A new shop featuring farm and artisan products made across the region has opened at the L.I. Aquarium and Exhibition Center complex.
Taste the East End opened its doors yesterday in the building next to the Hyatt Place East End.
Its light, airy interior simultaneously evokes country charm and city chic. That was by design, said Alexandra Bussi, who designed the interior and runs the shop.
Bussi, daughter of Joe Petrocelli, a principal in the company that owns the complex, went to college in Manhattan for visual merchandising — and it shows. A visitor to Taste the East End can’t help but be struck with its serene beauty.
White walls and shelves and flooring perfectly offset the carefully arranged displays of locally produced preserves, honey, horseradish, candies and other foodstuffs, alongside hand-crafted candles. soaps, pottery and custom clothing and housewares.
The shop’s visual focal point is the bed of a 1957 Ford pickup truck, smartly restored and converted into a sales counter.
“We just found this and thought it would be a great addition. We restored it at my dad’s shop,” Bussi said.
It points the eye toward the wall-size mural photograph, in black-and-white, of the Petrocelli family’s Raphael winery on Main Road in Peconic.
“The idea is to tie in East End farm goods to downtown,” said Bussi, who previously worked in the aquarium gift shop and held other jobs at the aquarium before going to work full-time in the Manhattan retail trade.
Petrocelli said his daughter seems to have been born to be a retailer. “Alex wanted a cash register when she was 5 years old,” Petrocelli recalled, smiling. “First she had a toy cash register and she would play ‘store’ for days. But she wanted a real, actual working cash register, so I bought her a Casio. I still have it in the basement,” he said.
Taste the East End was built in a space that served as locker rooms in the clubhouse of the original marina built on the East Main Street site before Petrocelli and his late partner Jim Bissett purchased the site. The locker rooms, occupying the front portion of the building where Jerry and the Mermaid restaurant is located, were long dormant. The site originally had an in-ground pool that looked out over the marina’s slips, and, where Jerry’s stands today, a snack bar.
Just a few steps east of the Hyatt Place, the shop will benefit from its proximity to the hotel.
“Sometimes people who are staying here don’t have time to get out and about to explore the region,” Bussi said. “But they still want to bring things home with them. This gives them a chance to bring home authentic East End goods, to take a taste of the East End back with them,” she said.
“We hope it will entice visitors to get out and check out the farms and places where these products are made,” Bussi said. She also hopes entice visitors and local shoppers alike to take a walk east on Main Street and come in to browse.
Taste the East End will be open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends. It will have expanded hours depending on what’s going on downtown, too, Bussi said.
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