A café at the heart of the community

Judging by the line winding out the door, the Wimberley Cafe is the place to be on a weekend morning.

Here are some numbers to digest:

— In a year, the Wimberley Cafe will go through more than 200,000 eggs. That works out to almost 550 eggs a day.

— They serve some five tons of bacon annually.

— In the last year, they went though more than a ton of coffee — 2,400 pounds to be exact.

— A few more statistics: The cafe served 2,000 pies (lemon, chocolate and coconut meringue are the most popular), 30,000 burgers and 25,000 chicken breasts in the past 12 months.

Since Chef Jay Bachman and his wife Jennifer purchased the cafe in the middle of the Wimberley Square on Oct. 6, 2018 and it has a hot spot.

There’s often an hour wait for a table on the weekends. The staff is growing and the menu is expanding.

Chef Jay sums up the key to running an efficient, successful restaurant in one word: teamwork. “It’s organized chaos,” he says. “Really, really organized. Everybody is mic’d and they can all talk to each other. It’s all about communication.”

There’s an app-based wait list so people know when a table will become available. There are cameras placed at strategic spots so the hostess and management can see what’s going on. Chef Jay could be relaxing at home, glance at his phone and notice that the kitchen staff needs to be shifted around. For example, he can choose to move someone from prep work to cooking. His phone tells him instantly what orders are being placed and that a couple hundred thousand eggs have been served.

Long waits

When asked what the toughest job at the restaurant is, Chef Jay pauses for a moment, then says Sunday-afternoon hostess. “You need to tell people outside that there might be an hour wait. Sometimes, they get angry.”

But with as many as 1,000 customers going through on a busy day, there are plenty of stressful moments to go around.

At the middle of it all is lead breakfast cook Poncho Hernandez-Glez. He’s the guy juggling the eggs and making sure the orders get out hot and in a timely fashion. Poncho got his training in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and has been with the Wimberley Cafe about a year.

“Poncho brings culinary experience to Wimberley that we just don’t normally have access to,” says Chef Jay. “He’s just the kind of guy I want to be around every day.”

Poncho arrives at the cafe at 5:15 a.m. to get ready for the 7 a.m. opening. He spends his day over the “flat top” stove piled high with hash-brown potatoes, sausage and bacon.

There’s plenty of cross training going on so the human parts can be shifted to where they are needed. On a busy weekend morning, there can be three cooks on the job. At times there are an additional two grills fired up just for pancakes.

“What if we lost so and so? We think about that a lot so we cross train everyone,” explains Jay.

The Wimberley Cafe employs about 60 people during busy tourist months and 40 during slower times.

After teamwork, says Chef Jay, it’s all about “double checking.” That’s where the expeditors — “expos” in restaurant lingo — come in. On one side of the narrow pass-through window is the kitchen and an expo who makes sure that each plate is complete and looks appealing. On the other side of the window is the dining room with another expo who double checks everything and makes sure the customers get what they order and special requests are fulfilled.

When it gets busy the duties expand and an expeditor might be making toast or cooking hash browns.

In today’s technological world, that little, shiny, spinning carousel with paper orders clipped to it is a thing of the past. There are now touch-screen monitors strategically mounted around the kitchen so the cooks know instantly what is being ordered.

Coffee is crucial, says Chef Jay. On a busy day, the Wimberley Cafe serves up 1,000 cups. At $2.75 a cup — refills are free — that adds up. The blend is locally roasted by D’s Roastery. Chef Jay and D’s owner Darrell Vasquez spent months experimenting before coming up with just the right blend.

The Bachmans ran the Back Porch BBQ at Cypress Falls before buying the Wimberley Cafe. After purchasing, they immediately closed the cafe to fix the roof and update the equipment. These days they are into “refining.”

Expansion?

What does the future hold?

Explains Jay: “Because of the sewer situation we have stopped thinking about expansion. It’s not even worth mentioning it’s so far off in the distance.

“We just want to the have the best chicken-fried steaks in Texas and creamy gravy my grandmother would have been proud of.”

The menu will always have its anchors — the burgers, omelets and sandwiches — but it’s constantly being tweaked. The cooks are trying out some vegetarian offerings now with a chalkboard out front advertising avocado melts and veggie pesto pasta and the like.

A new pastry chef has come up with chocolate chip and snickerdoodle cookies. “She was making fancy cookies with frosting and everything, but they cost $5 each— that’s just not our business model,” says Jay. So now customers can get a delicious cookie for a couple bucks.

Besides the Wimberley Cafe and his family, Chef Jay’s other passion is Mercy Chefs, a group that responds to natural disasters around the region and feeds those who have been devastated, first responders and people who are rebuilding. He’s headed to Beaumont soon to feed the folks cleaning up after the recent floods there.

His dream is to take some of Wimberley Cafe employees along to help Mercy Chefs. “The biggest short-term goal — besides consistency here at the restaurant — is being able to take guys with me on these (Mercy Chef) deployments. They will grow spiritually and emotionally. We all will grow.

“If I can get these people in those (Mercy Chef) kitchens then this place will be elevated.”