Ruben Cantu
Lori Stern cooking at Cow & Quince: “We’ve never compromised on what we started out to do.”
Lori Stern, the owner and operator of Cow & Quince in New Glarus, never set out to be a chef.
Her intention was to open “a local market with light fare, like waffles, soup and salad,” says Stern. At the time, she owned a farm, which she also ran as a bed and breakfast. “Our guests wanted to eat local, and there wasn’t really any place in Green County doing that.”
She opened Cow & Quince in 2014 after working for years in public policy.
Stern’s son-in-law was Cow & Quince’s first chef. “He made a little bit more and a little bit more and we became known for our food, and suddenly we had a full-blown restaurant,” says Stern. Reviews were glowing. “We had to put in a hood.”
Now, more than five years later, Stern remains enthusiastic about the restaurant and the work she has been doing with local farmers. “We’ve never compromised on what we started out to do — source locally and demonstrate that you can eat locally year-round,” says Stern.
But she has been doing the cooking herself for over a year, and wants to move on. On the verge of turning 56, she is “looking for an exit strategy.”
“It would be great if someone [continued to do] the sourcing we do,” says Stern. “We pay our farmers what they are worth; there’s no middleman.We don’t open frozen bags of food that cost next to nothing.”
The restaurant, at 407 2nd St. in New Glarus, is for sale for $550,000, including the building, with two apartments on the second floor. (Stern is also willing to sell the business without the building, but not vice versa.) It’s currently open for breakfast and lunch, with once-a-month set-course dinners. “It is much easier to walk into a restaurant that has been a restaurant, even if you change the concept,” Stern says. “At least people know to come here to eat.”
Stern is willing to be patient and keep the restaurant going until she finds a buyer. “If it takes five years to sell, that’s what it might take. It’s not a desperate thing or a ‘We’re not making it’ thing.”
Stern isn’t sure what she wants to do after selling the business — she mentions advancing her study of yoga and doing more writing, as well as continuing food activism and cooking in some capacity. She is currently running for a seat on the Green County Board.
“The restaurant for me represented being in the world the way I want the world to be,” says Stern. “I had been working on these big, intractable policy issues — child obesity, social and food justice, education issues, sexual health — big things, that was most of my career. I thought, ‘What if I just get small, walk the walk, and be in my community and lead by example instead of pushing these big boulders uphill,’” says Stern, who has worked on these issues in both the public and private sector. “But honestly, seeing what’s happening in the world in the last five years, I feel more compelled to step back in and get big again.”
