Das Café didn’t start with a business plan. It started with two sisters, a vacant building, and the quiet conviction that grief needs somewhere to go. Caroline Lott and Katy Harmer are daughters of Gerold and Christa Schroeder, who in 1981 left East Germany behind in search of something freer, eventually settling their family of ten in Utah. When hardship found them again, Caroline knocked on Katy’s door and said she was opening a café with or without her. Katy said yes.

That was 2011. They launched on Spring City’s main street with no experience, a paid-off Nissan as collateral, and recipes from their father’s kitchen. Opa Gerold had always dreamed of having a place of his own. His daughters built it for him.

Fifteen years later, Das Café is the kind of place a town of 900 somehow produces and the rest of the world finds. The menu is simple, made from scratch, rooted in the food they grew up eating.