There were many words John Rife used to describe his intent upon founding East End Market, which opened its doors in Orlando’s Audubon Park Garden District on Nov. 1, 2013, but interestingly, “incubator” was not one of them.

“There’s secret sauce in small entrepreneurship and in cultivating the neighborhood feel we’ve lost over the years,” Rife said on the day the market opened. He believed both locals and tourists would come.

Ten years later, it’s safe to say he was right.

East End’s inception began with a cross-country trip during which Rife and his wife, Kamrin, visited the nation’s public markets. They saw it as a place where people could find access to local produce, proteins and more.

“We’d come home and wonder, ‘Why does this not exist here?’” 

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That’s where it started. Here’s how it’s going: In a decade, East End has morphed into a unique, food hall-like venue — and is an integral part of putting Orlando on the nation’s culinary map. It’s been a springboard for six of the city’s Michelin Guide-recognized restaurants and undoubtedly a part of Orlando’s new status as America’s Best Foodie City. 

Between its stalls and garden boxes, and the kitchen in which now-beloved locals honed their crafts, it is a place where regulars while away weekend leisure hours with breakfast and coffee, cocktails and live music. It is a place where visitors step from Ubers with roll-on bags to grab their first Gideon’s Bakehouse cookie of the trip or their last weighty box on the way to the airport.

Gideon’s founder Steve Lewis, whose Disney Springs outpost now garners up to five-hour waits on its virtual queue, marvels. His first pop-up at East End almost didn’t happen.

“I could not have been granted a better opportunity. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have been able to do any other opportunity because I was super broke,” he says. 

At the time, Lewis was working at the mall, baking those now-legendary half-pound cookies in his kitchen and delivering them to customers on his bicycle.

“I had $800 in the bank when I did that pop-up.”

But the now-ubiquitous lines were immediate.

“It was clear he was onto something,” Rife says.

Gideon’s arrived in East End’s second wave, but the market’s early days were a whirlwind of locavore excitement and hand-to-mouth, entrepreneurial pressure, Lineage Coffee Roasting founder Jarrett Johnson recalls.

“It was a little more grungy, very grassroots,” he says.

Johnson, an Air Force veteran, came to Orlando to open a brewery but saw a market primed with a preponderance of local beer. Instead, he began brewing Chemex at the Audubon Farmers Market, where he drew the attention of East End’s future director, and eventually, Rife.

“He could tell we really cared about what we were doing,” says Johnson, whose method and model were unique. “And I think that’s what he really wanted the market to be about: People in Orlando trying new things.”

Today, Lineage has three locations and 40 wholesale vendors around Central Florida, including local indies like Foreigner Restaurant and giants like the JW Marriott Grande Lakes, but in the summer of 2014, he and the other East End vendors were worried.

“Opening week, we felt like we had this tiger by the tail … but after six months, it was crickets,“ Johnson recalls. “All the people who were willing to try something new had come through, but we hadn’t gotten a foothold with the larger community.”

Make it work became a mantra among the tenants, who had become a ragtag family. “Everyone was in it together,” he says. “It felt like a big team.”

Rife says they pooled their efforts at regular meetings, coming up with ideas to throw at the wall. Educational programming brought people in for classes on gardening or knife skills or food entrepreneurship. Trucks and pop-ups, along with live music, gave people reasons to stick around.

“Orlando could not afford to have a failure at this level,” says Rife. “After all the press and goodwill, to have been the very thing needed to break the ice for all these small businesses to flourish and then fail would have been a result of not being creative enough, not willing to hustle enough, not being innovative enough. It would have been a black eye. I think all of us felt it. I sure as hell did.”

Some caught lucky breaks. Johnson and his partner, who had quit their jobs months earlier, hit the lottery. Just as they were circling the drain, the Ritz-Carlton came calling.

“Their F&B director lived in the neighborhood. He tried our coffee and loved it. They started buying a bunch, and that was what helped us to survive the summer.”

Others weren’t as lucky but were able to shutter without financial catastrophe, another of East End’s gifts to startups, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer noted at an event marking the venue’s 10th anniversary. 

“It gives entrepreneurs an opportunity to try out something and fail and not go bankrupt, to not have to wager their whole life savings … to come here in a safe space to grow something.”

Some left voluntarily, hobbyists whose love of craft, they eventually found, didn’t translate as a full-time job. 

“It’s been a natural progression,” says Rife, noting that even the kitchen at East End had its origins elsewhere, evolving into the commissary-cum-incubator it has since become. Same goes for the soft goods. 

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Jacob Zepf’s Freehand Goods began its market tenure as a Holiday Market pop-up. As with Gideon’s, Rife saw the immediate appeal for its curated collection of handmade Florida apparel and goods.

Today, Zepf and his wife, Brittany, a longtime beverage pro, also head up The Neighbors, East End’s upstairs enclave, a combination Florida-maker boutique and craft bar, as well as The Audubon Room, a new event space. There is DomuLab’s incubator kitchen, which has already spawned a hit in Euro-Vietnamese restaurant Camille, now open in its own Baldwin Park space. It is currently home to Danilo’s Pasta Bar. 

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In the future, it will be something else. 

OG’s like La Femme du Fromage Tonda Corrente are grateful for the platform. 

“It’s been such an honor to partake in something so monumental,” says the Orlando native. “To have grown up here and watched the culinary landscape move from being dominated by corporate restaurant chains to chef-owned and -operated establishments … the market has been a big part of that.”

Lewis, once a one-man-show who sold 300 cookies per pop-up, now employs 180 people who churn out 7,000 a day. He credits East End not only with the space to create but to connect.

“Back then, I might have sold out at one o’clock, but I’d stay at that counter until seven and explain to every single person who walked up what was happening … It created a really authentic conversation between me and the community that exists to this day.”

He stays on, in part, because he’s a sentimental creature.

“It would break my heart not to be a part of what’s happening here every single day,” he says. “But I also recognize that Gideon’s is part of what draws people to East End Market.”

Lineage’s Johnson feels similarly. 

“We support the vision. I’ve been to the fancy food halls in Atlanta and Tampa, multimillion-dollar facilities that cost 100 times what East End does. But, they don’t have the heart.”

Indeed, there is a special patina that the market, a former church, has amid the low, vintage strip malls of Audubon Park. The world may come to East End Market now, in person and via sources like The Food Network and PBS, on which it appeared in a recent episode of “Start Up,” but it was built for the locals. 

“It still has the same DNA it did 10 years ago,” says Johnson, adding that he doesn’t aspire to grow Lineage as big as Starbucks. “But I do think it’s cool that when people go to the one in Pike Place in Seattle, it’s a thing. They say, ‘this was the original.’”

Perhaps, he fancies, one day, people will say the same when they visit his counter at East End.

It could happen. So much has since the beginning. 

“We don’t need to be a second-class city to the Austins and Seattles of the world,” a prognosticative Rife said 10 years ago to this day. “Orlando is a world-class city.

Find me on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter or Instagram @amydroo or on the OSFoodie Instagram account @orlando.foodie. Email: amthompson@orlandosentinel.com, For more foodie fun, join the Let’s Eat, Orlando Facebook group.