Right next to Kabinett Wine + Bar on Northampton Street in Easton, Pennsylvania, lies a 12,000 square-foot garage with old brick walls, fairy lights adorning the high ceiling and cafe tables strewn around the room, all completed with a view of downtown Easton.
This is the future location of Tucker Garage + Grocery, which will function as an Aussie cafe, wine bar and general store.
“The business model isn’t based on one part of it,” said Jason Hoy, the owner of Tucker Garage + Grocery and award-winning restaurant Kabinett. “It’s based on all of it.”
“It means that we can sell you a coffee or we can sell you a bag of coffee beans to go or we can make a coffee tiramisu in the kitchen,” he explained. “So all those things contribute to each other, rather than just one thing being the driver of the business.”
Tucker Garage + Grocery has been years in the making, building off of the Tucker Silk Mill, a cafe that was opened six years ago by Hoy and his wife, Melanie.
To keep their staff employed while the restaurant was closed down during the pandemic and, to help give the people in Easton easy access to groceries and produce, Tucker quickly transitioned from a cafe to a grocery store.
“Rather than making carrot cake, we started selling bags of carrots,” Hoy said. “Instead of baking bread to make avocado toast, we were baking loaves of bread and selling them. We were basically packing vegetables instead of cooking. We stopped cooking. We just started selling.”
Hoy said that Tucker became the second biggest provider of food to food banks in Easton, at times selling 7,000 eggs per week and sending 1,000 pounds of fresh produce to elementary schools. They sustained that business model in the Silk Mill for two years during the pandemic.
The Hoys then began looking for a new spot to reopen Tucker around downtown Easton. They were approached by developers from New York who offered them a chance to open a wine bar in a building they had purchased on Northampton Street.
“When someone says, ‘We’ve got this space and it comes with a very expensive asset'” – a liquor license in Pennsylvania – “‘Would you like to use that and open a restaurant?’ The answer is yes,” Hoy said.
Once they opened Kabinett in 2022, Hoy began the process of reopening Tucker. Once they leased the garage, they started remodeling the century-old space: repainting the walls, building a large walk-in refrigerator and setting up tables and chairs.
Hoy said that the store was given its name because they wanted to incorporate the grocery element from the original Tucker as “it helped so many people and it was quite a valuable part of the business.”
Hoy has assured long-time customers that the cafe aspect of Tucker will function as it had in the original location, just on a much grander scale. He also said that the general store will be stocked with everyday essentials, ethical-made products and fresh produce from local farms in the Lehigh Valley area.
“It’s also going to have that higher nutritional content, but it also means that you’re supporting your local economy,” Josh Parr, the manager of food and farm at Lafayette College, said of the local produce that will be sold there.
“You’re putting your money into your neighbors and keeping it within your system, rather than buying from these giant corporations,” he continued.
Hoy said they are shooting to open Tucker in the fall. They recently began a crowdfunding campaign to complete the finishing touches. Support has since rushed in, with $10,000 being donated in the first 12 hours.
The couple are “strong supporters of Easton as well,” according to Lisa Yelagin, co-owner of Pie + Tart and long-time supporter of Tucker.
“I hope the rest of Easton sort of understands how dear Easton is to them,” Yelagin said.