 Hello everyone I'm James Milan and this is Talk of the Town. For today we are in a familiar locale if you've watched Talk of the Town before you might have seen this interior for some other things that we've done. And yes we are at the Roasted Granola, a gem of Arlington Heights as far as we are concerned and I am joined by one of the two owners Emily Patel is in California but Sarah Short is here with us today. Hi James. I'm so glad that you are here. Thank you. And I am also joined by Lydia Kenigsher who is an artist the founder of Art Links which we will find out more about and a commissioner on the Arlington Commission of Arts and Culture ACAC of course. Thanks for that help Lydia. So anyway thanks both of you for being here let me just explain that we're going to talk about today is really the kind of intersection of art and creativity on the one hand and a little bit of commerce on the other hand in terms of this being a business of course but really how creativity suffuses this business from out here where we can see the paintings and we can see the windows and but also back in the kitchen and right back to the origins so I'd like to start with the origins if that's okay great this space where we're in right now was a place called Art Lounge before it was Roasted Granola. Tell us a little bit first of all about Art Lounge Lydia because I know you were involved and then about how Roasted Granola came about. Art Lounge was a essentially a sip and paint business which means that someone came and had 16 by 20 canvases and something on the walls that there was a stage there and and it really was a night business. It happened everything happens every night nothing happened during the day and there was a bar with with some goodies desserts and appetizers and then people came every night of the week to do some kind of a three-hour event. I became an artist in residence and as such I helped them do marketing and I also helped create courses so that doing earlier before the sip and paint started or under nights where at seven o'clock I think it was so we have also art classes so myself and other people taught to the community a little different than just sip and paint it taught more more just creativity without looking at something to paint and so it was sort of the beginning of what I called painting from the heart so that people could paint intuitively. So I was the artist in residence as I said that was teaching promoting all that stuff and then one day I had the pleasure of meeting Sarah and Emily and they started with their granola business and started by giving us little tips when there was a class or there was a painting by night um and boy thank you I was bought then you were right you're sold right away um yeah so I mean it's true that right Roast granola came into being while art lounge was still here so just explain how this this happened from your perspective. Yeah so we started the Roast granola business I think this fall it'll be 10 years ago we started out of Emily's kitchen and we started going to farmers markets and we consider ourselves artisan you know food makers um and we sort of outgrew Emily's kitchen we baked for a couple years in a in a bakery a private bakery 5000 square feet it was a dream and that bakery eventually expanded and we weren't going to be able to use the space and so we were looking for space um and we had heard that you know the art lounge was mostly evening events and that there was a kitchen and uh that was underutilized so we you know we talked to the owners of the art of the art lounge and uh moved our business in here just initially thinking that we'd bake granola and then we thought you know uh here we are in Mass Av in Arlington and and I live right up the street and we thought you know we should have a little coffee house there's really nothing down here and so that's basically how we started the coffee house we first started producing granola and then we sort of built out a little coffee bar and we shared you know the space with the art lounge and um when the art lounge left uh just before the pandemic um we started having uh art exhibits on the wall um and and then when the art lounge left of course a few months later there was the pandemic and and we shut down and when we when we reopened we you know kind of imagined um ourselves still being connected to the arts we really like that connection and uh we continued with the art exhibits and started bringing in local artisans uh cards I think actually handmade cards was our first thing that we brought in and then pottery we have two lovely potters that sell their pottery here and then we expanded to we have uh felted hats and um tea towels and you know all sorts of things yeah running the gamut exactly and we still like to um have local uh food sources also uh we get eggs um indirectly from farm to door direct they provide farm fresh eggs of uh from lilac hedge and we used to be neighbors with them at farmers markets we sell local honey from Carlisle honey uh we use their honey in our granola um the owner of Carlisle honey is also my bee mentor i'm a beekeeper uh we use uh maple syrup from Ackerman farm in Cabot Vermont they still you know bring them deliver the maple syrup to us it's another partner from farmers markets and we use that in our maple syrup um so even as we've expanded in our our granola we make a lot of granola it's still important to us to use local products when we can yeah we use greek olive oil in our granola and uh we our first person a first business that sold our granola with sophia's greek pantry in belmont and we still use greek olive oil in all of our granola because the olive oil was you know from her family's estate in greece and this is i mean this is really what we are here to be talking about today is that all all of these all this interweaving that happens between roasted granola and the community in a number of different ways especially again the arts community lydia you really were the driver for this particular episode uh you know when you kind of reached out and said you know i really want to let people know about roasted granola as