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Reminisce with us about the past 35 years.
35 Years: gone in the blink
of an eye
Is it really possible that thirty-five years have gone
by since we first opened our little coffee and tea
store at 40 Green Street in Northampton in 1974?
Thirty-five years is a very long time to run a
business in a small town, especially a niche business
such as ours. But our scrapbooks from those earlier days
overflow with memorabilia and other ephemera of our
life in food. When I look at the pictures of Bob and
me from our early days, I chuckle, fully knowing that
the two skinny kids with long hair and ‘no retail
experience’ still live within the portly, graying,
middle-aged ‘us’.
Our small town is filled with both a changing cast of
local characters who drift in and out of our life and
long-term residents/customers who have been with us
since our first day. We have grown older together with
our customers and have been observers into the lives
of many.
Births, deaths, marriages and divorces, those
leaving town and those moving in, children growing up
and having their own children, etc, comprise the collective memory
of our years in the store.
August 23, 1974
Marked the debut of Coffee Gallery, the first bohemian
coffeehouse in Northampton. For our small storefront
at 40 Green Street we paid $200.00 a month, a risky
sum of money to gamble back then on a coffee and tea
shop. We still remember the pride we felt at earning
$23.84 on our first day of business - we just knew we
were destined for success !
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WHEN DID WE FIRST MEET YOU ? |
1974 was
an exciting year for us - we were married in San
Francisco and in good peace, love and flowers
California hippie- style drove across the country in
an Arlo Guthrie-style Volkswagen micro bus with a
large, vintage commercial Italian espresso machine and
our spunky cat, Captain Jim of the Horse Marines, in
tow. We had $ 1,000 in cash, no business plan and no
business experience, but knew it would be groovy.
First location: 40 Green
Street
 Inspired by our time spent drinking coffee at the
original Peet’s in Berkeley and in espresso houses in
San Francisco’s North Beach, we served
individually-dripped cups of exotic coffees and
offered manually-pulled shots of espresso from our
classic piston-operated espresso machine. While this
does not sound out of the ordinary for today, remember
that in 1974 specialty coffee had not yet become a
national obsession, and the advent of Starbucks was
still far off in the distance.
Ours was a hip-but-low-budget place with art-for-sale
on the wall and the occasional poetry reading. We
served antipasto salads, crazy West Coast- inspired
sandwiches and gooey pastry cream horns that we
purchased from the former Ryback’s Bakery on Main
Street and Imperial Bakery on Pleasant Street in
Northampton.
It wasn’t
long before our customers began to purchase the same
high quality coffee beans and gourmet teas that we
served in our coffeehouse for brewing at home. As our
retail business grew, we kept our customers' personal
coffee-blends on file and began stocking a wide range
of coffee brewers, teapots and storage tins.
2nd location mid-1970’s: 10
Green Street
 In the fall of 1977 we made the decision to close the
coffeehouse aspect of our business and cease being
open nights. It was with a fair amount of regret and
uncertainty that we served our last cup of delicious
coffee. We shut down the espresso machine, cleaned it
well and packed it away ( we still have it).
It was time to concentrate on growing the retail part
of our business. As our business became more popular
and more ‘legitimate’ Bob cut his waist length hair
and gave up his golden ponytail forever ( at least
until he retires ! ). In just a few years time our
business had grown, and we jumped at the chance to
move up the street to larger quarters at 10 Green
Street.
By the end of the 1970’s the world of gourmet foods
and ‘fancy cooking’ was beginning to experience a
revolutionary change. French food had previously
dominated gourmet foods, and cookbook personalities
such as Julia Child, James Beard and a young French
upstart named Jacques Pepin were the celebrity cooks
of the day. Fancy food consisted of dishes such as
quiche Lorraine, country pâté, sauce Robert, and
Lobster Newburg, and were considered special occasion
dishes.
