Pip & Anchor: The Cafe and Market Everyone Told Me To Visit

On Nantucket for a couple days to do some reporting, I kept hearing the same recommendation from different people: Stop at Pip & Anchor for lunch. “You’re vegetarian? Even better,” they’d say. “You have to try the asparagus sandwich.” 

One quiet afternoon, I finally went, walking into a space that felt like a hybrid of cafe, market, and community kitchen. People sat around a communal table eating lunch, chatting across a few empty chairs. Others browsed shelves lined with pantry goods or refrigerators stocked with local produce. The space felt rustic but intentional: exposed beams, warm lighting, neatly arranged displays. In typical small-island fashion, nearly everyone seemed to know one another.

Behind the counter, co-owner Chris Sleeper was ringing up customers. When he learned I was a reporter, he stepped away for a moment to chat. Pip & Anchor hadn’t been part of my original reporting plan, but I could tell that it was a place with a story that one day, I’d revisit. 

Two years later, I finally sat down with Chris and co-owner Mayumi Hattori to hear how the business came to be. What began as a pandemic-era experiment grew into a cafe, retail shop, food distribution network, and community gathering space centered on reconnecting people to food and to their neighbors near and far.

Any single item that you pick up from the shelves — Grey Lady Apiary honey, Sacred Cow granola, Vault 5 cheddar — has been tried and vetted by Chris and Mayumi. Everything in the store meets their standards for ethical sourcing, high quality, and a production radius within 350 miles of the island. The pair developed those standards over years spent working in the restaurant industry and at Straight Wharf Restaurant, where Chris ran the front of the house and Mayumi ran the kitchen. In 2020, while working at The Club Car, Mayumi was nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northeast. 

It was that same year, during the early days of the pandemic, that the idea for Pip & Anchor began to take shape. Rita Higgins was running a small island project called Hundred Mile Makers, which organized pop-ups and events highlighting local farmers and food producers. When Covid shut down restaurants, those same producers suddenly had nowhere to sell their wares. 

Higgins pivoted quickly, turning her existing email list into a lifeline between farms and households. “Hey farmers, what are you harvesting?” she would ask, then match available produce with island residents trying to source food locally. At first, people placed their orders using a Google form; over time, that form evolved into an online storefront. 

Mayumi stepped in to help bring structure to the system. Drawing on tools like Farm Fresh Rhode Island’s (FFRI) aggregation network, the pair began coordinating directly with farms and consolidating weekly orders, expanding from a buyer base of roughly 20 households to more than 100 in a matter of weeks.

As demand grew, the operation developed a more stable online market, still built on the same idea: connecting local farms and makers directly with island residents at a time when traditional supply chains had broken down. That evolving system eventually became the foundation for Pip & Anchor. 

“There was no place on the island, no one place that we knew of, that you could go to and get all local goods and support our local economy,” Mayumi said. In 2021, Pip & Anchor secured its permanent brick-and-mortar storefront by partnering with Remain. In 2022, Pip & Anchor opened its doors.

Four years later, the operation has evolved far beyond its pandemic origins. When customers walk into Pip & Anchor today, they’re introduced to producers they might not have encountered otherwise, finding shelves stocked with wines, pantry staples, locally grown produce, and specialty foods such as sauces, spices, and preserves, all sourced from small makers across New England. 

“We try to be selective about who we highlight — making sure they align with our ethics and values,” Mayumi said.

That philosophy shapes every corner of the store. Refrigerators hold local produce and regional cheeses. Baked goods, seasonal sandwiches, and salads made by Mayumi and her team fill the display cases. Customers can settle into one of several seating areas, linger over coffee, and get a discount for bringing a reusable cup.

As owners, Chris and Mayumi wear multiple hats. Chris oversees the retail operation, wine program, and customer experience, while Mayumi manages kitchen production, sourcing, and the flow of food through the business.

Send It!

Chris and Mayumi believe that access to nutritious food — especially local farm produce, which often comes at a higher price — should be a right, not a privilege.

“So we want to make that available to our customers who are food insecure,” Mayumi said. 