this kind of engine this hub of creativity and of art and you know promotion of the arts um tell us a little bit more about like what it is that you see is so special about this place in that way well one of the things is in addition to commissioner i am a founder of art links which is a networking organization that does advocacy in support for artists and i've known sarah since the days of art lands as i said and i was sold under food and then about two years ago we were looking art links we're looking for a place to do holiday market so that's how i approached sarah who knew me and said well that sounds like a good idea and from that evolved into having a gallery for art links and in other words in order to exhibit on the walls you have to become a member and that is because art links is a part of the our length and commission of arts and culture we don't collect dues so my job is to make sure that the artists of all persuasions have a place to perform or exhibit so i talked to sarah and amily and when they started that because it is doable which we have a changing exhibit every three months and what i think i mentioned to you that i like about the roasted granola is that because i've seen how they create their their artists and food uh it has such an incredible synergy with how artists create and so in a way is the creative way of doing business is a creative way of working on the business in that attracts creativity which we normally see through the arts like in the ongoing exhibit but when you look at their business model as sarah aptly put it they create all the time they they they it's just it's very organic in other words yeah i'm sure they have a business plan but if things happen because they're so open to bringing community artists in their own creative spirit um i'm sure it comes from the family too because when i was teaching a class here their mother was thinking my class and the sister so there's a family of artists and and what art brings to a business is the quality that it's not fun with anything else it's the idea it's a subtle underlying intuitive idea of being open to what it's it's being creative and so not you don't have to be an artist to be creative but but creativity should permeate every part of your life because then we become better individuals a better society a more inclusive society yes for sure and is that answer were you asking absolutely in large part and i yeah i want to just reinforce what it is that you're saying which is that art as we are thinking about it today and creativity as we're talking about it it depends on openness right it depends on tolerance and expand and an expansive idea of what people have to offer right and it it it runs completely counter to that kind of narrowing and closing which all of us seek to avoid as much as we can and we do as a community the way arlington likes to think about itself certainly is well reflected here at roasted granola because again there is that sense of inclusion there is that sense of uh celebration of what particular creativity each individual can bring to it um coming out of that little monologue i apologize for talking for a while let me ask you though to give concrete form to something lidia was just referencing and that is um as you guys started this business you made granola you've expanded that menu quite a bit um and also i'm sure the granola itself has evolved over time give us a little just a little flavor of how create the creativity that that lidias you know has talked about kind of makes its way through your you know your process of developing the menu making your decisions etc with granola or or the whole menu well you know wherever you however much well it you know i guess it is a process over time you know we started out with just one granola and it's still called our original granola because it was the only granola we had um and you know when you first start out with a small business especially i'm going to say especially but granola but it could be anything many people said you can't go into business selling granola that's a saturated market and then other people we talked to said no there's always room for a quality product and so you know we we we always made granola at home and um so it was emily who really started the idea of um doing the granola business and so that process was um i guess it really did come from many years of just making granola of course it it changes when suddenly you're selling it and and um people will still ask me today this is a side thing so do you still like making granola i love the process of making granola i actually find it almost therapeutic and i'm not the one doing all the baking now i used to do the majority of the baking but just using high quality ingredients emily and i spent so much time finding um quality ingredients um and just mixing them together it was a lot of you know trial and error on on flavors uh you know that we then uh went from meeting acrimon farm at the farmers market we said hey could would you have enough maple syrup to sell to us if we wanted start you know making a maple pecan granola and um well we spent so much time tasting batch after batch is this the right amount of maple syrup that sounds rough because we try to have this balance where we we like a nice roast on our granola and a lot of people say well what does that mean that your granola is roasted versus being just baked in the oven well it's just really baked in the oven but roasting is really a dry process and we like to get that flavor when you roast an almond or a pecan it really i mean a pecan roasted by itself almost tastes like it has maple in it you know yeah there's a sweet right yeah there's just this this nice uh flavor that comes out so we sort of enhance we like to enhance the flavor of our product without covering it in you know sugar or things like that so that balance of what's the minimum amount of sweetness to make it really you know taste flavorful um has been very important to us i think um you know i i'm not gonna i'm not gonna claim that we're the lowest on the market with sweetness or salt or or anything like that but we