Chef Robert’s Kitchen

Chef Robert Cardoos is the owner of Chef Robert’s Kitchen, which sells a wide array of Greek and Middle Eastern foods, made by Cardoos himself each week.

“Hummus is my biggest thing,” he says. “We sold out of that today, along with Eastern tabouli and baba ghanoush. We have 58 different items, all made by me from scratch, except for our pita bread, which I have made for me up in Jacksonville.”

Cardoos, who is of Syrian descent, has been coming to the Marco Island Farmers’ Market for 12 years. His commercial kitchen is based in Ft. Myers, but at one point in his career, he owned 24 food stores across the country and two waterfront restaurants in Cape Coral, all of which he has sold to focus on the four farmers’ markets he attends each week.

“I went to retire and that lasted two days,” he says. “I needed to do something.”

He said his cousin in Boston was serving homemade Middle Eastern food at a farmers’ market there and it inspired him to launch his current business. “This is my heritage,” he says.