micro-greens from Hop Frog Farm which helps round out her menu with colorful and inventive salads bursting with flavor.
Where She’s Headed
Shona recently spent three weeks in England visiting family and, not surprisingly, eating a lot of great food. She came home with a renewed desire to focus on seasonality and to work even harder at making the café more efficient. She’s received an offer to open a second location, which is a pretty big deal for a spot open just under five years, but she feels the need to stay focused on what’s working in this nurturing space she’s created.
“I think the reason I get out of bed and hustle as hard as I do is because, for me, it’s just instinctual,” Shona admits. “I don’t know any other way of going about my life – I really enjoy working hard, and I love what comes out of that.” Come into the café more than once and she calls you by name, remembers your favorite drink, and will suggest you try something new, knowing you’ll probably stick with your favorite. There’s mutual respect between Shona and her regulars. “I feel like we share this sense of duty to each other,” she says, “like we’re an important part of each other’s day, and I’m proud to be able to have created this type of environment. It’s powerful to see how creating that sense of community and connection makes all the hard work worth it.”
As I finished talking to Shona for this piece, she made me a “Betty” for the road (a must-try carbonated cold espresso drink) and told me the thing that stood out most to her about her mother’s restaurant was the banter she had with her customers. “It seemed like she was the real reason people came in, you know?”
We do know, Shona, and it’s how we all feel about you and your café in case you didn’t already know. Breakfast or lunch at Shona’s makes the drabbest of days more bearable. But that hug I get from her on the way out the door? That’s gold.
