Copyright M Live Michigan
SUTTONS BAY, MI - Once you step inside 9 Bean Rows bakery and its cozy café near Suttons Bay, you might feel like you’ve unexpectedly used your passport - and arrived somewhere delightful. You’ll be forgiven if you look behind you, to see if you’ve left a cobblestone French street when you came through the doorway. Let your senses wander and you’ll swear you’re in a boulangerie or pâtisserie, with a little fresh farmer’s market on the side. Across the counter, big rounds of fresh-baked breads are waiting to be bagged and handed to a steady stream of locals and visitors alike. The desserts behind the glass case look too pretty to eat, but you know you’ll do it anyway. Jen and Nic Welty have spent the last decade building and expanding 9 Bean Rows into not only a Northern Michigan travel destination, but a spot that feeds the community, draws thousands of tourists and is interwoven into so many area businesses. Their spot - just a short, winding drive from Suttons Bay - is part bakery and restaurant, and the home base for the family’s farm operation and popular year-round CSA. Local headlines through the years have labeled this hospitality power couple as innovative, and as champions of Northern Michigan’s growing agritourism scene. After talking to both of them in the last year, we know that the Weltys’ dynamic business model boils down to something heartfelt: They love to grow and create good food. And they want to partner with people who do the same. And then they want to share it all with others - lots of others. “I love what I do, and knowing we’re leaving our mark on the community,” Jen Welty said. They work with farmers whose meats and cheeses are for sale in their cooler, with artisans whose gift products line their shelves, and with other growers whose ingredients make the food they sell even more delicious. During our recent trip there, we were able to peek inside the 80,000-pound wood-fired Spanish bread oven that’s the heart of their bakery business, helping them turn out 150,000 loaves of bread each year. They’re also known for their huge assortment of European-style pastries. Bite into one of the signature croissants and you’ll have to briefly close your eyes to enjoy what’s basically poetry + butter. In the high season, 9 Bean Rows’ talented team is baking 3,000 of these sweet, flaky goodies each day. Jen Welty is enthusiastically open about how they handle their multiple businesses. “For the most part, Nic stays out of the kitchen,” she laughed. Her husband juggles the always-evolving list of new projects on the property (wine courtesy of Aurora Cellars, anyone?). He also operates the CSA farm on site, handles the paperwork, and is Mr. Personality Plus for the tour groups who stop to visit. An Early Spark The couple met at Ohio State. Jen Welty said she was fascinated by the cute guy with the tight 80s-style rolled-up jeans whose pattern was to drop into her horticulture class, stay five minutes, then leave. “He had booked three classes in the same period,” Jen remembers. “He was a genius. He was just like this enigma.” At the end of the semester, Nic was looking for a place to live and Jen’s rental had an available room. “Three weeks later there is a knock at my door and he’s holding a duffel bag,” she said. They soon started dating. But their dates were very Nic-and-Jen. They talked about farming. They went on adventures. They perfected their couple rhythm while paddling a canoe. Nic grew up in a farming community in northern Ohio but had never been to Michigan. Jen, who grew up in Rockford, wanted to head back to The Mitten. “I guess we’re going,” he told her. A Life Up North Their Northern Michigan evolution began at Black Star Farms, an award-winning winery and inn near Suttons Bay that has served as a supportive incubator for a handful of well-known local businesses. The pieces that became 9 Bean Rows were first planted here. They started their first farm there, growing a Community Supported Agriculture model of weekly shares that has developed a deep fan following. A trained baker, Jen started the bread business there, adding pastries to round out the offerings and appeal to the local farmer’s market crowds. For a while, the Weltys took over the lease on a tiny Front Street spot in Traverse City to sell their wares, and later opened a farm-to-table restaurant in Suttons Bay. With each evolution, they made more partnerships and refined their plans. Finding a Home Their current incarnation began in 2014, when they bought the old Covered Wagon farm market on East Duck Lake Road. It was a quaint country spot that served up doughnuts and pies. The owners were retiring. The Weltys saw an opportunity in the unused land around the small market building. “We knew we wanted our bakery and our farm all in the same area,” Jen Welty said. They opened in March of that year. “In the first week, we knew we’d made the right decision. All the sudden, there was literally a line of people out the door.” What was bringing the crowds in? The array of crusty breads, some with the earthy tang of sourdough. An expanse of delicate pastries that have only grown in breadth over the last decade. And the kind of entrepreneurial dreaming that can’t be turned off. For inspiration last year, Jen took two of the bakery’s pastry chefs to France. In her spare time, she thinks about how to write grant proposals to fund a grain mill that could help local farmers as well as expand her supply of bread ingredients. And recent years have seen the addition of a wood-fired pizza oven, an outdoor bar area and patio, and the interior renovation that made room for the café. Taking a break on her couch upstairs, Jen talked about a good loaf of bread being her first love - and why she finds it so easy to lean into the European flair in her baking and her pastry menu. “It’s also the food that I want to eat,“ she said. ”It is always a mix of what talent do I have in the kitchen to perform what we need to do." And a menu full of local ingredients is always her best starting point. What’s in a Name The story of how the Weltys’ 9 Bean Rows got its name is as personal as it is poetic. It’s a hat-tip to a line in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by Irish poet W.B. Yeats. The poem itself is about living a simple life at one with nature. Jen Welty, who comes from a family of English majors, remembers the time when they really could not figure out a good name for their business. She was sitting outdoors one day when her father and sister just broke into the Yeats’ poem, reciting it together, line by line. “While they were speaking in their cadence, it was so passionate,” she said. It turned out, that one phrase plucked from this simple poem was a perfect fit. Here is the first stanza: The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by William Butler Yeats I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
