Business

Mead Park’s Apple Cart To Open Friday

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As winter draws to a close, one of New Canaan’s favorite seasonal restaurants, The Apple Cart Food Company, is getting ready to open its doors. The eatery’s owner, Emad Aziz, was hard at work last Thursday morning, making preparations for the restaurant’s official opening—a task he has undertaken each spring for the past two decades. “I’m very excited about it,” Aziz told the New Canaanite. “It’s been a very long vacation for me. I took a lot of time to go over everything, trying to get the perfect menu to keep my prices fair and my customers happy.”
In keeping with tradition, The Apple Cart will feature several new menu items this season, including options for those with certain dietary restrictions.

Business

‘Flour Water Salt Bread’ Coming To East Avenue [UPDATED]

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A popular area baker is planning to open a shop in New Canaan. The New Canaan Building Department on Tuesday received an application for a sign at 53 East Ave. for “Flour Water Salt Bread,” records show. Launched by Robert VanKeuren in Darien seven years ago, Flour Water Salt Bread (here on Instagram) makes a sourdough loaf among a wide variety of breads and pastries. 

The shop is about one or two months from opening and VanKeuren told NewCanaanite.com that his team is “very excited to join the New Canaan community.” “Flour Water Salt Bread is a fully sourdough American interpretation of a traditional French boulangerie, offering sourdough everything: breads, croissants, bagels,  pastries, English muffins, sandwiches and more,” he said in a text message.

Business

Property Owner Seeks To Establish Pet Store with Grooming Services at Grove and Elm

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The owner of the vacant commercial building at Grove and Elm Streets is seeking to amend the New Canaan Zoning Regulations so that a new pet store planned for the space can also offer grooming services. The 2007-built glass-and-brick exterior building at 272 Elm St. has been vacant since TD Bank closed its branch there nearly four years ago. The property’s owner, V.M.I. Inc. managing principal Frank Vuoso, in 2023 proposed installing a high-end car dealership there. During a special meeting in December, the Planning & Zoning Commission approved part of a new plan from Vuoso, to change the property’s use from a bank to a retail pet store.

Business

‘A Family-Friendly, Community-Oriented Business’: Carpet Trends Is Coming to Main Street

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A family-owned, multi-generational provider of residential and commercial flooring and related services is coming to downtown New Canaan. Carpet Trends will open a satellite showroom at 97 Main St. this spring, according to owner Tyler Rogers, whose grandfather launched the business in 1956 in Rye, N.Y.

“We do some work in New Canaan and the surrounding area now, and we thought given the similarities between Rye and New Canaan, the location that [Realtor] Betsy [DiMatteo] helped me find, there was a lot of things that lined up, and it’s easy for us to service this area from our existing warehouse with our existing labor with our existing stock. We’re known for the stock that we carry, which is discounted high-end to low-end products that we buy in bulk. So when designers are shopping and they’re looking at the high-end products or they’re looking for whatever products, they come to our stock wall and see if they can get a good discount for a high-quality product because we have it in stock.

Badass Bagels

‘Badass Bagels’ Is Coming to Burtis Avenue

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A favorite of the popular New Canaan Farmers Market is setting up a permanent location downtown. Badass Bagels—a sourdough bagel maker whose extras include Hot Honey Pistachio Cream Cheese, Bourbon Chocolate Chip Cookies, Sourdough Pizza Dough and Honey Nut Squash Soup—is opening at 5 Burtis Ave., according to the company’s social media and a sign in the window. The bagels are “entirely different from a standard yeast bagel,” the result of a four-day dough-making process, according to the Badass Bagels website. “They are made with our very own sourdough starter,” the website says. “The starter was created during the spring of 2020 during the many weeks of being home and baking and cooking anything and everything.