The Marketplace Bakery & Deli brings homestyle food to Cheney with a focus on local ingredients and supporting local farmers.

The restaurant offers breakfast and lunch services. Breakfast items include classics such as eggs, bacon and pancakes, but also adds twists like stuffed hash browns and stuffed biscuits smothered in gravy. Additionally they have a weekend brunch, with foods like Belgian Waffles and eggs Benedict.

The lunch menu consists of a daily rotation of soups, enormous hot and cold sandwiches and burgers, with a selection of craft beers on tap.

The Marketplace also hosts various handmade pastries and baked goods, such as homemade doughnuts, cookies, bars, pies and breads.

Owner Lori Musgrave opened the Marketplace in Cheney nearly two and a half years ago, but she’s been in the restaurant business for almost nine years.

“Before we moved our business here we had a bakery and deli in Deer Park,” Musgrave said.

Musgrave, a Cheney resident for over 17 years, said she got tired of the drive from Cheney to Deer Park every day and came up with the idea to relocate the restaurant to Cheney.

“I decided that maybe I could just do the whole thing here and bring what we were doing in Deer Park to Cheney,” Musgrave said.

Musgrave’s inspiration for the restaurant came from her work with local farmers and local Amish.

“I was working with the Mennonites and the Hutterites up in the Deer Park area and they had a bakery and deli up there,” said Musgrave. “They were giving it up and offered it to me. I was just very fortunate to be able to jump in and keep the store going.”

The move from Deer Park to Cheney gave Musgrave the opportunity to expand the business from just a bakery and deli.

She moved from a 1,500 square-foot building to a 6,000 square-foot restaurant in Cheney. The building was previously occupied by Gatto’s Pizza, a restaurant and arcade for several years.

Previously in Deer Park, the restaurant had served only baked goods and sandwiches.

“We started thinking, what would go over well here in Cheney? And that’s when we decided to start looking at bringing it back as a restaurant,” Musgrave said.

Musgrave’s goal was to provide a little bit of everything in her restaurant in a family-style atmosphere.

“We wanted to stay with the making fresh food aspect, and we started looking at what we could make with what we already had,” said Musgrave. “We thought, we make our own bread, so let’s increase our sandwiches. We already make sourdough bread, so we could make sourdough pizza. We just started looking at everything that was available from local farmers and based our menu on that.”

Musgrave didn’t do it alone. She credits much of the restaurant’s success on her chefs. Specifically, she named Holly, who does a lot of the baking, her aunt, and Scott, a former casino chef who came on to help.

“I was just really lucky with the whole team that came in to help,” Musgrave said.

All the recipes used on the menu were created by Musgrave and her team of chefs and everything in the restaurant is either homemade or locally sourced.

“If I can get it from one of the local farms, or we can make it here fresh, that’s what we do,” said Musgrave. “We don’t go out and buy frozen foods to reheat, we just don’t do that. When we make hash browns, we take a potato, shred it, and cook it.”

Musgrave acknowledges that her process of hand making everything takes longer, but to her, it’s worth it.

“It takes time to make real food,” said Musgrave. “We’re not some place where you can just go in and they put the food in front of you in two minutes.”

“When you go to a restaurant or fast food, and they bring out your food almost instantly, what does that tell you about the food? It’s been premade, it’s been set, it’s been hot-held. We didn’t want that.”

Another objective of Musgrave is to make college students feel like they’re getting a home-cooked meal when they come to the Marketplace.

“We can always tell you what our ingredients are,” said Musgrave. “So that’s what we offer that is so much different, it’s homemade.”

The most popular items on the menu is the Reuben sandwich and the chicken bacon ranch sandwich. The stuffed hash browns and the biscuit basket are the most popular breakfast items.

Musgrave’s personal favorite items, however, are the pancakes, the chicken bacon ranch sandwich and the BLT.

“Our bacon, again, is locally sourced. I love our bacon,” Musgrave said.

The Marketplace isn’t only a restaurant. Like its name suggests, it’s also a market, full of various, locally sourced items for sale. They offer a large variety, from handmade candies and syrups to farm-fresh eggs and cheeses, and even non-food items such as soaps and baskets.

Musgrave’s inspiration for her market comes from her work with farmer’s markets.

“In the end of summer, when the farmer’s markets close, the farmers still have fresh vegetables, and the soapmaker still has soaps, and the beekeepers still produce honey. And nobody had ever thought about doing something where you can keep going,” Musgrave said.

“I thought, this is my chance to help all of these local little businesses keep going, and that’s what I did.”

The Marketplace now has items from 31 different local farmers, artisans, and crafters. Their intention is to keep growing. Most of the items are predominantly Amish, coming from the local Hutterite and Mennonite Farms.”

Musgrave inspects the sources of the items she sells before she hands them out to the customers.

“Just like a farmer’s market, any of those farmers can tell you where your food is coming from, and that’s really important to me,” Musgrave said.

On top of selling items inside, the Marketplace also hosts a Cheney farmer’s market in the summer. Musgrave said the farmer’s market usually runs from June until either Sept. or Oct., depending on the weather.

To Musgrave, local food makes all the difference.

“You have to be able to support local, and support the local farmers, because they’re the ones growing your food,” Musgrave said.

“It’s easy to go into the local grocery stores and grab your food. But when you can come and talk to the producers who grow your food, and know where it’s coming from and what’s been put on it, if anything, when it was picked, doesn’t that sound a lot better?”

“If you go to the store, and you look at the tomatoes, they’re almost always perfectly formed. That’s because they’ve been picked green. Now if you come to a farmers market and look at those same tomatoes, they’re not perfectly round. They have not been picked green off that vine, they’ve been picked red and ripe.”

Musgrave said that it’s these fresh ingredients that make all the difference in how her restaurant’s food tastes.

While the Marketplace started as a breakfast and lunch restaurant, Musgrave intends to slowly introduce a dinner service as well, starting this Friday. The dinner service will start out running Friday nights only, offering a full three-course meal for a reasonable price. Musgrave is also adding a salad bar on Fridays, offering unlimited soup and salad.

The Marketplace Bakery & Deli is located at 1011 1st St. and is open Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Fridays for dinner service.