The Yelp-ers call her “sleepy eyes.”
Her name is Sarah Cohen, and she is the force behind Happy Badger’s neo-hippie meets Alice Waters cuisine. She is also the dreamy-sounding front woman of the jazz-pop-folk trio The Antivillians. She and her cohort, brother and musician Ben, are the leaders of a motley crew of friends and family creating food that is as soulful as their music at this Bowling Green restaurant.
Happy Badger’s former life as a fair trade gift and clothing store in Toledo — the iteration of the business parents Alan and the late Donna Cohen started in 2000 — informs the indie spirit of the cafe today. Sarah and Ben (who returned from New York City to take over the family business with his sister) have found that integrity is as challenging a pursuit in the food industry as it is in music. After a summer of renovations and menu tinkering, they’ve reinvented the Happy Badger into a “forward-thinking restaurant.” Every week, the pair take separate cars to trek to area farms and bakeries to source Happy Badger’s menu — Ann Arbor’s Zingerman’s bread and coffee, Calder’s Dairy for milk and cream, Rosewood for organic raw milk cheese, the Toledo Farmer’s Market and Schooner Farms for produce. The Cohens have “transposed directly on to the food” the fair trade philosophies they learned from their parents, even if it means much more work to get it done.
“We could easily have everything delivered from [a food service distributor], but to me that industrialization of food culture, it’s just incredibly pervasive and negative,” Ben says. “We’re trying to provide an alternative to that. I really believe in the products that we use. [It’s] really simple food that focuses on ingredients.”
Unadulterated food, as Ben describes it, is the focus of the Badger’s Sunday brunches, a mellow midday affair with melancholy musicians playing live and a mix of professors and students seated in the ragtag, mismatched chairs of the comfortable-home-turned-restaurant. The hand-scrawled Badger Brunch menu changes weekly — a mound of truffle butter eggs sauteed with spinach and mushrooms on a puffy, buttery croissant, or buckwheat pancakes smothered in grilled apples, cinnamon, Calder’s Dairy butter and Michigan-made maple syrup. There are other hearty, charmingly-titled dishes, too, like the Springtime’s-A-Comin’ BLT (a farm bread sandwich of thick Belleville bacon, tomato, sharp white cheddar, fried egg, greens, pickled turnips, cilantro, mayo, and tomato jam) or the Lumberjack Wrap (local eggs, potatoes, squash, spinach, tomatoes, cheeses, onions and peppers).
They’ve started collaborating with Black Kite Coffee and Pies to bring Badger Brunches to Toledo the last Saturday of every month, setting up shop in the Old West End cafe from 10am to 2pm. And they’ve begun to host reservation-only slow food dinners seasonally, in addition to being the spot for area activist groups who want to meet around Happy Badger’s regular lunch menu of “giant sandwiches” made with everything from fresh basil chicken salad to avocado tofu.
To the Cohens, the extra effort to represent their beliefs with the food they make is the only way of making a “high-idea restaurant work.”
“It’s a crazy amount of really awesome ingredients that go into everything we make,” Ben says. “To me, it’s not worth sacrificing those things to make more money, because if that’s the case I’m just going to cook at home and do a different job. There’s a sense of responsibility to maintain the ideas that we’re really pushing.”
The Happy Badger, 331 N. Main St., Bowling Green. Open Sunday thru Wednesday, 11am-4pm; Thursday thru Saturday, 11am-8pm. Brunch at Black Kite Coffee on Saturday, May 25, 10am-2pm. 419-352-0706. www.happybadger.com.