 In what now seems like a collective overnight
culinary shift, food visionaries such as Alice Waters at
Chez Panisse, Julie Rosso and Sheila Lukins of the
Silver Palate and Joel Dean & Georgio Deluca of NYC’s
legendary food shop Dean & Deluca began to introduce
American foodies to new concepts in cooking and
eating. In the East, the spell of the Mediterranean
influenced food and cooking, and on the West Coast,
cooks looked to the bounty of California foods and
influences from Asia. Restaurants began to serve
lighter, fresher dishes. Simple cooking techniques
highlighted fresh foods over frozen or canned food,
and using seasonal foods became the new hallmark of
good cooking.
A new American cuisine was being shaped and for
foodies across the land, there would be no going back
to the taste-less, spice-less food of the ‘pre-condiment’
days of the 50's and 60's.
Our efforts were given a boost when our shop and a
selection of our products were listed in the October
1981 issue of Bon Appetit magazine in a feature
titled: Foods By Mail. This was a big moment
for our little store and our first taste of national
press.
Early-1980’s: how we eat
changes in America
 It’s hard to remember back to a time when the
condiments we know and love today were not available
in the USA. But those of us in the food business
remember it well. It was not until the early 1980’s
that many of these tastes - chipotle peppers, pesto,
sun-dried tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, Ras el
Hanout, harissa, to name a few - began to arrive on
our culinary shores for the first time. It was a
decisive time in America for ‘food awareness.’ The
food revolution had begun and it was very, very,
exciting to see American food change for the better.
Like many others, Bob and I were spending time cooking
and eating with friends. We planned imaginary trips to
Europe, where we would visit the great restaurants and
local farmers markets brimming with wonderful
foodstuffs.
Here in the East, New York was the food mecca. Small,
old-world Italian markets and Jewish fish stores were
suddenly joined by upscale specialty food shops that
lined their shelves with all manner of colorful and
intriguing imports: condiments, spices, cheeses, extra
virgin olive oils, balsamic vinegars, sausages, pâtés and sweets.
 We dreamed of offering a little bit of this tempting
food world in Northampton. So, we expanded Coffee
Gallery to be more than coffee and tea. We filled our
shelves with fanciful imported ingredients and gourmet
foods. I can still remember receiving our first case
of Italian extra-virgin olive oil from Dean & Deluca
and feeling very special because we had it. Specialty
cooking ingredients seemed a perfect complement to our
wonderful bean coffees and leaf teas, and our
customers were ready to dive in, fork first.
Discussions about food, recipes and restaurant finds
were a great topic of conversation in our store. For
those of us hopelessly hooked on the joys of eating,
it was a glorious release from the prison of the
tasteless, generic ‘American food’ of our childhoods.
Culinary history was being made and it was a wonderful
and magical time to be in the gourmet food business.
We attended the Fancy Food Show in NYC religiously and
tried as best we could to emulate the NYC food stores
that we so admired: Dean & Deluca, Balducci’s, DDL
Foodshow, EAT, and others.
3rd Location early-1980’s:
192 Main Street
In the summer of 1982 we moved to large downtown
quarters at 192 Main Street, where we had a brief
foray stocking delectable French, Italian and Spanish
cheeses, and meats and pâtés. Unfortunately, our
vision proved to be 10-15 years ahead of time: it was
the heyday of Brie, Brie and only Brie. Before too
long we closed that department and swallowed our first
bitter pill.
We quickly dusted ourselves off from that
disappointment and turned our attentions back to
coffee. Most of the major coffee retailers were
starting to buzz about a new innovation in coffee
freshness: the Italian vacuum-valve coffee bag. We saw
this as the way of the future for coffee freshness,
and became one of the first whole-bean coffee
retailers in the USA to sell coffee in these bags.
This was a radical change from the way that we had
always sold our coffee, and, even though most of our
customers understood the change intellectually, it was
still a painful and rather controversial move for
quite some time.
