Ironworks Cafe and Market
Erika Rattray is the owner of Ironworks Cafe and Market. She started Ironworks in 2014 and every day since has been working to improve her customer’s experiences.
CALEB PEREZ/SPECIAL TO THE COLUMBIA BASIN HERALD
Ironworks features furniture handmade by Erika Rattray and her father and items original to the original welding shop.
Ironworks features a variety of food such as sandwiches, salads, and some baked goods as well as drinks such as lattes, Italian sodas, and even beer and wine.
During the spring Ironworks offers various plants and flower baskets available for purchase. This year Rattray has grown her own garden of peonies which will be picked and ready for purchase by the end of May.
OTHELLO – Ironworks Cafe and Market in Othello is located at 335 S. Broadway in the old welding and fabrication shop. Today they serve a variety of amenities such as coffee, food, and different floral and plant starts.
The owner Erika Rattray has had Ironworks open since 2014 and since then has been seeking to provide her customers a more and more enriching experience especially now that the restrictions brought on by Covid-19 have been lifted.
“We sell soup, salad, sandwiches,” Rattray said. “We have beer and wine and I have an espresso machine.”
Around springtime every year they open a full greenhouse behind the cafe where they sell vegetable starts and hanging baskets of flowers all of which they grow themselves, she said.
“They are really fun they make our patio look so beautiful,” she said.
During the winter months, Ironworks provides a variety of classes that anyone can take part in. These classes occur once a month and include activities such as flower arrangements and a glass-making class along with many others, she said.
“We just do kind of events in the winter to get people out of the house and doing group activities again,” she said.
During certain special occasions, such as the recent Sandhill Crane Festival, they will have live music playing at the cafe. Along with this Ironworks can be rented out after hours for anyone looking for a spot for a special occasion, she said.
The ultimate goal of Ironworks is to bring a sense of community to Othello and to make small towns hip, she said.
“It’s not just big cities, small towns can be cool too,” she said.
This idea came from when Rattray used to work for Yelp prior to opening Ironworks. Seeing how businesses were operating all across the country and what worked – and what didn’t – inspired her to bring something she felt was truly unique to Othello, she said.
“I like being creative that’s why we do classes at night,” she said. “I like that when you come into Ironworks that there’s always something to look at.”
When the Ironworks building itself was an old welding and fabrication shop it was owned by the Larsons and the Alreds in Othello. While Rattray was in High School her father purchased the property where it sat empty for a while, she said.
Following graduation from WSU Rattray worked her job for Yelp in Arizona before eventually making her way back to Othello looking to create her own career path. This is when she decided to remodel Ironworks where she and her father were able to do most of the renovations themselves, she said.
Most of the furniture such as the tables and chairs are either custom-made by Rattray and her father or were original to the building, she said.
“You should look at the tables, the tables are cool,” she said. “All the tables are different and they have typeset drawers and each one has different things in it.”
The shop has even been gifted a lot of items to Ironworks that were originally made there back when it was just a welding shop. Even most of the metal that is within the cafe is recycled and repurposed from the original shop, she said.
“A bunch of fun stuff that we did here,” she said. “I tried to bring a lot of history back to the building.”
The shop saw a lot of success after its opening in 2014, unfortunately following the pandemic, Ironworks, like a lot of other businesses, had to put a halt on services. During this time Rattray took the opportunity to take on an entirely different project and become a full-time farmer, she said.
“When COVID happened and I had to become a full-time farmer because the restaurant business was a little rough there for a moment, I decided to plant something that I thought would make me extremely happy every time I’d go home,” she said. “So I planted an acre of peonies.”
These peonies took exactly three years to flower and since this year will be the first time they will be able to offer fresh-cut peonies. These are expected to be available by the end of May, she said.
Now the beauty of her field now gets to make its way to the cafe as the springtime brings more people and activities to Ironworks.
Caleb Perez is a graduate of Moses Lake High School and a Communications student at Big Bend Community College.
IRONWORKS CAFE AND MARKET
335 S Broadway Ave.
Othello, WA 99344
509-592-9710
