Sugar 2 Salt, a Family Practice
There is an easy formula, not really open to debate: Food that does not have to travel very far, is in season and comes from people who are just as passionate about growing it or raising it as you are about cooking it—that food tastes better. —Stephanie Wiitala
A DAY IN THE LIFE
5 AM—Stephanie Wiitala’s work day begins. The kids are still asleep and her husband is already up and gone. She sits with her journal and takes time for her thoughts, getting ready for the demands ahead.
7 AM—Breakfast, backpacks, lunches and homework; two high schoolers out the door and the youngest off to kindergarten. She checks in at the restaurant and determines the pace and priorities of the next few hours.
9 AM—First, emails for Cathedral Barn at the Historic Barns Park, where Stephanie is event coordinator. From wedding planners. From people needing an event venue. From vendors about contracts and dates. The Barn and the work of making it a success come first in her day.
Next, a change of hats and on to correspondence for Sugar 2 Salt, the breakfast restaurant and catering business she shares with her husband, Jonathan Dayton. Staff schedules, accounting, upcoming events— she texts or talks with Jonathan often as he runs the line, in between plates of the breakfast rush.
11 AM—A run to Sam’s Club for something that did not get delivered to the restaurant this morning, plus some groceries for home to save time later. Then stop by the Barns on her way to the restaurant.
1 PM—Finally at Sugar 2 Salt, she stands at the baking table over an open cookbook and one of the few remaining daily scones. The scones have not been perfect lately so Stephanie reviews a Thomas Keller recipe, taking notes on what to tweak tomorrow. Jonathan cooks nearby and she loves working in the kitchen with him, talking about their days, their life.
3 PM—Jonathan leaves to pick up kids from school. Stephanie returns phone calls and double-checks front-of-the-house details for a catered dinner next Saturday night. The menu is set but might allow for an extra-special dessert; she writes down ideas before turning out lights and locking up.
7 PM—No school events tonight and homework is done, so Stephanie can sit and listen while Jonathan reads to their daughter before bed. She is tired, but happy. She thinks about the business concept of return on investment—and considers hers is a great one.
SUNNY IN MICHIGAN
Stephanie Wiitala is a people person. Her effusive personality matches perfectly with her sense of occasion, her sunny disposition and her true love for serving people. She is perfect for what she has chosen to do. Her husband calls her Sunshine.
Wiitala grew up in Traverse City, on Twelfth Street, not far from what was then the State Hospital. Her grandparents worked there in the 1950s. As a teenager she’d ride her bike past the deserted buildings, wondering what would become of the huge, old structures. Now her restaurant is nestled into one of the newer parts of what has become the Village at Grand Traverse Commons.
Stephanie met Jonathan while working at Black Star Farms in Suttons Bay from 2012 to 2016. She says, “I loved Black Star Farms from the first moment of our student tour in culinary school. It was everything I wanted to work with—an agricultural destination focusing on the nexus of local food and the building of a foodshed community. I started as an intern, worked my way into a job—but to keep that job through winters I had to help find a way to grow business. Getting to plan weddings and grow the events ... that brought me out of the kitchen! I chose to be a chef, but being an event and wedding coordinator chose me.”
Jonathan vouches for her having found the right place. “Her vision even before culinary school was to work somewhere with its own garden. Black Star Farms was a tremendous food community, with cheese being made there, and 9 Bean Rows making the bread. We had our own eggs, and the pigs gave us meat for the inn.”
The two partnered to grow the business of the farm, and they also partnered to grow a family. They knew that, someday, they could take what they had learned and turn it into their own dream.
The first part of that dream came true when Stephanie started doing events at the Historic Barns. She formed the very first iteration of Sugar 2 Salt Events, submitted a proposal and, once hired, lent her considerable energy to growing the reputation of the offerings at the Barns.
Stephanie’s family was involved in local radio, so she comes to sales and marketing quite naturally. “As a salesperson, to help someone have the best event of their lives is fantastic,” she says. “I love working with people and helping them. And I love getting to be a part of that beautiful space every day.”
S2S
The tapestry of their life together contains many magical threads, including the naming of their dreams.
