In an industrial mill space formerly used to process cotton, Bowman and Anna Brown have created Jackrabbit, a light, bright, and butter-filled café serving food the couple covets themselves. Fortunately for customers, those foods are delightfully decadent things like soft scrambled eggs with onion jam and brioche toast and open-faced smoked salmon sandwiches made in the morning; seasonal salads served at lunchtime; and a collection of pastries available throughout the day. The dishes are influenced by the spirit of Scandinavia, with a slight nod to the desserts of Eastern Europe as well.
The Browns, who also own Elda, an elegant restaurant just upstairs from the café on Main Street, opened Jackrabbit in the spring of 2021. Few traces of the cotton operation remain in the old mill space. Where there was once a freight elevator, dirt floors, and lots of red brick, the sun now illuminates pleasingly off-white painted walls, wide plank floors, and a light pink counter where the sweets are displayed, and coffee is ordered. The tables and chairs are a study in simplicity, reminiscent of a progressive Swedish primary school. The play on textures and neutral tones offers a subtle luxury and warmth.
The Scandinavian aesthetic applies to the food as well. Richness rules, with butter, cream, and eggs baked into most of the seemingly simple pastries. But everything that comes from the ovens at Jackrabbit is, in the end, expertly engineered to be well balanced.
“Bowman is not a sweets person, so the pastries are not overly sugary,” Anna explains. “We set out to have a lot of whole grains and a strong presence of sourdough. Everything is naturally leavened.”
Bowman and two full-time bakers start the pastry-making process on Monday, so the pastries and the hearty breads Jackrabbit also sells are ready for when the café opens on Wednesdays. The pastries “are complicated. They take skill and time to produce. Taking that time for the dough to develop contributes to the richness and flavor,” says Bowman.
The star of the pastry case is the cardamom bun, an artistic knot of enriched dough spiked with the warm, citrusy flavor of the spice commonly used in Scandinavian baking. “This one’s not super traditional,” Bowman says. “It’s more like a bun crossed with a kouign-amman, soft inside with a caramelized sugar top, baked a little longer, keeping it from being too sweet. It borders on bitterness. We like to operate right on the edge.”
Sitting beside the cardamom buns is semla, a classic Scandinavian pastry filled with almond cream and fruit compote and covered in whipped cream. It looks like a puffy cloud but is surprisingly rich. As is the medovik, a layered honey cake prepared like a tiramisu, with thin cookie-like layers of cake soaked in a caramelized honey syrup and stacked between layers of sweet and sour cream. “When a pastry is balanced, you want to keep going back for more. The medovik is dangerous in that sense,” says Anna, claiming this one as her favorite.
Much effort goes into Jackrabbit’s coffee service, too. Each beverage—Americano, espresso, cappuccino, cortado, latte, and mocha—is made to order with freshly ground beans from two local roasters. Pour-over coffees and espresso drinks are served in thick ceramic cups, on individual trays. The care that goes into each cup “celebrates the idea that you’re really coming in for a break and should take your time,” says Anna.
Image by Heidi Kirn
“Even though this is supposed to be a casual restaurant, we try to have little personal service touches that make it unique and special,” Bowman says. “It’s things we crave, things we wish we could go out and find ourselves.”
