Eve’s Café has served Lampasas County residents everything from pastries to pork schnitzels along the downtown square for 29 years. At the end of the month, the journey is set to come to an end.
Owner Eve Sanchez said the last two years have been tough to manage. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many restaurants across the U.S. have been affected by staffing shortages. Eve’s Café is one of those.
“You don’t find any qualified or experienced help,” she said. “What you get is people who don’t have experience or experience in fast food and don’t want to learn. A lot of people just didn’t go back to work, for whatever reason. I don’t know how they live, or pay their bills because I always had to work to pay my bills.”
Sanchez takes pride in her kitchen’s freshness, with all dishes cooked to order. However, she and her husband Steve have shouldered a heavy burden due to the inability to secure competent staff.
“It is so much stress that it is one of the reasons why Steve and I want to go and just quit,” she said. “It is a different herd of people out there, different upbringings, different work ethic and too many expectations, but they don’t deliver.”
Eve and Steve settled in the Lampasas County area in 1989. Although she never pursued cooking in her native Germany, Eve worked at Kempner Brick Oven, Donut Palace and at a coffee shop that is no longer in business.
After learning the ropes, she grew confident that she could open her own establishment to serve Lampasas County residents.
“I kind of worked myself into that scene before I realized ‘I can do this for myself in a small setting,’ ” Sanchez said.
Eve’s Café opened in 1995, originally starting as a coffee shop. Sanchez said everything they did was trial and error. The business was devoted to crafting dishes that would keep customers coming back.
“Instead of just saying I want to do my thing, well your thing might not be appealing to a lot of people,” she said. “So you need to get off of your thing and adapt to the community to what people like. You need to cater to the people that are around you all the time. Don’t blow them off, because those are the people that are going to visit your restaurant.”
For the first 10 years, Eve’s Café served breakfast before transitioning later to lunch and dinner. In the early years, the menu was limited to two or three items with sides, before it grew into the German-themed eatery it is today, with 10 unique schnitzel platters.
Sanchez admitted she was unsure if she could have success in Lampasas with her German dishes. Advice from her mother proved to be helpful as she built a customer base.
“My mom always said it doesn’t matter where you go, what you do or where you are at, when you do serve food or want to have a happy marriage or something like that, love goes through the stomach,” Sanchez said. “And that is what happened here.”
Nonetheless, she feels the love of being patient in waiting for a fresh, homemade meal has been lost among younger generations. Sanchez said some customers want menu items their way, refusing to recognize culinary brilliance offered by the traditional preparations.
“Unfortunately, mom-and-pop places are pretty soon going to be history, a sign of the past,” she said.
“We are catering to a generation that is more concerned about looking at the phone, eating on the road, not taking the time to eat anything, going home and buying frozen food, or DoorDashing this or DoorDashing that,” Sanchez said. “It is this generation, and it does not support little businesses in general.”
In 2022, Eve’s Café was listed No. 20 on Yelp blog writer Samantha Visone’s list of the top German eateries in the U.S. Sanchez said she never thought her culinary creations would become so popular that people from Dallas and Austin would venture here for her food.
“I didn’t think it was going to go like this, even though we put in all the effort and all the work,” Sanchez said. “At the end of the day, you don’t know how people are going to take it and support you.”
The restaurateur expressed her thanks to Lampasas County residents who have contacted her in recent weeks after rumors swirled about the café closing.
“I don’t know what is going to happen with Eve’s Café,” she said. “It has been an unbelievable journey from nothing to this. The acknowledgment we get from all of our customers is very soothing, but there is an end to everything. I am done stressing out and trying to do the work of three to four people.”
For those eager to snag one last pork schnitzel dinner, Eve’s final day of service will be March 30. The café is open from 3-9 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.