As a child, Marcella Mazzeo loved hearing stories from the café her family owned in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1970s (before she was born). Her parents relished the fact that people from all walks of life were part of one shared experience in the space they created. From these recounted tales of locals ranging from beatniks to Manhattan commuters in suits, the seed of Mazzeo’s dream of owning her own coffee bar was planted.
However, being the child of immigrants, she pursued a more practical path in the medical field. “We didn’t come to this country so you could open a coffee bar,” she recalls her mother saying when she broke the news that she planned to veer off this path. While a student at Stevens Institute of Technology, Mazzeo got her first job in a coffee bar in Hoboken and fell in love. After graduation, she continued to pursue a career in the medical field, but she also spent time in Italy, reconnecting with her Sicilian roots, and studying the coffee bar culture. The fulfillment of the dream, she says, was 15 years in the making.
Mazzeo’s strong intuition and a series of signs from the universe kept that dream alive and, ultimately, led to the birth of Salonnière Coffee Bar. A Rockland native who spent a lot of time painting in her youth, she always felt at home in the artsy vibe of Nyack and was inspired by the work of Edward Hopper and the antique store-lined streets. One day in 2019, while walking through downtown Nyack, her dog stubbornly pulled her toward a recently vacated storefront at 79 South Broadway.
Another afternoon, during a particularly challenging day at the office, she walked into an antique shop in New Jersey and spotted an old painting. Although the canvas was torn, she immediately identified the subject of the painting as Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress to King Louis XV, who rose to fame and power as a key figure in French history, as one of the original salonnières.
During the French Enlightenment, the salonnières were women who hosted gatherings in salons to discuss art, culture, and new ways of life. According to Mazzeo, the idea of these women as “change agents” and the salon as a place where “everyone can be heard” are the themes that served as the inspiration for Salonnière Coffee Bar. The painting of Madame de Pompadour, which Mazzeo had restored, is the focal point of the “salon” where people are encouraged to linger, while catching up with a friend or having a business brainstorming session.
“When I see that people feel safe enough in my space to express how they feel, or I see people collaborating or strategizing, I feel so fulfilled,” Mazzeo says. This is exactly how she pictured that once romantic notion of the coffee bar as a place where stories are told.
Mazzeo took this idea one step further when she took over the adjacent space to expand her business to include Salonnière Kitchen and Market. While this part of the business was partially born out of demand from her customers looking for specialty Italian products, Mazzeo saw a new opportunity to tell the stories of producers, small farms, and chefs by lining the shelves with a carefully curated selection of artisanal products from Italy. She can pick any item off the shelf and talk about the source and accompanying factoids about each product or producer. She points to specific products used during recent sessions of “Nonnas in the Window,” in which Mazzeo’s mother or aunt will do a live cooking demonstration in front of the window, where customers or passersby can watch, and viewers can also follow along on a livestream. Everything at Salonnière is deeply personal and personalized.
At the heart of Salonnière Coffee Bar is an undeniable sense of community. Mazzeo likes talking shop and doesn’t do anything in a vacuum. In the early days of the business, she leaned heavily on her neighbor, Maria Luisa Whittingham, a 30+ year veteran of the Nyack business community. They, along with other merchants, joined together at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to strategize. Mazzeo says that what was a reactive solution for the moment became long-term support for these business owners. This group evolved into an active committee that has contributed to downtown revitalization efforts, particularly in the area they have coined “SoBro” (short for South Broadway), by developing events and marketing them in a manner that draws both locals and tourists.
Mazzeo is always thinking about growth, although she recognizes that the business itself can’t always be in a growth mode. The idea of growth keeps her going, but sometimes that means growth for her staff, or for the producers and makers she features at the shop.
Mazzeo sees herself as a modern-day salonnière and change agent. She has no shortage of ideas and isn’t afraid to try new things, a quality she views as a key ingredient to her own success. Successful people, she says, seize opportunities and “are not just willing to pivot, but get excited about it.”
For more information about Salonnière Coffee Bar and Salonnière Kitchen + Market: https://salonnierecoffeebar.square.site/