Colleen Taylor knows the ins and outs of the restaurant business.
Freight Yard Pub, the popular restaurant she co-owns with her brother Sean, has been a cornerstone of the North Adams restaurant community for 28 years. The duo ran Taylor’s Fine Dining at 34 Holden Street, now occupied by Public Eat + Drink, for several years and opened Trail House Kitchen & Bar across the street from TOURISTS hotel in 2018.
“Tourists want to come here for the outdoor beauty, MCLA, and MASS MoCA,” said Taylor, a longtime board member of the Berkshire Visitors Bureau and 1Berkshire. “I am very aware of what the future holds.”
While she is excited about their new culinary venture, Craft Food Barn, it was not exactly inspired by an economic development opportunity.
Taylor saw opportunities to capitalize on the tourism industry generated by MASS MoCA and TOURISTS, which is why she opened restaurants by these projects (Taylor’s Fine Dining and Trail House). This was not the case with the Craft Food Barn, which was established as a response to COVID.
“It was more an unfolding of events,” said Taylor, who found herself responding to the coronavirus outbreak in a surprising way.
“Before the pandemic, we had maybe four or five to-go orders a night,” she said. “During the pandemic, our take-out business exploded and we were doing 40 to 50 to-go orders a night. We had to change some of our processes to adapt to take-out food,” including ordering, packaging, and distribution.
Practically overnight, Freight Yard Pub turned into a “ghost kitchen,” a type of food production and delivery service that does not provide customers with access to a brick-and-mortar storefront. The business model has gained traction in recent months — Foodservice IP predicts a 42-percent increase in ghost kitchen sales in 2021 — and Taylor thought about opening a dedicated ghost kitchen for the restaurant, which is unable to handle a high volume of both in-person and take-out dining.
The Taylors put an offer on the building at 465 Curran Highway in North Adams, the site of two former ice cream parlors — a Dairy Queen and The Dairy Barn — and closed on the property in June 2020.
“We thought we’d paint the building and open up in three months,” she said. But the project, originally estimated to cost $250,000, ballooned to $400,000 after the addition of a new floor, ceiling, roof, and parking lot.
As the scope of the physical build-out expanded, Taylor pivoted from the original plan and decided to create a new take-out restaurant with a more robust menu.
The eatery will open at 6 a.m. and serve coffee, cappuccinos and lattes, smoothies, house-made baked goods, breakfast sandwiches, and affogato — espresso with ice cream. Lunch items will include burgers, fish and chips, grilled cheeses, and salads. A smaller dinner menu of seafood, steak tips, and other made-to-order meals will be available. And, of course, ice cream.
“We will have chocolate and vanilla soft serve as well as about 20 different flavors of hard ice cream,” said Taylor. “We wanted to keep [ice cream on the menu] because of the building’s history.”
Brand-new and specialty equipment was purchased for the restaurant including a dual smoker, ice cream freezers, a UNIC Tango Ace super automatic coffee machine which retails for $15,000, and a Merrychef high-speed accelerated cooking countertop oven — a combined convection and microwave oven that can reach 525 degrees.
“It can cook everything from salmon to sandwiches,” said Derek Gerry, executive chef. “It’s going to help our speed, especially pumping out breakfast sandwiches.”
Even if the 1,000-square-foot building could accommodate indoor seating, which it can’t, it was important to Taylor to find a way to provide quality food that could be ordered, made, and picked up quickly and safely. The menu is geared towards “everything we can cook in under 10 minutes,” said Gerry. “Even steak tips are pretty quick if you know what you’re doing.”
A drive-through menu board and window were installed outside the building for fast orders, and customers who order in person and need to wait can park in a numbered spot in the lot or relax at a picnic table. In addition to phone and online ordering, Taylor said she is experimenting with ordering via text.
“I’d be crazy not to be nervous,” she said of the entire operation, “but we’re doing everything right.”
Craft Food Barn will not only contribute to the culinary landscape of the northern Berkshires, but it is adding 15 new jobs to the hard-hit food service industry. Taylor made a point to hire out-of-work restaurant staff as well as promote employees from within, including Gerry.
“I’ve been with [Taylor] for 20 years,” he said. “I started as a dishwasher at Freight Yard Pub and became head chef at Trail House. I stayed with her through the pandemic, and now I’m going to oversee all three restaurants.”
This, for Taylor, is what the business is all about.
“Now, we have a lot of room for growth,” she said. “It’s been a rollercoaster ride, for sure, but I hope that other people can see that North Adams is worthy of really good investment.”
Craft Food Barn is slated to open the first week of May 2021.