try to be you know we try to be very aware of it and a lot of customers have asked us oh could you make an unsweetened granola i don't want any sweetener in it so we just made uh we only have a very limited amount of a toasted muesli because i was like well you know you just have to i'm just going to go all the way with nothing but we've toasted it because we just really love that flavor of the roasted nuts but there's no oil there's no sweetener there's no salt and it really tastes delicious in yogurt see i think i think yeah you're hitting the nail on the head in some ways for what i was asking because again it goes back to that idea of openness right the idea of oh customers feel comfortable to give you their input knowing that you are going to take that seriously yeah have you know have a go at it enjoy the process as you said of developing something new and yeah we just recently made a nut freak granola which for many years i was very against doing because we're all about nuts and i'm you know i'm terrified of out of allergens but so many people the farmer farmers markets in particular have said well i'm not allergic to nuts i can't tolerate them anymore so you know we thought okay well you know clearly says on the back of the bag made in a facility with nuts but uh we have a nut free version we also do a gluten free line that you know we're in a in a facility that has gluten but um my sister and i are both uh gluten free and so i'm really a fanatic about you know the kitchen is absolutely clean and i do all of our gluten free work before anything else is done and i am vegan and i always find my vegan stuff yeah so i'm talking about the granola what are those things that i'd like to get that has granola and chocolate is the brownie or oh the hazelnut cacao bar oh my god that's amazing so right so yeah so so initially when we opened back to sort of the the menu and the food we had a very limited menu it was more like bowls you know a yogurt bowl or a smoothie bowl with our granola and fresh fruit and we made you know we make a jam bar that's really delicious that has our original granola on it we make a a vegan hazelnut cacao bar so it's a a bar that then has our granola on it so we try to where we can incorporate our granola into some of the baking i make a really lovely cheesecake it's a classic sour cheese cheesecake but i use our granola as the base so you know it's it's gluten free and and it's a nice cheesecake but as i'm listening to you're describing how you create it's exactly when if i describe how i create my paintings i would probably describe it in in painterly ways but it's in exact same ways and that's why it always attracted me to be in conversation with emily and sarah because we understand each other's processes so when i or when the painters come they're familiar with a creative person because they're created themselves so the way in which they create the food the menu and the business i mean granola is part of it but certainly they're always the drinks are amazing yeah what is the last of it last and i'd love the maca something oh my god we're not we're not gonna go through well only because only because that's exactly what happens when i i i am faced in with a white canvas and i have the trepidation would it work with it not but then once i get into the flow of it the images show up and it's the same exact process and so i think that's why this business is so successful the atmosphere has that flavor their customer service everybody their employees uh people love coming here and uh and also the fact that they like to collaborate with the businesses around uh we do like to collaborate i mean some we've had a couple of evening events and we've um you know i've said we've got prep neighborhood kitchen across the street and we would you know partner with them and they would make foods you could order across the street and bring it over here we do make a couple of cookies we don't always have cookies but our cookies would be strictly vegan or gluten-free and if somebody wants another cookie i'll tell them to go across the street to cookie time because they have fantastic cookies we with during the pandemic when we closed down you know we we really didn't know what was going to happen but when we and it was our all of our customers started ordering granola which was amazing and emily and i did all the baking in the kitchen and you know packaging and shipping out granola and then we eventually started people could do pickups and we they'd come in and you know we just have a table inside the door but when we started about reopening the cafe a lot of people always said they wanted egg sandwiches and why don't you have egg sandwiches so we got a little grill and we started making egg sandwiches to go and now our um so the egg sandwiches have nothing to do with granola or anything but in there i'd say our um my niece sammy who's emily's daughter really took the lead she basically runs the kitchen and uh with her staff really was creative in making um egg sandwiches um we do everything house made you know so we make because we make with the granola fig bites which are these amazing little kind of like energy bites of figs and almonds and stuff we always get figs she started making a fig jam you know so there's a sandwich with fig jam on it and we do things again all very organic process yeah kind of paying attention interacting with others making being being willing to have things evolve yeah right in front of your eyes in a sense another thing is that it's a family oriented it's a lot of their family members however around here to help when to work and and it's a pleasure because that really comes across to the customers and to the people that that that understand that this is their family oriented whether your family or not well emily's one of emily's older daughters keila um actually opened the cafe with us she was um it was after she'd gotten out of college and she hadn't gone back to grad school yet and she's in environmental sciences but she's a very talented artist and she did all of our labels and she did the first menu um we don't really have our