By Josh Resnek
Everett’s Gerly Adrien is teaming up with two other business people to form a retail food outlet in Jamaica Plain called, Monumental Market.
This will be the coming together of three businesses, Lavender Bee Baking Company, Tipping Cow Ice Cream (which Adrien owns) and El Columbiano Coffee.
They will opening cup in a space once occupied by Monumental Cupcakes.
What is this all about?
It is all about great food and JP and joining forces to enjoy a success.
When Monumental Cupcakes owner Patti Hudson closed her Jamaica Plain cupcake shop earlier this year, she promised something “monumental” in its place, per the signs on the papered-up windows. That is indeed true: An innovative, nut-free, bakery and café (with ice cream) called Monumental Market is opening there this spring from three established, Boston- area wholesale companies— Lavender Bee Baking Co., Tipping Cow Ice Cream, and El Colombiano Coffee, as reported by Boston Magazine.
“It’s a joint venture to give us all a space to grow and expand our own business, but because rent is so expensive [throughout the city], it’s a way of doing that together,” says Lavender Bee founder Kelsey Munger.
Monumental Market will function like a typical bakery- café: There will be one, central point-of-sale system where guests will order whatever they want, whether it’s a cup of coffee to go; a custom cake for a party; or a cappuccino, an apple-honey fig tart from Lavender Bee, and a scoop or two of Tipping Cow’s gourmet ice cream flavors to eat in the store. (There will be a few seats inside, but the small space won’t be conducive to working from home, Munger says.)
“I am so excited to be part of this experiment. We are all working together very hard to make this new shop just right,” Adrien told the Leader Herald.
All three brands happen to make exclusively nut-free products, so it’ll be a safe choice for people with those allergy concerns. Munger, who launched the farmers’ market pop-up Lavender Bee just over a year ago out of her then-workplace, Brookline Grown, has a peanut allergy herself. When Brookline Grown shuttered, she baked out of the Stoneham shared kitchen Food Revolution, which was accommodating to allergy safety concerns, she says, but it wasn’t exclusively nut-free. “I want to be able say my products are manufactured in nut-free facility.”
Munger has been connected with Tipping Cow owners David Lindsey and Gerly Adrien for a while; their Somerville shop carries Lavender Bee’s packaged products, and she knew they were also looking to expand. Munger is also close with El Colombiano founder Javier Amador-Peña, whose coffee roasts were sold at Brookline Grown. He was a fellow Brookline Farmers Market vendor this past year, and he put the former Monumental Cupcakes location on the trio’s radar. The sale was “serendipitous,” Munger says, and the new owners got the keys around Monumental Cupcakes’ last day of business in late January.
“We totally understand and appreciate not just the customer following, but the family that she created,” she says. “We’re putting our own twist on [Monumental] with three awesome businesses in there.
We want to keep JP funky and vibrant, and use the space for the community to hold art shows, pop-ups, and other cool events. We want to make sure the market itself is almost like a farmers’ market, but permanent.”
Any chance Adrien will be opening soon in Everett?
“I’ll have to take a real close look at that possibility,” she told the Leader Herald.