The first time Stephanie and Jonathan talked about S2S was when they were just getting to know one another, prepping vegetables in the kitchen at Black Star Farms. She told him about the restaurant she wanted to have, Sunrise to Sunset.
Jonathan says, “I could not believe my ears! In design school, I had created the logo for the business I wanted to have someday, S2S. Sunrise to Sunset. We had the same dream, even the same name.”
Soon, there were more S’s. Stephanie says they fell in love on the summer solstice, their daughter was born on the summer solstice and they opened their restaurant together in 2017—on the summer solstice.
Jonathan says, “And we have symmetry. She is an optimist; I am a pessimist. She loves the front of the house; I love the kitchen. We work.”
When Black Star Farms partner Don Coe retired, they felt that was their cue to move into a new phase of their lives. Their daughter, Esme, had grown through her toddlerhood in a backpack in the kitchen, and because of the family that they had become there, they started the journey to owning their own restaurant.
Jonathan says they chose a breakfast focus because of their daughter. “If we had opened a dinner place, I would never see her.” Stephanie adds, “We also wanted an eclectic menu, and it has served us well—it is fun and different in here, it is fun and different on the menu. But what we really wanted was family.”
“Also, I have a philosophy about doing breakfast,” says Jonathan. “There is a calmness in the very beginning of the day; people are more open and available. There is beauty in the morning, and I loved that out at the inn, people coming down for breakfast, nothing on their minds but starting their day well.”
They moved into their new space in January 2017 and started catering. They catered events and weddings and meetings all over Northern Michigan while they readied the restaurant for opening. The restaurant opened in June and that first year their business was half catering, half breakfast.
Then in the summer of 2018, two things occurred: They launched a new website and they were mentioned by the New York Times. The website blew up with hits, and interest swelled just in time for the Traverse City Film Festival.
“That week our dishwasher broke, a hot water heater started on fire, our ice machine stopped working and our main server broke her clavicle,” says Stephanie. “It was our worst week ever. But we did it. And that taught us we could now rely more on the restaurant and not have to do so much catering or travel so far afield for our business.”
The couple feels that they have made it through the infancy years of business launch—doing almost anything for growth—and are becoming more satisfied with their size, structure and life balance.
“If you start with family, it helps you with your yes’s or no’s—we are not going to miss out on the important things in our kids’ lives,” says Stephanie. “We get to have our own rules here. We are not working for somebody else, so our kids can be part of this with us. Esme has a regular spot on the couch, and that girl knows her way around a kitchen—she is great at cracking eggs. My daughter Lauren is one of our servers, my son Riley helps with events, dishwashing and catering. That opportunity as parents to have our kids with us, and involved with us, well, that just increases the amount of family time that we have.
“Both our mothers bring us vegetables and herbs. I have photos of Jonathan’s mom bringing huge baskets of herbs and nasturtiums, beets, carrots. My mom brought mountains of thyme. Grammas really help with babysitting needs, too. We love that they get included in our dream.”
THE FOOD
A glance at the daily menu readily shows that Sugar 2 Salt is inspired by local and seasonal ingredients. Behind the scenes, everything is made from scratch—fresh bread and pastries daily, plus housemade sausage, bacon and smoked meats. They say the local connections are critical to their quality.
“When food comes from people that you know, there is a story,” says Jonathan. “When you put it on the plate, you have something to talk about. With those building blocks, I can make great food, and I like that we don’t use traditional recipes. We look at what we have and make something delicious with it. I have now been working for 13 years without a recipe book. Seasonal is better—we won’t do asparagus in September. It does not make any sense, and so we have to say no.”
“Preservation is key,” says Stephanie. “That fabulous raspberry scone yesterday was made with berries from a local woman who had a great harvest back in September. The blueberries in today’s scones were from Buchan’s Blueberry Hill, out of the deep freeze. We can be generous with what we have put away, which helps keep the menu fresh.
“And Jonathan prepares things in a way that you wouldn’t expect. He gets people to eat things they think they don’t like.”
Sugar 2 Salt
1371 Gray Dr., Ste. 300, Traverse City
231-492-4616 • Sugar2Salt.com