That mindset became the foundation of Pip & Anchor’s “Send It” Box Program, which distributes boxes of fresh produce to food insecure individuals and families on Nantucket. The program now provides roughly 80 boxes each week, enough food to feed about 300 people, and they hope to expand it by about 50%.

Working with farmers to stock the store also means coordinating produce for the food security program. Because many of the farms are small, planning requires constant communication and a close understanding of what crops are available at any given time. 

It’s not a gleaning program, because the food isn’t donated. Pip & Anchor pays farmers their full market rate. When growers find themselves with surplus crops — extra salad greens, an abundance of eggplants, or produce that has matured faster than restaurants can purchase it — Mayumi helps redirect that food into the Send It program. 

“We move that food through the Send It Program so that it doesn’t get tilled under.” she said. By paying farmers for excess crops that would have been composted, Pip & Anchor has created a food security initiative that also supports the local agricultural economy. Farmers have told Chris and Mayumi that the program has helped extend their growing seasons and provided a more reliable source of income during slower months. 

“They’re now growing specifically for our program,” Mayumi said. “They know that we’re going to allot them [a certain amount of] money every single week.” 

And the effects extend beyond the individual farms. With more consistent demand, growers can hire and pay more workers and continue producing food later into the year. 

“Now the growing season is extended, where they have food almost year-round, which is amazing,” Mayumi said. “It may not be a lot in the wintertime, but that's a long way from when there was zero food coming from the island during the winter months.”

Two of Pip & Anchor’s largest farm partners are Fog Town Farm and Washashore Farm, both located on Sustainable Nantucket’s community farm plots. But the business also works with other growers across the island.

“The farmers as a whole have really trusted us to be the people to call to find an outlet,” Chris said. If a farm suddenly has excess produce, Pip & Anchor can purchase it for the Send It program, use it in the café, or bring it to the Food Pantry.

“So there really is a nice outlet for all the farmers, and they can grow more comfortably and confidently, which in turn allows them to grow their farms,” Chris said. “We've not only watched all the farms grow in size, but we've also watched all their teams grow, and now we're watching all of their families grow.”

Neighbors, Near and Far

Beyond Nantucket, Pip & Anchor taps into a wide network of regional growers across New England. 

“We have a friend we work with who has helped us quite a bit in terms of technology,” Mayumi said. The food security program, she added, requires significant “backend tech, support tech,” and ongoing work to build systems that can handle ordering and coordination at scale. 

For now, much of the day-to-day communication still happens the old-fashioned way. “It’s all via text messages,” she said. “And it’s not even a group text. Everybody gets an individual text that’s copy-pasted: ‘Hey chef, I have this available.’ It’s just not the most efficient way of communication. We’re trying to figure out something better so farmers can streamline ordering.”

To help bridge that gap, Pip & Anchor also works with Farm Fresh Rhode Island (FFRI), a regional food hub that aggregates products from farms across the region. Through its Market Mobile platform, each farm maintains its own listing of available products, quantities, and pricing within a shared system. Buyers place orders online, allowing FFRI to consolidate deliveries and distribute food efficiently across the region. 

“It’s basically an aggregator,” Mayumi said. “You’re doing everything based off pre-orders, not off things sitting in a warehouse like a normal distributor.”

Pip & Anchor also works with Myers Produce, a younger regional distributor based in western Massachusetts and Vermont that sources from small, often organic farms across New England and delivers into Boston, New York, and the Cape and Islands. 

Together, these systems have helped expand what “local” can mean on Nantucket. 

Chris noted that the Send It program — particularly its steady winter demand — has played a role in making that regional distribution possible year-round. “That weekly guaranteed 80-plus pounds of individual SKUs from farms is a huge reason why both Myers and FFRI are able to deliver to Nantucket all year round,” he said. In the food industry, an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) refers to a specific product variety — meaning the trucks that come to Nantucket are packed with a wide range of goods from various regional growers.

“They didn’t deliver to Nantucket at all before Pip & Anchor existed,” he added. “And now they deliver not only here, but also to the [rest of the] Cape and Islands. So Pip & Anchor and the Send It program opened the channels for all these other small farms from southeast Massachusetts, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, eastern New York — to get to the Cape and Islands.” 

