For the past few years, on Saturday mornings spent at the Cooper-Young Farmers Market, my go-to strolling snack has been a crisp, flavorful hand pie from the LuLu’s Foods booth.

Even though a common companion to that order has been Lulu’s also tasty black-eyed pea sausage and biscuit, I didn’t realize until recently that those hand pies are fully plant-based, made with dairy-free butter.

LuLu’s has expanded to Lulu’s Cafe & Bakery, in a storefront along Poplar Avenue, across from East High School, where the full range of pastries, sandwiches, cakes, breads, bagels and soups are all made without using animal products, and with a dedication to local and regional sourcing and made-from-scratch ingredients.

Herrington: Where does Midtown end, or begin? A defining question for a modern Memphis

LuLu’s is run by Don Gaines and Stephanie Blanda, who met several years ago when both were working at Cooper-Young’s Imagine Vegan Cafe.

Gaines started Lulu’s, named after his dog, first as a market stand and roving pop-up endeavor; the more sweets-oriented Blanda joined him soon after. 

For both, this business was rooted in what they’d sought as consumers but struggled to find locally. 

“Don and I both shared a frustration with other options for vegans in Memphis, and even non-vegans,” Blanda said. “There’s just not a lot of places that are so focused on using fresh, seasonal ingredients: Local ingredients, things that are naturally grown, things that are organic and just making everything from scratch. It’s very easy to get a lot of pre-made ingredients and items. It’s a route that understandably a lot of restaurants take; it’s just not one that we’ve chosen.” 

The dough for those hand pies, which Blanda said is one of their favorite items, includes a non-dairy butter made by Gaines in-house, in multiple batches a week. It’s deodorized cocoa butter (so it doesn’t have a chocolate taste) and vegetable oil emulsified with soy milk and vinegar. 

Today & Always vegan café ceases lunch and dinner service

“We sat down and looked compositionally at how much butter is fat and how much is liquid and tried to figure out how to make that balance in a plant-based way,” Gaines said.

That butter is also used in the buttercream frosting of Blanda’s cakes and in the bakery’s scones and biscuits.

The filling comes from local fruits in season or frozen or canned by Gaines. Sometimes it comes from the peach tree in his front yard. 

The black-eyed pea sausage was inspired by black-eyed pea falafel Gaines used to make while working at the now-defunct Fuel restaurant in Midtown. (Fuel remains a popular food truck.)

“One day when I was eating it, I thought the texture was so close to sausage. I wondered what would happen if I added a binder and changed the spices. It started from there and expanded,” said Gaines.

Dancer Lil Buck and Imagine Cafe dream up new vegan cheese sauce

The bakery uses mostly whole grain, organic flour from North Carolina’s Carolina Ground. 

“When I first started using the flour, I kept thinking, it’s not very white,” said Gaines. “And that’s because it’s not.” 

“It’s not bleached,” said Blanda. “It’s not super refined. It’s like real food.”

All of the bread made with that flour is sourdough, including focaccia adorned with seasonal ingredients (recently sweet potato and Brussels sprouts) and bagels. 

“I think they might be the only sourdough bagels in Memphis,” Blanda said. “I don’t know of anyone else who’s doing that. We shape them by hand and boil them the old-fashioned way.”

$10 Deal: City Silo is full of dishes that are good and good for you

Varieties include everything, sesame, poppy seed and, on Saturdays, cinnamon-sugar.

Even with the new shop, on Saturdays you can still find LuLu’s at the Cooper-Young market. 

“That’s our plan, to stay there as long as we can,” Gaines said. “It’s such a great way for people to meet us, know who we are and find out about the business for the first time.”

Blanda and Gaines — who are designing LuLu’s as a worker’s co-op, with themselves as only the first two “owners” — built a following at the market and have seen many familiar faces already migrating to their new shop.

Herrington: Where does Midtown end, or begin? A defining question for a modern Memphis

They hope to build more of an audience now, not just those specifically seeking plant-based options but also those people seeking healthier options or maybe just more flavorful organic and locally sourced options. 

View Gallery

“It’s a pretty central location,” said Gaines. “It’s not exactly Midtown and not exactly East Memphis. It’s on Poplar, and people are going up and down Poplar all the time. You can get to it from Central, and there’s a neighborhood right behind us.” 

LuLu’s Cafe & Bakery, 3119 Poplar Ave., 901-590-3938. Open 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays, and 8 a.m. - 2 p.m., Saturdays.