Heather Horton has a few pandemic messages for her fellow Kansans.
“Don’t give up. Take each day as it comes,” she says, which is good advice in any situation. But also: “Think about the people, not the profit margin, because that’s what matters in the end.”
Horton and her husband, Roger, co-own two small businesses in Pittsburg. They opened Sweet Designs Cakery, where they bake party-type desserts, in 2009. A block away is Toast, which they opened last October, with a concept that was unusual for Pittsburg.
You go to Kansas City and you have probably a restaurant on every block trying to source locally and promote those farmers. … What we have is people going to work at restaurants that mainly serve fried food that comes in a box.Heather horton
Horton describes the menu as “comfort food but done in an artistic, bright, fresh way.” Their bestselling items are the avocado smoked salmon and the Pallucca’s Toast Melt, named for the century-old family-run meat market in Frontenac. All along, their plan was to buy as many ingredients as possible from farmers markets or farmers she knew.
“You go to Kansas City and you have probably a restaurant on every block trying to source locally and promote those farmers, but we don’t really have that in Pittsburg,” she says.
They also wanted to train people to work in culinary arts, an opportunity that’s also rare in southeast Kansas, she says.
“What we have is people going to work at restaurants that mainly serve fried food that comes in a box. We don’t have farm-to-table training,” she says.
She hired several high school students, hoping they could get school credit in addition to on-the-job experience. But COVID-19 put those plans on hold.
Since restaurants are one of the pandemic’s hardest-hit industries, I’ve been fact-checking politicians who like to say their party is the only one saving small businesses.
Horton, who got a Paycheck Protection Program loan and grants that have helped with payroll, says she hasn’t seen much state-level leadership.
“They shouldn’t be trying to one-up each other in a pandemic,” she says of those politicians.
Mostly, her businesses have survived through community support and their own initiative.
Roger had started baking bread, which they’d thought about selling in small markets around the area. They weren’t quite ready for that, though, because the bakery was too small. But with weddings and anniversaries canceled, business at Sweet Designs Cakery tanked. Dine-in service at Toast was closed from March until July.
It was scary, Horton says. They started doing curbside and pop-up lunches. They added DoorDash deliveries. They packaged up the hummus and marinated mushrooms and olives they served at the restaurant for #ToastAtHome. And Roger started baking more bread.
