A new gourmet burger restaurant and gelato shop will open on South Main Street.
Jim and Jeannette Zaza will open Relish America Gourmet Burgers and Buza Dairy Bar in mid-September in the vacant side of 27 S. Main St., where Gibson’s Bookstore used to operate. The burger side will be the first American outpost of a Canadian chain with seven locations, also called Relish Gourmet Burgers.
On the spectrum of fine dining to fast food, Jeannette Zaza said the restaurant will be “somewhere in between.”
“If you’re a business person in the area, you don’t want to spend a long time because you don’t have a long time for lunch,” she said. “But you don’t want fast food. You want quality.”
The couple has never run the day-to-day operations of a restaurant, but Jim Zaza is a businessman with years of experience in the international food industry. He works as an executive for Yildiz Holding, Turkey’s largest food group. Among other brands, the company owns Godiva Chocolatier.
Jeannette Zaza described herself as the creative side of their partnership, with a background in art – and ice cream.
“I just came back from gelato school in Italy,” Zaza said last week, wearing red-framed glasses that matched the still-wet paint on the wall of the soon-to-be restaurant.
The Zazas learned about Relish Gourmet Burgers through a friend, and with their youngest daughter off to the University of New Hampshire, they decided to invest in the business by opening a stateside location. Relish is expanding in Canada as well – the website lists two impending locations in Vancouver as well.
“It’s really a very nice concept,” Zaza said. “It’s very interactive with the public.”
The couple originally looked for a restaurant space closer to their home in Gilford. When they expanded their search, they found the perfect opening in Concord, next to Red River Theatres and Capital Commons.
Gibson’s Bookstore relocated from that location to the Love Building down the street in summer 2013. Owned by state Sen. Andy Sanborn of Bedford, the large storefront has housed a couple of pop-up shops since then but nothing permanent.
So Sanborn divided the space into multiple storefronts, and in February, Simplicity Hair Studio and Salon opened in one storefront. The remaining space, its windows now peppered with signs for Relish and Buza, will become the restaurant.
“The downtown is changing,” Zaza said of Concord. “It’s getting a new facelift. A lot of people during the daytime, it’s a busy city.”
Relish in Canada doesn’t have a dessert menu, but Zaza said she has always dreamed of opening an ice cream shop or a bakery. So when they realized the former bookstore had square footage to spare, Zaza jumped on the idea of a gelato shop on one side. In Turkish and several other languages, “buz” means “ice” – hence, Buza.
“I love ice cream anyway, so it wasn’t hard to do that,” Zaza said with a laugh. (Coconut is her favorite flavor.)
The menu for Relish will be similar to menu for the Canadian locations – signature gourmet burgers, stacked with toppings like avocados or roasted garlic mayonnaise. Some of the burgers already on the menu are actually named for American landmarks, like “the Big Texan” burger. (That one comes topped with barbecue sauce, crispy onions, pepper jack cheese, bacon.)
Zaza is already thinking about future specials, which could be unique to Concord.
“We might have a signature burger for one of our politicians,” Zaza said.
Relish will also serve French fries and healthy sides like salad – and, of course, poutine, a Canadian staple of fries, cheese curds and gravy.
“And then you might want some dessert,” Zaza said.
Buza will offer ice cream, gelato and soft-serve on the other side of the shop.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s two separate businesses,” Zaza said. “It feels like it’s one.”
Zaza isn’t worried about the downtown construction, which will tear up and rebuild South Main Street during her first year of business.
“I felt like they did it fairly quickly down in the other area (on North Main Street),” she said. “I know it is disruptive, but hopefully we can work around it. … They’re managing it quite well, and once they’re finished, it will be even more beautiful.”
The target opening date is in mid-September. For more information about Relish, visit relishlife.com. The Buza side of the business does not yet have its own website.
New location for YoYo Heaven
YoYo Heaven is “walking the dog” down the street.
Father-son team Andy and Dan McBride opened the shop at 132½ N. Main St. in October 2013. Two years later, the McBrides wanted to keeping growing the business. So next month, they are moving down the street to 35 S. Main St.
The new YoYo Heaven will have about double the square footage of the current location, Dan McBride said.
“We didn’t think we’d be able to expand this quickly, but it seems pretty popular,” McBride said. “People in the area seem to like the idea that kids should be off their phones and with a hands-on toy.”
The South Main Street store will be able to carry a greater volume of yoyos, and McBride said YoYo Heaven will also be able to expand its lines of juggling and vintage style toys.
Next to Bona Fide Green Goods, the new location is also near Constantly Pizza, Double Midnight Comics and Spank Alley Skate & Board Shop. Ticking off the names of his soon-to-be neighbors, McBride said he thinks foot traffic for the yoyo store will increase near those stores.
“It’s a better location for our kind of business,” he said.
Construction on the Main Street project did discourage foot traffic to YoYo Heaven, McBride said, but that work didn’t impact the decision to move. In fact, relocating to South Main Street will mean YoYo Heaven will open the door to construction for two summers in a row, rather than one.
YoYo Heaven will be closed during the week of Aug. 24 for the move. The shop will reopen at 35 S. Main St. on Sept. 1. For more information, visit the YoYo Heaven Facebook page or yoyoheaven.com.
Construction update
This week, Main Street construction will be focused on the plaza in front of the State House, per an email update from the project PR team.
Grading in that area will be finished Monday and Tuesday. Concrete crews will then begin pouring sidewalks. That will start at the Centre Street intersection and move south, and the city plans to finish pouring the sidewalks to Capital Street by Friday.
Work on the west side of the North Main Street sidewalks will continue just south of Capital Plaza this week as well. Back on the east side of the street, the construction crew will return to an unfinished section of the sidewalk in front of Northway Bank.
For more information about the Main Street project or to sign up for regular email updates about construction, visit mainstreetproject.com.
(Megan Doyle can be reached at 369-3321, mdoyle@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @megan_e_doyle.)
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