When we first opened our Wilkeson, Washington restaurant we had an idea of wanting to meet our customers in real life, offline, to let them try the syrups we were already crafting in small batches with garden ingredients, and selling from our blog's website. We wanted a space to grow a community around our products, and we loved the romance of bringing back to life a pre- turn of the century building. We saw from Belinda's mobile bar company how impactful it was to taste the syrups in drinks. She served drinks at events all across Washington state, and customers raved about the garden inspired cocktails and "zero proof" (non-alcoholic) drinks made with Simple Goodness Sisters syrups.

The Soda Shop helped us to connect with our customers and feed our hospitality driven, extroverted selves, while helping our customers understand how the not so simple syrups could transform your home bartending game (or coffee drinking, tea making, or even baking.) You can read more about how we ended up in Wilkeson and our reflections after 1 year of being open to catch you up to speed.

Now, in year four, I can say that the Soda Shop is not only so much more than we initially envisioned, it is finally fulfilling the visions that we did have from the start. At the beginning, we didn't anticipate the menu we'd need to serve to meet our local licensing requirements, or the equipment layout required (if you ever want to open a restaurant, take whatever you think you need for refrigeration and just go ahead and triple it. Put that in your budget.) However, since the beginning, we knew we wanted a warmly furnished space, with multiple uses for the two conjoined buildings that would include a kitchen in which we could bottle our syrups and let our customers understand the process, as well as a beautiful dining room and outdoor dining that attracted a community of diners and drinkers. As the daughters of an absolute wizard of an architecht and contractor, we had added and subtracted walls, doors and windows in our minds We looked around the rooms as they were and we had the vision of a space that was no longer dark, peeling, and crooked but bright, functional, and true to the original character of the 1891 building whose future we now determined.

But have you ever done anything halfway and had to live with that for years? Maybe lived through a home renovation that is never quite finished, or taken an extended number of years to finish a degree? It is deeply unsatisfying for a person with a goal and a vision to deny themselves a finish line, for four years. Our winters "off," when we close the Soda Shop for the low tourist season, have allowed us to move forward in increments.

So when we enter the Soda Shop today and look around and feel done with that restaurant space, the newfound ease in that feeling is palpable. There was always an internal edit happening when I viewed the dining rooms before, as in "there will be lights over there to define the booth space and create a warmer glow and give a more historical look than the overhead pendants, later, but it is what it is for now- dark." Now there are interesting things on the walls, when last year we got just to the point of adding our wall of full-glass doors to the rotten back wall before we had to turn our attention to re-opening, inventory stocking, making staff schedules.

What I can say with gusto is that as slow as these changes have sometimes felt (three and a half years isn't really that long, we know) and sometimes as hard as that has felt, they have been filled with more joy than frustration. It has been so gratifying to feed people here, to bring our friends here and to make new ones within these walls. I asked my kids about their favorite Soda Shop memories and Henry said his favorite was watching Christmas movies on the big projector in the dining room with his friends, eating ice cream in his Christmas pajamas. Hayes said his favorite memory was Halloween Trunk or Treat in Wilkeson. He was dressed as a ninja, and we played tic tac toe at one of the trunk set ups (I think it was a vehicle masquerading as a pirate ship?), which had you beat an opponent before giving you a giant candy bar. Our cousins and their kids have come every Halloween and hung out all day, bringing along new friends each year so that the circle and the happiness just gets bigger. My favorite memories are on the live music nights, swinging my boys around or holding them in my arms under the string lights. We are all are there, dancing, my husband has the other boy in his arms, my sister with her kids. After all, when I picked the band, the drinks menu, and placed the lights, and the weather cooperated with a dry night of a slow pink sunset, how could I not find these moments perfect? Smaller moments bring me a gratification kind of joy, as in "will that cherry soaked whiskey cola drink be back next year? I gotta say, I think it is my favorite cocktail I have ever had."

Yet the work goes on: the outdoor dining at the Soda Shop, while beautiful and comfortable and very usable for game playing and ice cream eating and memory making, isn't at full vision yet. We want a stage for the performances our customers love, a covered area for the Pacific Northwest weather, and we see more garden beds out here - we can't stay away from an herb and flower garden for long. Excitingly, the 1891 original side of the building, which currently houses our Soda Sop kitchen in the back, is just now getting it's makeover. (The Soda Shop side was originally built in 1909-1910, but was completly rebuilt in 1981.) It will be our production kitchen for our products. In some ways it is a makeunder. We are scraping accoustic tiles from original wood ceilings, replacing linoleum floors with wood again. In this new kitchen space, with the help of a USDA grant, we're installing efficient, commercial syrup making equipment , moving beyond the incredibly manual version we've been working within: just heavy pots of bubbling syrup, tubing to fill bottles, burnt hands. We've long used a co-packer to help us with the number of batches the summer harvests require, but we are so eager to own more of this process ourselves.

Here's something we've learned about being dreamers, entrepreneurs, people who love a project and hate an ending: there will always be a next idea, so you have got to learn to love the now. My advice to anyone in this stage: release versions 1 and 2, messy as they may be (did you know the old location of the dining room couch was to hide a gaping hole in the wall?) Enjoy these early versions thoroughly. We filled ours with people and good food and invited people into what still seemed in many ways a mess to us, but that looked pretty great to them. Use your beta releases to their full extent. Let them bring in the cash needed to continue. Someday, year four will come and you won't be completly finished, nah, ever, but you might have one thing where you can look at it and say: "There. That is what I meant to make. "

• The biggest line up of live music, events and festivals we have ever had We love planning these special events for our community and our customers responded so strongly to them last year. See the Soda Shop Events line up here, including Old Fashioned Fest and Garlic and Goats.
• Strong returning staff of women with whom we have been at our most stressed out and most joyous. That kind of chemistry takes time, and to have found staff who are invested in this vision alongside us is so valuable.
• Stuff on our previously bare walls. More importantly, that stuff better tells our stories: stories of what a farm to bar restaurant even is, stories of Wilkeson's history, and stories of who we are as farmers, as bartenders and as a family.
• A menu that we're confident in. Man, did we learn a lot as early restauranters about menus- what should or should not make the cut on a sandwich or cocktail menu, how to test new specials and see if they deserve a spot, which deep cut, wonderfully detailed cocktail recipes belong in a book or a blog post rather than on a bar menu for the general public.

The town of Wilkeson finished a sidewalk project to make the business disctrict ADA accessible over winter 2022-23. The process was pretty miserable, with our last few weekends open working around sidewalk closures and a contractor whose complete lack of professionalism shocked ourselves and the town, but we are happy to be able to welcome those with disabilities more easily, with no more step up into our storefront.