logo so displayed but she's done our roasted granola labels and most of the labels on our granolos and all of our treats and so yeah so she's yeah very very much of a family atmosphere here i've got to say in general we feel comfortable staying yeah we hire a lot of young young people and in some ways we some of them call us you know their second mother's not surprising yeah i want to actually change our focus we only have about five minutes left in the conversation it's going by fast right it always does i do want to change our focus to this current exhibit that is here because people will always as lydia mentioned before in conjunction with acac and art links etc you've got rotating exhibits through here every couple of months two three months and i know that there will be a new one starting in june black joy project um we'll we can talk maybe a little bit about that um but just even what's what's on the walls right here well susanne menon is our artist and we have expanded our art links membership to surrounding times so susanne is actually from medford but she is an art links member no she's an art links member and uh uh what the quality is she's an oil painter which is so unusual because as an oil painter she does plein air painting which means that it's sort of like to the eyes of the plein air is the impressionist painting and they basically never do anything in indoors and i was just fascinated by the fact that all this art is done on site yeah so i has been very successful i look around and i say oh my god two more paintings are gone so uh people like that they like the freshness and i have to tell you for an oil painter to do plein air painting it's really not normally thought of and when you look at the images they're just so fresh and they have the quality of oil but they also have the quality of here and now so as i said we have a three in and her run ends and she had an opening a couple of weeks ago um can i interject one thing one thing that's really susanne's gave a lovely talk a few weeks ago but one thing that's so nice we get a lot of artists who's the first time they've had an exhibit and they often come here with their friends or family and they're having coffee or something to eat and they are just so amazed sitting here and just being surrounded by their artwork and and the other thing that's nice about having i think having artwork in a cafe for several months is you know a lot of people aren't going to come in and just say oh i love that painting and buy it right right they come here several times and that painting grows on them and then and then and then they buy it you know so it's it's it's a it's a really nice it's really that's so special having all this art on the walls yeah again the just kind of the the syncretism of like just the fact that this works well it works well for you works well for the business one hopes it works well for the artist it works well for the community this really what we're kind of here celebrating today in a lot of ways how you know whether you've meant it or not rooster vanilla has become in this part of arlington for sure perhaps throughout the town you know really a kind of engine of this type of creativity and community building yeah so well done thank you um lydia we we have just a couple minutes left anything else that you want to add um one of the things that i also think you like about rooster granola is the fact that again they really foster inclusion and at all levels not just the the emerging artists people who need volunteer work i mean it's just you wouldn't believe the the amount of people that they attract they don't really care if they get paid or not they just love to be in this atmosphere so to that level we have the next exhibit is going to be the black joy project which is a project of along with acac and our public arts coordinator uh is it is basically to demonstrate and also dei right yes the department of equity diversity equity and inclusion uh it is it is the town and it's the art the arts commission and um the rooster granola again is to show all these these things that we aim to have more people of all races whatever they are and uh as i said sarah last to attract emerging artists artists that they just began artists that had stuff in their basement and they haven't shown in a while so that is important to us and and to me as an um as a commissioner and as an our links uh founder is very important to me because my mandate has to be to find places where art can flourish so we have the black joy project uh from um i say what if they june through august and then september october november we have another group we always put calls for art and after that we have the third holiday artist market which i'm so excited along with the window painting that happens we have a spring festival coming up uh june 10 for the holiday market we started that on the on the saturday after thanksgiving and every saturday afternoon we have to in the cafe closes at two the coffee house is open and we have you know like three or four vendors in here right and it's been it's been really successful people love it yeah the feedback that i get because we send a survey it's just terrific they love the people here they love the public people that want to come already have a waiting list so i'm really excited about that and i'm very grateful that they give me all this freedom oh and we we i mean we've loved partnering with with you and art links thanks it's really been amazing yeah all right well i want to thank you both for this conversation i again want to thank you and emily for just creating this space thank you and maintaining that means a lot to us it's important to this part of arlington and important to the town thank you very much so we appreciate it i've been speaking with sarah short one of the two owners of roasted granola and with lydia kenek sure who is as i've already mentioned an artist in her own right as well as a clear patron of the arts around here so thank you so much for your time thank you and we also thank you for your time this has been talk of the town i'm james molan we'll see you next time