But once the dust settled from this change, the vacuum
packed valve bags were embraced and appreciated by our
customers. We chuckle about it today, because the majority
of coffee retailers, both small and nationally
distributed, use this once ‘revolutionary’ packaging
and it is now the way that coffee lovers around the
country expect to purchase coffee.
4th Location late 1980’s: 65
King Street
In 1989 business necessitated that we find a larger
location. We moved from Main Street to our present
location at 65 King Street, and considered it just
‘temporary’. As a destination store, we refined our
product mix, and became dedicated to selling the best
artisanal foods and condiments we could find,
expanding our global 'local' sensibilities. Sometime
during the last twenty years, we stopped thinking
about this location as ‘temporary’.
Prepared For a New Decade and
Century
Our 2nd piece of national press came via a phone call
from a then budding New York Times food writer: Mark
Bittman. He had heard about our fantastic, imported
cooking stock from France and wanted to mention it in
an article that he was writing on Winter Chowders. We
were thrilled, and by the time all was said and done,
we sold hundreds of packages of this product to avid
Times readers and cooks. ( Unfortunately, the stock
has stopped being imported since then.)
Tea Flexes its Muscle
 While we had always sold English-style tea blends in
our shop ( both teabags and loose-leaf tea), the
arrival of premium, hand-made Asian teas during the
early-1990’s began to change how we viewed tea. Once a
staid commodity that offered little in the way of new
tastes or origins, tea imports suddenly began to focus
on splendid, hitherto unknown-to-the-West teas from
China, India and Sri Lanka. As we learned more about
this interesting food product, we realized that the
West had been virtually cut off from China’s best teas
since the days of the last Chinese emperor. As more of
these interesting Chinese teas became available, our
focus on tea intensified.
Because of our interest in Chinese tea, we had the
opportunity to visit China in the year 2000 and travel
throughout rural green tea villages in eastern China.
This tea trip was followed over the next several years
by tea-sourcing trips to other regions of China and
also to Japan and Taiwan. On our trips we have had the
good fortune to observe the old, traditional methods
of tea cultivation and tea production throughout
various regions of East Asia and to observe first-hand
tea artisans creating premium, hand-made teas. These
are opportunities that few tea retailers in the West
have had, and which, in turn, allow us to educate our customers and readers about
these unique teas and all that we have seen and learned.
Name Change
In fall of the year 2004, after the 30th anniversary
of Coffee Gallery, we decided that the idea of a
‘coffee’ store was not representative of how our store
had changed. People from out of town who wandered into
our store, professional colleagues at food conferences
and new Valley residents all assumed we were a café.
In essence, no one understood what we sold because the
word ‘coffee’ got in the way.
So we made a bold move and changed the name of our
shop to Cooks Shop Here, which we hoped would
convey a more appropriate image of what our store had
evolved into.
The name change did help with the ‘cups of coffee’
café issue, but at first there was some confusion
regarding whether or not we had sold the shop ( no we
had not.) But it worked out in the long run and of
course, we will always be called the ‘Coffee Gallery’
by our local customers and friends.
Shortly after changing our name, we set up our first
web site -
www.CooksShopHere.com
Our Role as Food Educators
In 2005 a national publisher ( Ten Speed Press ) asked
us to write a small book for them on tea. We were
thrilled. That small book became our comprehensive,
big ‘tea ‘bible:’ The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking
Guide (Ten Speed Press 2007). Our book
treads new ground in tea information and our efforts
we were noticed by Chinese food expert Nina Simonds.
She contacted us to say that she would like to write
an article about us, our book, and our tea for a
Wednesday edition of the New York Times. What a
fantastic opportunity !
The following spring our heads were spinning as our
book was nominated for both a 2008 James Beard
Foundation Cookbook Award and a 2008 IACP Cookbook
Award. The New York Times dubbed us ‘The Professors of
Tea’, which was such an honor.
