BELLINGHAM, WA (MyBellinghamNow.com) – Karolina Lobrow and her husband Ben Howe serve meat-free food and curated, European-style brews out of a cozy 50-seat cafe in the Sunnyland neighborhood called Otherlands Beer.

Lobrow brings a feminine twist to the Bellingham beer scene with fairy lights are strung across the ceiling, the walls covered in local art and gold and blue ornamental wallpaper. Each table is decorated with a fresh arrangement from her flower friend, Corina Cheever, who trades her goods for weekly beer and food.

Lobrow describes the vibe of the place as more of a homey café than a typical brewery.

“Everything was a little more niche, versus some of the more expansive things offered in other places,” she said. “We were hopeful that that would make the place work, in terms of aesthetic, we wanted it to be a little bit different, too.”

With names like “Send in the Clouds” and “Some Soft Returning,” Otherlands’ beers evoke a sense of whimsy and escape.

Otherlands maintains a tap list of only seven to eight beers at a time. They typically make European-style lagers and Saisons, which are often referred to as farmhouse ales in the United States. They also always have an IPA represented.

When the couple met, Howe was running a nano brewery out of his garage that Lobrow called an “intense labor of love.” It didn’t make money, and he closed it down, but the pair held onto their passion for the service industry and ideas for the future.

Lobrow and Howe started working on the plan for the business in 2016. They lived in Portland at the time and were working on securing the funds to get off the ground.

They knew they wanted to have a brewpub, and Lobrow convinced him to move to Bellingham, where she had already lived two times before.

“Looking at Bellingham, it was a community that already had a vibrant brewery scene, was very supportive of small businesses,” Lobrow said.

The plan was to open shop in April 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown delayed their start date, but they pushed forward and opened in June that same year. They signed a lease, got married and got their bank loan in a two-week span that summer.

“It was really stressful,” Lobrow said. “We were leaving to go to our wedding on the east coast and waiting to hear if the bank – like the 10th bank we went to – would finally accept our small business application.”

The pandemic threw a wrench in the plan they had been working on for years, but it wasn’t going to stop them.

“It was: there’s so much momentum, we’re already at the finish line. There wasn’t any turning back by the time the pandemic happened,” she said.

All the traditional things you do to gain traction when opening a restaurant, like grand opening parties, didn’t feel possible at the time, Lobrow said. Her friends in the restaurant industry had no advice about how to navigate their predicament.

Photo by Seddie LeBlanc

In hindsight, Lobrow thinks that the “soft launch” created by the parameters of lockdown helped them work out the kinks before they were overwhelmed with business.

Shorter hours, less days and a small staff worked as a sort of “training wheels” for the place Otherlands would become. Customers came out to support them because they understood how hard it was to get started in that environment.

The owners celebrated their fifth year in late June and feel they’ve finally hit their stride.

“This is the first time this year where I feel less imposter syndrome and more like I have an understanding of our place, and that has felt really good because there’s a sense of normalcy,” Lowbrow said. “For the first three years, it was very up and down, and now I feel like I know my staff, I know the community.”

Otherlands hosts regular events and participates in community activities like Sunnyland Stomp, and, most recently, a poetry pub crawl. They have a book club that comes in regularly and would like to start a weekly art night.

“Because our space is a little bit smaller and our service model is more of a sit-down restaurant, it’s a little more challenging to have these kinds of walk-through events,” Lobrow said. “So being able to invite in affinity groups and have more people enjoy the space, I think, is a goal.”

Lobrow runs the forward-facing elements of the business, and Howe focuses on the technical aspects of brewing the perfect pint. The couple jokes that Lobrow is kind of like her husband’s manager.

The pair brought in head chef Noël Keyes to help develop their menu.

“It was always kind of a collaborative effort in the sense that we would talk about the foods we thought would be really great and also the foods that she thought would be really great, and then she would put together the recipes and make it work,” Lobrow said.

Now, they have two co-chefs, Cylene Sana and Dan Fitzgerald, who have been working with them for three to four years.

Lobrow and Howe’s vision was to serve dishes that were naturally meat-less, mostly as a natural consequence of neither of them eating meat.

“I mostly became vegetarian as a necessity out of college, because I went to the Peace Corps and it was hard to get meat and I didn’t have a fridge,” Lobrow said.

From an ethics standpoint, it felt unnatural for the couple to profit from meat. For them, the motivation to eat meat-less is split between environmental concerns and concerns about the meat production system in the United States.

Friends, family members and their bank had concerns about the business failing because of their choice not to serve meat.

“You wouldn’t necessarily notice, and people have told us they’ve come here multiple times without noticing, which is great, because it feels like it’s not a secret anymore, but it certainly felt like it was working,” Lobrow chuckled.

The Eastern European dishes on the menu, like pierogis, are a nod to Lobrow’s Polish heritage, though her “very Polish” family told her not to feature their cuisine.

“Your family said very specifically: don’t make Eastern European food. No one likes it,” Howe said.

“No one likes it, you’ll go bankrupt in a week!” Lobrow added.

So far, the pair’s choice to go niche has worked out for them. Lobrow said they will keep going until it doesn’t and then adapt.

My Bellingham Now previously reported Otherlands Beer made USA Today’s list of the ten best brewpubs in the U.S.

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