Sandwiches, wraps, salads keep Wasilla restaurant hopping

After nearly four years of serving up breakfast and lunch to hungry locals, a downtown Wasilla restaurant is looking forward to what comes next.

Amanda Graydon, along with her husband, Charlie, and their six children, opened the Wandering Café in November 2021, as the world was emerging from the Covid pandemic. It was a big step up from the food truck scene that provided the launch pad for the restaurant’s current success. An admitted “coffee snob” with entrepreneurial aspirations, Amanda said she always dreamed of opening her own café. So when the opportunity arose to buy a food truck in 2019, she took the leap. The timing was fortuitous. Months after getting the food truck rolling, the pandemic forced a shutdown of many brick-and-mortar businesses.

“We were able to operate when others couldn’t,” Graydon said. “It really helped us get our name out.”

So did the creativity of the menu, and the home-made goodness that came out of it. Four years after parking the truck, there are still staples of the original menu anchoring the current list of offerings at the Main Street establishment.

The transition from mobile food vendor to restaurateur, was mostly smooth, although it came with an increase in the number of hats Graydon had to wear on any given day.

“I work the line. I do grocery runs. You really have to put everything into it to be successful,” she said. “It’s a really big part of me now, and I do love it. But I didn’t expect it to be as much work as it is.”

That love can be seen in the creative menu and lovingly crafted sandwiches the Wandering Café has become famous for. Among those is the appropriately named Pioneer, which is a generous portion of turkey, topped with cheddar and bacon, then grilled and finished with lettuce, tomato, and ranch dressing.

Like all Wandering Café sandwiches, it is served on a choice of white, wheat, or sourdough bread, and can also be made as a wrap. Graydon said the Pioneer is the most ordered sandwich.

“You just can’t really top turkey and bacon,” she said.

That’s not for lack of trying, though. The menu lacks no creativity or palate-appeal.

Like the Pioneer, other sandwiches feature names that riff on the restaurant’s “wandering” theme. The Nomad is billed as “our grilled cheese.” It combines cheddar and havarti cheese and is grilled in the café’s signature rosemary butter. The Vagabond, a cold sandwich, features turkey, swiss, avocado, lettuce and tomato.

More recent menu additions include The Popper, a grilled sandwich of cream cheese, cheddar, jalapeño jelly, bacon and jalapeños; and Blueberry and Brie, a savory-sweet combo that brings together melted brie, havarti, and blueberry sauce on rosemary butter-grilled Texas toast.

The Dilly Dally is another house specialty. It uses a giant pickle in place of bread and stuffs your choice of ham or turkey between the slices, with cream cheese, lettuce and tomato.

The sandwich recently drew the attention of national online travelogue onlyinyourstate.com, which featured the Wandering Café in a September feature. (Hotlink, if you want it. www.onlyinyourstate.com/food/alaska/buzzy-restaurant-most-popular-dish-ak) The publication called the eatery “one of the most charming, family-owned restaurants in Alaska, and a place where you can find some of the very best sandwiches in the Last Frontier.”

Credit that to diligence and commitment to quality ingredients. Graydon said she buys local products whenever she can, including locally roasted coffee beans, and makes all dressings from scratch.

In all, there are nine sandwiches, two salads, two soups, and three breakfast items on the menu, plus regular specials that are always a hit.

“A lot of the menu is from the food truck,” Graydon said. “But I’ve added things over the years.”

Graydon said another part of the operation that makes the Wandering Café special is that it displays the work of local artists and potters, whose work rotates in and out on a roughly quarterly basis.

It all adds up to success for Graydon, who did not imagine such an expansion of the operation when she was selling coffee out of a truck. Now, she has a full staff with little turnover, loyal clientele, and still has time for her own family. “I feel very fortunate,” she said. “I did not think the food was going to take off like it did.”

In addition to menu items left over from the food truck days, some of the customers are also holdovers. They combine with newer regular patrons to make up the most enjoyable aspect of the operation for Graydon.

“My favorite part is the community we get here. We thrive on our regulars. We know them by name and what they order,” she said. “It’s honestly really awesome.”