Business

Zumbach’s Plans Second Coffee Shop on Burtis Avenue

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New Canaan’s best-established and locally owned coffee shop is planning to open a second location downtown. 

Zumbach’s Gourmet Coffee, a hub of activity at the corner of Pine and Grove Streets, is planning to open a shop on Burtis Avenue, according to an application submitted to Planning & Zoning. “Doug has leased a space at the above referenced address where he plans to open a second coffee shop location offering an expanded selection of handmade coffees including cold-brew as well as nitro-brew coffees,” Paul Tully of Imian Partners LLC, representing the property owner, said in an April 14 letter to Town Assistant Planner/Zoning Inspector Sarah Carey. Tully referred to New Canaan’s Doug Zumbach, owner of the eponymous coffee shop that also founded the popular car show “Caffeine & Carburetors.”

The commercial building at 22 Burtis Ave. is located in the Business A
Zone. Under the New Canaan Zoning Regulations, site plan approval is required from the Planning & Zoning Commission.

Business

‘Blackbird’ Restaurant Coming to Elm Street

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The owners of Solé on Elm Street are planning a new restaurant called ‘Blackbird’ for the commercial space next door. Planned for a September opening at 105 Elm St.—between The Playhouse and Solé, formerly home to Potpourri and, later, Fat Face—Blackbird will offer a wide range of cuisine that patrons will be able to share, according to Adam Zakka, principal of Z Hospitality Group. “It will be a departure from our sister restaurant next door, which is a restaurant with your typical appetizer-entree-dessert menu format,” Zakka told NewCanaanite.com. 

The new restaurant will be “more progressive” in that the menu will offer more “shareables,” he said. Blackbird also will be “beverage-driven,” featuring “progressive cocktail techniques,” he said, and is expected to offer “a little more late-night life” than Solé. The cuisine could be described as “global,” Zakka said, “not bound to Italian or French or Asian,” and will offer some American-style food in the mix.

Around Town

‘An Enormous Addition to the Town’: New Canaan Museum & Historical Society Unveils Plan for ‘Special Collections Museum’ with Reassembled Millar Studio

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Representatives of the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society last week unveiled plans for a striking new barn-like structure at their Oenoke Ridge campus. The glass-enclosed “Special Collections Museum” will have attached at its rear one of the last–if not the very last—original art studio of a founding member of the Silvermine art colony, according to Nancy Geary, executive director of the NCM&HS. 

Addison Millar’s lean-to-like painting studio—which remains in place on Mill Road more than a century after the artist himself, and his wife, were killed in a railcar accident (1913)—has been generously donated to NCM&HS by the Borglum family, Geary told members of the Planning & Zoning Commission during their March 28 regular meeting. “It is a very rustic building,” Geary said during an approximately 30-minute pre-application presentation to P&Z during its meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. “It uses the bark from the mills at the turn of the century when it was built. And we have a plan to disassemble it and rebuild it, and it will be partly enclosed and partly attached to this new building. It will give us space also to have permanently on display rotating paintings by the Silvermine artists.

Business

New Business Tenant Planned for Vitti Street Building

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The owner of a commercial building on Vitti Street is seeking permission from the Planning & Zoning Commission to allow retail on the first floor. A dry cleaners, State of the Art Cleaners & Tailors, used to occupy the first floor at 43 Vitti St. (The second floor of the 6,300-square-foot building is occupied by the .46-acre property’s ownership organization, Columbus Center of New Canaan Inc.)

“The current proposal is to convert the first floor dry cleaner space back to its retail and office use,” New Canaan attorney David Rucci of Lampert Toohey & Rucci LLC told P&Z in an application. Under the New Canaan Zoning Regulations (see page 80 here), site plan approval from P&Z is required in the Business B zone for “specialty sales and services which would be in keeping with the service business nature and stated purpose of the zone.” P&Z is scheduled to take up the application at its regular meeting Tuesday night. Rucci said in a site plan narrative that forms part of the application, “The applicant meets the standards set within that section .

Government

Former St. A’s Pastor to P&Z: The Church-Owned House on Maple Street Should Be Demolished

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Saint Aloysius Church had explored the possibility of refurbishing the house at 30 Maple St. for many years after the structure began to show signs of wear due to heavy use, according to the church’s former, longtime pastor. The church’s leadership asked engineers and architects about how to renovate the building “so that we could continue to use it for teaching and meeting space,” the Rev. Msgr. William Scheyd said in a Dec. 29 to Planning & Zoning Commission Chair Dan Radman.