Kim Krawcyzk’s menu facilities out-of-date treats like coconut macaroons and watermelon honeyed tea
POPLAR GROVE — Kim Krawczyk and her daughter, Melanie, were eating cooking during a Main Street investiture when Melanie forked out a ancestral feed store for sale opposite a street.
Krawczyk, a North Boone High School teacher, had been jotting in her biography all she could do on retirement. Running her possess coffee emporium was in a mix.
Her daughter joked that a aged feed store would be a good plcae for portion java.
“I suspicion about it and we suspicion about it,” Krawczyk said. “It unequivocally wasn’t a right time, though it was a right building. So it was a right time.”
In Mar 2016, Krawczyk, 53, bought 5 parcels — in a 100 retard of West Main Street — with 3 graphic buildings assembled in a early 1900s. She non-stop Poplar Grind — a coffee emporium with out-of-date treats — in July, sealed it for a propagandize year and re-opened in May.
Business is delayed though quicker than final year. She has large hopes for a place she’s designed with some of her favorite activities in mind — baking, interior decorating and visiting with people.
“I can do all those things here,” she said. “I don’t wish to be Starbucks. I’m not Starbucks. we wish to have a good product. we wish people to like what they’re getting. we also wish some-more of a attribute … and a hominess.”
Patrons are treated to an insinuate space with out-of-date treats like homemade lemonade with elementary syrup, watermelon honeyed tea, chocolate chip cookies, coconut macaroons, carrot cake and cinnamon rolls.
Customers conclude her labors:
“If we haven’t been here, come check it out,” one Jul 2016 Facebook post reads. “It’s unequivocally lovable and a pastries are yummy, too. Watermelon honeyed tea is amazing!!!!”
Poplar Grove proprietor Jeff Peters wishes her well. He’s forsaken by for coffee and a Danish.
“She’s trying,” Peters said. “She unequivocally spotless it adult nice.”
Krawczyk has lovingly shopped for a tables, chairs and valances highlighting Poplar Grind’s native feel. The little space has ancestral tin walls, ceilings and cornices.
With a do-it-yourself mindset, she has epoxied countertops and remade little chairs. The work started with her swabbing a hunger floors.
“I fell in adore with a floors,” Krawczyk said. “I cleared a floors with Murphy’s Oil Soap. Doesn’t that sound dorky? we theory we only had a prophesy in my conduct of what we could make it.”
While formulation for an Aug shutting for a new propagandize year, she skeleton to supplement a new underline each summer. This summer, it was a “library” of books and valances.
Krawczyk hopes to retire from her training pursuit in a few years and give some-more time to her summer endeavor. For now, Poplar Grind is open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday by Sunday.
“I’m training a lot, so we feel each year I’m going to come behind and do something different,” a clergyman said.
Krawczyk enjoys her students dropping by. And any enthusiast can see cinema of her children — North Boone High School graduates Anthony, Melanie and Nicholas — unresolved by a money register.
“I only kind of suspicion she was crazy, though here she is,” Melanie Krawczyk said. “Everywhere we go, she has to buy something (for a store).”
Krawczyk can’t stop dreaming. She’d like to reconstruct one of her properties — a prolonged building — into a marriage or celebration venue. There’s another territory she’d like to during slightest paint.
Rosie Moscato, owners of Moscato’s Pizza on South State Street, welcomes her comparatively new neighbor.
“It’s good that they indeed move some-more to this downtown area,” she said.
Susan Vela: 815-987-1392; svela@rrstar.com; @susanvela