Inman's Harvest Cafe is the real deal for homegrown, homemade food and hometown feels
Katy Reinecker and her husband, Nick, manage the Harvest Cafe in downtown Inman, and her parents, Loren and Ginger Thiessen have owned it since 2008. This family-owned and operated business is passionate about baking the food as real as possible by using home-grown real ingredients for their made-from-scratch home-cooked meals and by creating a hometown atmosphere.
Homegrown, Homemade food
The Harvest Cafe strives to make everything from scratch. “About 90% of what we serve is made from scratch,” said Reinecker. “We make our own breads, including the hamburger buns, grind our own meat to make burger patties and German sausage ropes, and bread the chicken ourselves.” She said that about the only thing they don’t make from scratch are the french fries and onion rings. “I tried, and it was awful,” said Reinecker.
The switch to operating in this way happened as a direct result of COVID. Reinecker said, “The big companies didn’t care about us small town places when the supply chain was interrupted. So we started making everything ourselves.” They finished grinding 40 pounds of meat this morning. They make the German sausage and put it in the casings themselves.
They even grow their own food. “We just got 400 potato plants,” said Reinecker. They grow what they need, including spinach, tomatoes, and beets. The beets are used as pickled beets or in a recipe called Harvard beets, a sweet, syrupy recipe served warm.
This hometown cafe also offers a variety of dishes, keeping patrons coming back home to eat instead of seeking other towns nearby for Mexican food, fried chicken, liver and onions, and Mennonite dishes like Verenike and New Year’s Cookies. Fried Chicken Friday has a different casserole each time.
Polly Holler, a waitress at the cafe, said that Schnetka is served on Wednesdays. It is a Mennonite pastry that is like a fruit-filled long john. Patrons have a choice of cherry, peach, or raisin filled. Cream puffs are served on Thursdays.
The recipes used for the homemade meals are pulled from shelves of family cookbooks in a glass-doored bookcase at the back of the cafe. Right in front of the bookcase was a 30-inch diameter bowl filled with flour breading, and Nick Reinecke was hand-breading chicken. His wife noticed her bag on a chair nearby was heavily dusted with flour. Reinecke grinned and said, “I’ll have a talk with my husband.”
Hometown feels
Each table has a story at the cafe. “We’ve been covering these tables for 40 years,” said Holler. They are trying to replace a few of the original salmon-colored mid-century modern boomerang patterned laminate tables that have been part of the cafe since it began. There are also brown laminate tables “someone bought at some point,” adding to the cafe’s story.
While they are replacing the smaller rectangle tables, the big round tables are staying. Each one has personal value to Katy Reinecker.
“That one over there is the table us grandkids sat around and grew up with,” said Reineceker. “When there got to be too many grandkids to fit round the table, it came to the cafe.” The octagonal table is staying because Reinecker likes how it looks. The third round table was bought at a liquidation sale from Red Lobster in Hutchinson. Patrons at the cafe affectionately call it the “family table.”
“Where the buffet is now used to be a soda fountain and in 1987, it was changed to a buffet,” said Holler. She has worked at the cafe for 33 years, and the Reineckers are the 6th owner of the cafe that Holler has worked under. “It’s a nice little town with welcoming people. They took care of me. We love our community, the people here.”
Holler reminisced about how times have changed what they serve. The cafe used to have a pastry counter filled with favorites for all the local farmers. “Now, people just don’t eat the same things for breakfast anymore,” said Holler.
A collection of model tractors, trucks, and semi-trailers encircle the room on a shelf suspended from the ceiling. There used to be a model train on tracks, but to keep the train was cost-prohibitive. To keep in line with the hometown harvest theme, Reinecker added harvest-themed tractor and truck scale models from her family’s collections. “The tractor collection was my grandpa’s and the semi-trailers belonged to my uncle,” said Reinecker. The collections are conversation pieces and patrons often take pictures.
The Harvest Cafe is located at 112 South Main Street in Inman, Kansas, and is open Tuesday through Thursday, 6:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m., Friday, 6:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m., and Saturday, 6:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. For more information about their menu or specials, visit their Facebook page or call (620) 585-6925.
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