Avocado Ranch Dressing (Vegan)
Get Real Café’s favorite recipe is the Avocado Ranch Dressing. It’s vegan, a perfect complement to a sandwich or salad, and a wonderful condiment to veggie sides.
This is What Committing to Your Mission Looks Like
Veronica Ripp Brings Passion, Experience to Her Get Real Café
Through her own journey to health, Veronica Ripp realized a need in Door County for healthy lunch options that included local food, vegan options and gluten-free and organic selections.
Acting on her entrepreneurial dream of opening her own business and a committing to a menu offering “real” food made from scratch, Ripp and a small dedicated staff opened Get Real Café at 116 Madison Avenue in Sturgeon Bay and have been welcoming guests for more than five years.
“Veronica knows a lot about the culinary world and understands how to be creative with food using different sauces, meats, and cheese combinations. She also understands what keeps people coming back,” said Katie Henrickson, a friend and employee who has been with the café since it opened along with two part-time team members, Trish Zrimsek and Amanda Sallinen.
Get Real Café guests may sport face coverings this summer as they come into the restaurant to pick up their favorite lunchtime salad, smoothie, wrap, or sandwich, but that doesn’t prevent Ripp and her staff from recognizing familiar faces or delivering Door County hospitality. When emergency stay-at-home orders were put in place in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, the cafe closed for weeks and Ripp used the time to update her website and menu and prepare it for both easy online ordering as well as curbside pickup.
Customers can now choose their favorite lunch or beverage, customize orders to include extras or omit certain items and select pickup times with text-and-go communications and payment confirmations. It takes just a minute or two to complete an order. Payments are made online and freshly prepared food is delivered to your car or can be picked up inside the restaurant.
“The support of our community has brought me to tears,” Ripp said. “Customers have stepped up, and I have been able to stay in business due to their generosity. Some ordered weekly meals. Others bought gift cards for future use. It’s been overwhelming as well as humbling.” Guidance from state and local leaders regarding reopening restaurants has continued to be the motivation for Veronica’s creativity. She used her limited outdoor space to creatively add outdoor dining. It’s both a colorful and welcoming extension of the café.
The Get Real BLT. Contributed photo.
“Get Real is as much a family as it is a restaurant, and we have the greatest guests ever!”
- Katie Henrickson, Get Real Café staffer
“Our guests know that we care for them and they care for us,” Henrickson said. “They’ve been with us through this COVID-19 time and without their support, we would not be able to be here for them. Get Real is as much a family as it is a restaurant, and we have the greatest guests ever!”
Get Real Café is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and offers a variety of lunch selections that include soups, sandwich favorites like a BLT or Free Bird sandwich, salads with quinoa or cobb, and wraps featuring fresh vegetables or organic and uncured meats.
“I’ve tried to create a broad enough menu with something for everyone. If you’re looking for vegan options, I have that. If you’re looking for gluten-free options, I have that, and if you’re a meat and potatoes kind of person, our lunch will certainly satisfy you,” she added.
Hot and hearty sandwiches include the Cuban panini made with pulled pork, uncured ham, and Swiss cheese, or the Italian panini with its organic pulled chicken combined with basil pesto, artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and provolone cheese.
For those who are looking for a refreshing and flavorful fruit or veggie smoothie or an organic juice combination, the café has these choices, too. Children love the banana-berry smoothie, while the naturally sweetened pinacavado is a favorite for adults with its combination of pineapple, avocado, spinach, honey, and coconut water.
In addition, 95 percent of the restaurant’s straws and to-go containers are compostable items made from fiber and cane sugar. Although it costs more to serve food this way, Ripp knows where the packaging comes from and is happy that she’s not sending polystyrene back to the earth.
“I have a conscience for what I am doing every day. It’s not just part of my business; it is who I am,” Ripp said. “I have concern for environment, externally and internally. Knowing that products are organic, sustainable and earth-friendly and that I’m serving something of quality is important to me.”
Ripp was brought up in the restaurant business where quality and care have always been paramount. The daughter of David and Sally Ripp, her parents purchased the Nightingale Supper Club when she was in third grade. She became a young kitchen helper admiring both her parents and grandparents who owned Bay Food Market.
During summers when not attending school, she worked both front and back of the house for both the Nightingale and the White Gull Inn in Fish Creek. In the early 2000s she graduated from the Reggie White Urban Hope entrepreneurial program that helped to launch more than 900 regional businesses since it was first established by Reggie and Sarah White. She later achieved a culinary arts degree at Le Cordon Bleu Atlanta and worked with many talented chefs.
With this lifetime of good examples, education and experience, she began her journey of owning a restaurant. Longer-term, her vision is to expand to other outlets, like area hospitals or other businesses as means to expand her product offerings.
For customer Lynn Tomjanovich, Get Real Café is the perfect place to meet a friend for lunch or to pick up a smoothie. She said, “With a friendly staff, the atmosphere is inviting, and with anything you order, you’re assured of quality ingredients and a regard for conscientiously raised food for healthful living.”
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