Holiday Shopping 2023: WAVE on Elm

For today’s installment of our local holiday shopping series, we stopped into WAVE at 86 Elm St. and chatted with owner Heather Satin. 

Here’s our conversation. 

New Canaanite: Tell me about your store. Heather Satin: We’ve been around for 30 years. We started at Main Street for 26 [years] and then in 2020 we moved to the Elm Street location, which we truly love and we’ve met a lot of new customers, but still retained all of our old customers. We have jewelry, home and clothing.

Holiday Shopping 2023: New Canaan Music

[Editor’s Note: This Q&A interview with New Canaan Music owner Phil Williams kicks off our holiday series spotlighting local businesses, running daily through Christmas.]

The holiday shopping has officially arrived on Main and Elm Streets downtown with Black Friday. We dropped into New Canaan Music at 90 Main St. to talk to owner Phil Williams about what holiday deals he and his staff are offering at the popular store. (Williams himself is a New Canaan resident who serves on the Carriage Barn Arts Center board of directors, and has served in the past as a member of the Planning & Zoning Commission and New Canaan Chamber of Commerce board member.) Here’s a transcription of our conversation. New Canaanite: For people who don’t know New Canaan Music, tell them about your store.

Miyuki Launches ‘Me & U Cookie Co.’ for Popular Cookies on Pine Street

Miyuki Mirafiore started making cookies not long after opening her eponymous noodle shop in Pine Street Concessions. Located beside her husband Dante’s (equally eponymous) pizza place at 75 Pine St., “Miyuki’s” has become a popular go-to lunch option for many in town since opening in 2017. 

She started with “just a little tiny batch” of 12 chocolate chip cookies, Mirafiore recalled later Tuesday afternoon as the lunch crowd thinned out. 

“I started to realize how fun it was, and everybody loved them,” she told NewCanaanite.com. “And ever since then we’ve just kept making them.”

And that’s a good thing, because Miyuki’s cookies—and especially her chocolate chip cookies—emerged as a number-one overall seller in terms of quantity. 

Recognizing their soaring popularity, Mirafiore this year launched a dedicated brand for the tasty treats. 

On the Me & U Cookie Co. website, customers can order boxes of eight or 12 assorted cookies, as well as party platters and favors of any size. 

“It just grew organically and I started to realize maybe it’s bigger than the other things,” Mirafiore said. “And I started selling online.”

She’s doing a brisk business with the accidental big-hit menu items, offered in a variety of flavors that includes chocolate chip as well as oatmeal raisin, double chocolate, white chocolate raspberry, peanut butter marshmallow and sugar. 

Asked how she landed on the recipe for her locally famous chocolate chip cookies, Mirafiore said, “Trial and error.”

“It took a long time to develop the recipes,” she said, which were “probably based off of” a basic recipe that she tweaked.

High-End Car Dealership Planned for Grove and Elm

Saying he was inspired by “Caffeine & Carburetors,” the owner of a commercial property on Elm Street is seeking approval to create a “classic and exotic car showroom and dealership” there. The 2007-built glass-and-brick exterior building at 272 Elm St. has been vacant since TD Bank closed its branch there two years ago. 

The new busines’s focus would be on “higher-end automotive brands,” according to Frank Vuoso, principal at Norwalk-based VMI Incorporated—owner of the .52-acre parcel. “We would offer consignment for display in the showroom as well,” Vuoso said in a letter to Planning & Zoning that forms part of his application for site plan approval. 

Vuoso continued: “The secondary purpose would therefore be automotive service and repair. With the building being as it is currently, this allows for the showroom to be present in the front with repair work to be done in a concealed manner in the back.