Around Town

Caffeine & Carburetors To Propose Four 2015 Dates, Downtown and at Waveny

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Calling Caffeine & Carburetors a safe, responsibly run gathering that benefits the community, aligns with New Canaan’s recreational principles and has earned support from town government, public safety, arts and business leaders, the event’s creators are proposing four dates for a 2015 season. New Canaanites Doug Zumbach, owner of the eponymous Pine Street coffee shop where the grassroots event was born, and Peter Bush, as well as Ridgefield’s Todd Brown, are seeking the following Sunday dates and places for this year’s Caffeine & Carburetors:

April 19—Pine and Elm Streets
May 17—Waveny Park (in conjunction with the Carriage Barn Art Center’s exhibition “Va Va Vroom! The Art of the Vehicle”)
Sept. 13—Pine and Elm Streets
Oct. 18—Waveny Park

Noting that Zumbach covers all costs for the event, the proposal says Caffeine & Carburetors “attracts New Canaan families and visitors from neighboring towns who attend to enjoy cars as well as the charm of the town and its restaurants and shops.”

“Caffeine & Carburetors proved itself to be a responsible and caring steward of Waveny Park by all accounts, with officials observing the event as being a ‘success,’ with ‘people enjoying themselves,’ going ‘very well,’ with ‘no issues or problems,’ being ‘orderly,’ and garnering a ‘tremendous donation for the Food Pantry,’ ” the proposal said.

Business

‘Choose To Be Happy’: New Canaan Friends’ Business Poised for Larger Retail Market

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“… honor, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves … but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that through them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.” —from Book 1.7 of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” translated by Sir David Ross

In one way, the rapid rise of the phrase “Choose To Be Happy”—the chord it strikes and, if retail experts are right, its potent marketability—should perhaps come as no surprise to New Canaan residents Matt Konspore and Mike Shullman. On a basic level, the longtime friends became its first adherents and converts—its first “customers.”

A chance remark uttered by a loved one in need nearly two years ago, those four words and the powerful, empowering message they carry took root for the men, and quickly became a kind of byword between Konspore and Shullman at a time when each, in his own way, had been searching for some inspiration. The friends began texting “Choose To Be Happy” to each other and then, on a lark, Konspore ordered up about 10 T-shirts with the phrase printed on the front, had his wife and kids don them and surprised Shullman at his home—one for every member of each family. Immediately, anyone who saw Konspore wearing the T-shirt—say, at Zumbach’s Gourmet Coffee on Pine Street, a regular hangout—had a strong, positive reaction, he recalled.

Government

Rec Director on Waveny Caffeine & Carburetors: ‘It Went Very Well’

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The first New Canaan gathering of classic and specialty auto enthusiasts to be held somewhere other than the downtown—the Oct. 19 event at Waveny—went “very well” and “people seemed to enjoy themselves,” the head of the Recreation Department said Wednesday night. Caffeine & Carburetors’ debut at New Canaan’s treasured park saw cars “in a nice orderly manner on the roads, the parking lot, around the front circle of the house,” Steve Benko said at the regular meeting of the Park & Recreation Commission meeting, during the first public postmortem of the 3.5-hour event. “I didn’t see any issues or problems,” he said at the meeting, held in the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center. “Doug [Zumbach] and his crew stayed after to pick up signs and pick up garbage.

Around Town

Caffeine & Carburetors Clears Final Hurdle for Oct. 19 Event in Waveny

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The popular grassroots gathering of classic and specialty car enthusiasts—an event whose only location in New Canaan, to date, has been the downtown—has cleared its final hurdle for a Sunday, Oct. 19 trial run at Waveny. Launched four years ago out of New Canaan resident Doug Zumbach’s eponymous gourmet coffee shop on Pine Street, Caffeine & Carburetors has grown so large that, logistically, it cannot be held downtown more than twice per year. One long-term vision for the event is a combination of installments downtown and at Waveny—for example, two at each spot between April and November. On Thursday, an administrative team known as the ‘Special Events Committee’—overseen by Tom Stadler of the first selectman’s office and including parks, police, emergency management, health and recreation officials—voted unanimously in favor of the October trial run.

Business

Caffeine & Carburetors Returns to Downtown New Canaan Sept. 7; Future Installments Could Be Held at Waveny

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Caffeine & Carburetors, New Canaan, CT-April 6 2014
The New Canaan man who launched what rapidly grew into a hugely popular gathering of classic and specialty car enthusiasts in town—so popular, in fact, that organizers and town officials have worked hard to figure out just where and how often it realistically can be held here—says he’s excited about the return of the event to New Canaan on Sunday, Sept. 7 and optimistic about its future in town. Doug Zumbach, owner of the eponymous gourmet coffee shop at Pine and Grove Streets, birthplace of Caffeine & Carburetors, said he and fellow organizers—Todd Brown of Ridgefield’s 109 Cheese & Wine and Peter Bush of FM 95.9 The Fox—have had “good conversations about the future of Caffeine and Carburetors, and so I’m very comfortable that the event will be here in New Canaan for 2015.”

“The event coming up on the 7th will be well attended, I think. We are getting a lot of calls from all over, people are very eager to attend because we did cancel June. So I think if the weather is fine, we’re going to have a great turn-out, a lot of great cars are coming, some surprises I know of.”

Those include high-end specialty, very limited production cars “as well as the typical array of Porsches, Ferraris, Maseratis,” Zumbach said.