Plants: They’re what’s for lunch at new vegan-friendly cafe set in downtown Modesto
If you’re going to eat plants, might as well be surrounded by them as well.
The meta concept, a plant-based cafe inside of a floral shop, is coming to downtown Modesto in 2020. The Farmacy is a new pop-up eatery from Erin Doran, who has built a mini-empire on Tenth Street with her side-by-side wedding/event venue The Century and co-working space Nine3One.
Her new restaurant The Farmacy will open inside her planned floral shop, The Rosé Bouquet. Both are set to open in the new year, sometime around February or March.
The Farmacy will feature a whole food, plant-based and vegan-friendly menu, Doran said. So expect healthy offerings like build-your-own salads, soups and a regularly rotating menu of bowls as well as botanical lemonade, teas, infused waters and juices. Everything will be around $10-$13.
The diet came out of necessity, Doran said. About a year ago she was having health issues which were attributed to food allergies. She switched to a plant-based diet and hasn’t looked back. Instead she started looking forward and enrolled in an online plant-based nutrition course through the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies at eCornell University.
“I decided I wanted to share all this information and knowledge I got with other people, and decided to do that through the cafe,” she said. “You get to see how beautiful plant-based eating is.”
The Farmacy will start as a pop-up cafe, and depending on its popularity grow. Doran plans to start with lunches during the week. It will start off with a “farmer’s market-style” salad bar. If the eatery takes off she said she will expand its menu and its space.
For now it will be nestled inside the Rosé Bouquet, which will have a storefront on Tenth and be open to walk-in customers as well as the exclusive flower provider for The Century. Like The Farmacy’s edible salad bar, the flower shop will be interactive, with an “arrangement bar” where people can pick their own flowers for bouquets.
The Farmacy will be able to seat about 20 to 30, with some seating planned for outside on the sidewalk and in the breezeway between the two buildings.
Doran has owned The Century, a popular wedding venue, since 2014 and in 2018 added Nine3One, a co-working facility where people can rent space by the hour, day, week or month, as well as hold meetings and other events.
That Doran has added another business to her growing roster should be no surprise to anyone who has watched her work over the years. Her entrepreneurial spirit was on full display from Day One, when she offered a shoe check and VIP restroom passes for festival-goers at X-Fest, the once popular outdoor music festival that took over downtown streets every summer for years before the plug was pulled in 2016, in her then fledgling business The Century.
The clever name behind The Farmacy comes from Doran’s philosophy of “treating food as medicine.”
