Most mornings, Lucy is in the field by five-thirty. By seven she's on Yolo Ave, flipping the sign over and pulling the first shot. The bell over the door rings the same way it has since the building was a feed store in the eighties — brassy, a little out of tune. The espresso machine takes a few minutes to come up to temperature. Long enough to get the pastries out of the case and the morning quiches into the warmer.
The cafe wasn't really planned, not in a business-school way. It started because we were already growing more than the farmers' market could move, and because Esparto needed somewhere to sit down for a cup of coffee that wasn't a gas station. So we leaned into both at once. The cafe sells the coffee. The pantry, on the wooden shelves at the back, sells what came out of the field that week, plus what our neighbors make — oil from up the highway, honey from the hives a few miles east, bouquets the florist drops off Wednesdays.
It only really works if your neighbors are good at what they do. Out here, they are.
Esparto sits at the mouth of the Capay Valley. Most days, people are passing through — on their way to a tasting room, a hike, a roadside fruit stand. We figured the town deserved a stop of its own. Somewhere to land before the valley swallows you up. Somewhere where the strawberries on the counter were picked four miles away that morning, and the person at the register can tell you which farm and who you'd run into if you drove out there.
That's the whole pitch, really. A farmer makes you a cappuccino. The cookies were baked at five. The flowers on the table came from the lot behind the hardware store. We hope you'll come sit a while.