“I never knew I was going to have people lined down the street on a Saturday morning,” he said. “Now the biggest problem is to get people in a seat after they come in the door.”
Rainey said Sunrise Café is big on the natural side of food and he is focused on getting the best food for his restaurant, pointing out that there has been a 500 percent increase in the amount of organic food used at the restaurant since he took it over.
“We get food from 18 different local farms,” he said. “It’s the superior food quality. That’s all I was really trying to accomplish.”
Rainey said that most of the farms the restaurant has partnered with have been through connections made at local farmer’s markets.
“It’s all about carbon footprint. It’s all about sustainability, in my mind,” he said.
The front entrance of Sunrise is painted in colorful pastels and just inside the door is a display case of novelty tea cups. Rainey talked about an elderly woman who came in one day and recognized one of the tea cups from the cafeteria at Antioch College when she used to wait tables there.
“She was like ‘That was our tea cup, how did you get one?’ (The previous owner) must have picked it up as some point,” Rainey said.
There is also the full-building mural on the interior walls. A local Yellow Springs artist, Travis Hotaling, is the one behind the art. Rainey came up with the idea of having the seasons represented on the interior, with winter turning to spring and summer to fall. Though the mural is essentially finished at this point, Hotaling comes in for an hour every Tuesday (when the restaurant is closed) to add to his work.
“As long as it’s dragged on now, it’d be kind of weird for it to ever be finished,” Rainey said.
Hotaling is planning to add a mural to the outdoor patio area once the weather starts to warm up, Rainey said.
One of the key dishes on the menu, the Vick Burger, also has a local flavor.
“It all started with Vick Mickunas,” Rainey said. “He’s a local guy who lives in town. He does all the beer ordering at the emporium, he has his own WYSO book review show where he reviews books and talks to the authors. By the time (we) took over here, we just put the Vick Burger on the menu. It’s kind of a novelty now.”
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