 
After completing that book, Ten Speed Press asked us
to develop 50 recipes for a hot drinks book for
Williams-Sonoma. We accepted the challenge and
had fun in the process. This second co-authored book was printed with two
jackets: one exclusively for sale in Williams-Sonoma
stores and a different one to sell everywhere else. We
are happy to say that
HOT DRINKS:
Cider, Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, Spiced Punch, Spirits
is still in print and selling well.
Outside of our daily lives in the store, we keep busy
with other food-related projects. We often speak about
tea (or olive oil, chocolate, etc ) at culinary
conferences, museums and schools, and present
photographic slide shows of artisan tea production in China
and Japan. It gives us great pleasure to kindle a new
appreciation for foods and the efforts of food
producers among those in the audience.
We recently
created a new website-
www.teatrekker.com
– which is devoted entirely to tea. Websites are great
places to feature blogs: conversation that is
related to but outside the scope of a website. Each
of our websites has an informative blog:
the Cooks Shop Here website features
An Educated
Palate and the Tea Trekker website features
Tea Trekker's Blog.
Also, many of you are fans of Bob’s
weekly live radio shows:
Around the Pantry, airing Tuesdays at 8:42 a.m. on WHMP-AM (1240 / 1400 / 1600 AM & 96.9 FM) with Chris Collins and at 8:50
a.m. on WRSI-FM (
93.9 FM ) with Monte Belmonte.
2010 & Beyond
 2010 begins with the announcement of the publication
of our second book on tea by Ten Speed Press:
The Tea
Enthusiast’s Handbook: A Guide to the World’s Best
Teas ( April 2010 ).
So, onward we go, following the food trail where it
may lead us, and working diligently to share with
customers and readers our passionate interest in food.
But with all that has passed our way these 35
years, we must ask: Have we, as foodies and passionate
eaters reached the limits of new cuisines and tastes?
What is there left to discover?
We answer our own question with a resounding: NO !,
There are cuisines left to explore even as ethnic
cuisines once considered remote and ‘foreign’ are now
familiar to us. For the truly new, we must go farther afield.
Or focus regionally on familiar countries. For some,
food falls under the umbrella of technical chemistry. But for others like us, food remains
tangibly connected to soil and place. Many of us
know that it takes time and patience to truly
understand the culture and cuisine of a foreign place.
So we believe that there will be a big emphasis for
some to retreat back to a favorite, familiar cuisine,
and spend more time coming to know it on its own
terms.
Today, keeping it authentic is the new mantra.
Where food is sourced has become very important.
Where does our food come from, who grows it, how is it
grown and
how is it processed are many of the questions we
are just beginning to examine.
 These issues and others will be voiced loudly in the
coming decades as we better understand what questions
we must ask in order to have a voice in what we eat.
Additionally, growing interest in how we eat and what
we eat is underscoring the need for greater
availability of authentic, local foods in our
markets. And, this increased desire for better
food is creating new opportunities for (and
appreciation of) the farmers and other food purveyors
on whom we depend for our food.
A new decade is a perfect time for all of us to
reflect on the changes that have been brought to our
‘American table’ since the 1970’s.
Thank You to All
No history of Cooks Shop Here, Tea Trekker (or Coffee Gallery )
would be complete without a huge acknowledgement of
love and appreciation from both of us for the years of
support and trust granted to us by our loyal customers
and Valley residents.
Despite four different locations, and even worse -
for being closed on Mondays - we have been allowed
to grow, prosper and find our place in the food cosmos
thanks to the tolerant attitude of our customers and
community.
While running a growing business for 35 years has had
its share of problems, issues, tears and grey hairs,
we are blessed to have customers who have made it
immensely pleasurable, and have provided the
inspiration for us to sell the best products that we
can in the best way that we know how.
We have come to know many of you well and have watched
your children grow and prosper. Thank you all for
allowing us to continue to be a part of your life. We
look forward to reaching our 40th anniversary and
beyond.
Peace
Mary Lou
and Bob
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