The Blue Ridge Grocery, in the former Cigar Shop on Blue Ridge’s Main Street, began operations last week in the capable hands of Danny Mellman and Michelle Moran. The store is next door to the couple’s successful restaurant, Harvest on Main.
The Blue Ridge Grocery is a bakery-café focusing on fresh breads and coffee, community-supported agriculture and fresh, local produce. The grocery store is modeled after the Mercat de la Boqueria in Barcelona, Spain. It’s a bustling space for daily shopping and daily cooking, a space to see, touch, honor and celebrate food and dining, according to the owners.
Two women, one who loves baking and the other who loves making coffee, anchor the grocery, which will serve breakfast, made-to-order sandwiches and salads for lunch and all-day snacks.
Local farmers and purveyors will supply the grocery including a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program for weekly boxes to be picked up; fresh flowers from a local farmer; fresh-from-scratch breads and pastries, baked daily; locally roasted and brewed coffee, and Harvest on Main’s house-cured meats and pickled items.
Moran and Mellman founded Harvest on Main in 2009, a successful lunch and dinner restaurant that showcases local, sustainable food in Blue Ridge, and The Cook’s Farm, a downtown Blue Ridge cooking school located on a one-acre model farm to show what sustainable foodservice production encompasses in the Blue Ridge Appalachian foothills.
Mellman is a nationally acclaimed, James Beard-nominated chef who has honed his culinary skills for 30 years managing and cooking in kitchens from Pennsylvania to Florida, and France to Australia. Moran, his wife and partner, is a longtime culinary journalist, the former editor of Gourmet Retailer and Gourmet Business, and a professional cook on her own right.