Within the Send It program itself, the balance between island-grown and regional food shifts with the seasons. In winter months, boxes are more heavily supplemented by regional produce. In summer, when Nantucket farms are at peak production, the focus shifts back to island-grown food with regional items filling the gaps.

“We try to keep the boxes as diverse as possible,” Mayumi said. “Fruit especially — we include it whenever it’s in season. It tends to be more of a luxury item, and it’s heavily requested.”

“We don’t take any profit from [the Send It program],” Chris added. “Neither of us take a salary. We pay everyone who helps, and it’s covered through community grants, private donations, and donations made at the checkout counter.”  

For both founders, the structure reflects a larger shift in how they wanted to work after years in restaurants.

“We both wanted a better quality of life and a little bit more life balance,” Mayumi said. “I got into restaurants because I love to feed people and I love to nurture and take care, and this way I feel like I’m actually doing that more so than in a restaurant.”

The shop itself has become something of a community anchor. “We know our customers’ stories,” she said. “We are their third place. If they go on vacation or have a health scare, we hear about it. They bring their kids here after school.”

“It’s cookie hour right now,” Chris said. “They’re all upstairs getting cookies.”

For him, the work is about the scale of impact. “In restaurants, especially high-end restaurants on Nantucket, you’re serving a very small part of the one percent,” he said. “It’s gratifying, but this allows us to serve multiple levels of the community. It really feels like we’re making a difference.”

And one more thing: “We have really good coffee,” Chris said. “We’re both coffee obsessed, so we had to make sure that it was as good as we could get.” 

Even the milk in their coffee is sourced from a local farm. “We take every step that way,” Mayumi said. 

That same attention extends across the shop. 

“Every single thing that we give to someone here, we know where it comes from,” Chris said, gesturing toward the store’s pantry shelves. “We’ve tried everything. If somebody walks in and asks, ‘Do you like it?’ it’s like — yeah, of course we like it. We don’t bring it in if we don’t.”

“When we travel around New England, we’re always kind of looking for things,” Mayumi said. “Friends will send us photos from Maine like, ‘You have to try this.’ And more often than not, we can work it out.” 

The result is a constantly evolving roster of producers — small-batch food makers, farmers, and artisans across the region whose work might otherwise never make it to an island shelf.

Even the infrastructure behind that network, they said, often feeds back into those relationships. Farm Fresh Rhode Island and similar regional distributors don’t just move product — they make it easier for small farms to exist at scale, and for places like Pip & Anchor to connect to them.

Looking ahead, beyond expanding the Send It program, Mayumi and Chris hope to deepen their work with the island’s school lunch program and host farm dinners where regional makers can showcase their products in a more experiential way. 

“For example,” Mayumi said, “For years I've been talking with Moromi, which is a soy sauce producer in Mystic, [Connecticut]. He and his chef partner make all these kinds of funky soy sauces out of sugar kelp or different mushrooms they forage. Most people think of soy sauce as something like La Choy on the shelf, but how cool would it be to have a dinner where they get to talk about why they make all these different soy sauces, how the process works, and then you actually taste how they’re meant to be used? Those multi-layered experiences — that stuff makes us really excited.”

Chris added that they’re also working with Mass General Hospital and its network on the idea of prescribing food through their food security program — treating food as medicine rather than medication. 

“There are a couple of doctors that have expressed great interest,” he said. “But there’s a lot of red tape in the hospital system, insurance, all of that. We’ve made progress, though.” 

On an island where “local” is often defined within a narrow radius, Pip & Anchor is actively stretching that definition. 

“We were one of the first businesses here to really think about local as beyond Nantucket,” Chris said. “It used to be a self-sustained island; we’re not that far from that history. But our population has grown so much that we need to think about local as utilizing our neighbors.”

At Pip & Anchor, that definition shows up everywhere — in the shelves, the farm lists, the text messages, the boxes on the counter, and the people upstairs eating Malted Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies to break up another island day. 

Pip & Anchor is located at 14 Amelia Drive. To view their cafe menu, learn more about their wine club, or check for upcoming events, visit pipandanchor.com or follow them on Instagram @pipandanchor.