Spoonfed Kitchen & Bake Shop brings experience, resilience and hospitality to the Port City.
This November, the owners of Wilmington’s Spoonfed Kitchen & Bake Shop will celebrate the 20th anniversary of their making the list of Oprah’s Favorite Things for their Deeply Fudgy Brownies.
At the time, the daytime talk show host’s influence, and the effect of her annual favorite things list, was tremendous. Its impact brought Spoonfed owners Kim and Matt Lennert, and their Chicago-area café and catering business, A Moveable Feast, into a new era. They quickly learned how to fulfill orders fast by hiring new people, setting up new systems, and a tent, while keeping their current customers happy. That lesson served them well when they transferred their winning formula to the Port City in 2017 just in time to deal with a hurricane.
“We opened right before Florence,” says Kim, “so it took us a while to figure out what would work best for our customers.”
Turns out what they were serving worked very well. Spoonfed in Lumina Commons with their prepared and made-to-order foods—in addition to their catering business—has been consistently busy serving breakfast and lunch five days a week.
It started in a way that inspires many toward a career in food: a part-time job in a kitchen while in school. For Kim it was art school, and the kitchen was in a café where she worked under classically trained cooks.
“There was no Martha, no Food Network, no Starbucks,” she says. “It was Julia Child. I learned so much.”
She also met her future husband, Matt. The two opened A Moveable Feast in 1999 in Geneva, Illinois, which is where they caught Oprah’s attention. They were doing her “aviation catering.” (Which, apparently, is what making meals for someone’s private plane is called.)
The couple sold the café in 2011 to employees, and got out of the kitchen. They moved to Detroit where Matt invested his time making stand-up paddleboards just when the sport was taking fire on the Great Lakes. Kim worked in a production bakery, an additional education that advanced her skills. It gave them time to spend with their growing daughter.
Competitions and connections within the SUP community put Wilmington on their radar. Beach? Burgeoning food scene? SUP skills? Successful entrepreneurs? You do the math.
Eight years later, Spoonfed is part of the community.
“We get to know people at their weddings. We know what people want when they’re picking up lunch for a day on the beach or on the water,” says Kim. “Our business has come to prioritize being part of people’s daily lives in addition to special occasions.”
Popular items? “The chicken salad for sure,” she adds. “It’s pretty basic, not a lot of bells and whistles.” To make it, they start with quality chicken, roast and pick it on-site, and keep the bones for stock. The salad comes together with a mayo-based dressing, celery and grapes. Second place is the tuna salad.
This brings me back.
As I recall, my first bite of chicken salad contained grapes—and maybe some sliced almonds—which was likely a result of a state-backed marketing campaign by the California Table Grape Commission. Thompson seedless traveled east to be sliced in half and added to what would become a classic.
Spoonfed’s tuna salad is a grand, near exotic, advancement from the spare tuna sandwiches shmushed between Wonder Bread, wrapped in waxed paper and stuffed into my brown bag lunch with an apple and a Hostess Snack Cake: a cupcake, a Ho-Ho, a Zinger or a Ding-Dong, whatever was on sale. It was usually sent to school on Fridays when eating fish was considered a deprivation to atone for our sins. Another way food conventions can affect us three times a day.
The tuna salad at Spoonfed is made with large, not mushy, flakes of tuna, crispy apples, celery, pumpkin seeds and a dressing with “a nice bumpy mustard, lemon, and lots of fresh herbs.”
The couple’s current favorite thing is Kim’s granola. It’s gluten free, has whole nuts, the right amount of salt and, Kim says, is hand packed, because “we like the clusters.” She’s been perfecting the recipe for 25 years. It’s currently shipped across the country and can be found in select local markets. Potential new flavors include chocolate and chai.
The Lennerts and their team, which includes one of her sisters, Susan, as the catering manager, and a deep bench of home run hitters: a manager, an assistant manager, two café chefs, a catering chef and two pastry chefs, are starting to look ahead.
Matt’s been drifting back to paddle boards; Kim took a collaborative writing class, “Where I found my tribe.” A cookbook might not be far off, and perhaps another location. Spoonfed is outgrowing its kitchen.
About those life-changing, dense, butter-rich, fudgy brownies: They are still on the café’s counter.
“I like a cakey brownie,” says Kim. “But Oprah, she counts more than I do.”
Get ’em while they’re still hot.
