Julia Daly, a 2017 MCLA graduate and transplant from Staten Island, New York, never imagined she would own her own business in her second year out of college. “I don’t even really know what inspired me to take on the café,” she says, looking back. “I think it was just something I had missed so much, and I knew so many other people had missed so much — and it wasn’t even that I felt like I was the best candidate. It was more, I feel like somebody has to do this, and nobody else is doing it, so why can’t I?”
The Parlor Café originally opened on Ashland Street in 2012, and was a major asset to the area, especially for students attending MCLA, given its proximity to the campus. After a few years, the doors closed, and while other small businesses cycled through that building, the impression The Parlor had left on the local community remained alive. So, in 2018, Daly and her business partner Nick Tardive, also a fellow MCLA graduate, began to show interest in revitalizing what was at one point a prominent and thriving community space. “The space had been closed for about a year before we moved in,” Daly says.
Jason Morin, one of the previous owners of The Parlor, owned the building at the time Daly and Tardive started talking about taking on the business. Then the building was sold to a new owner, who was initially willing to continue The Parlor’s previous contract for operation. As the pandemic settled in and MCLA closed and sent its students home, The Parlor saw a decline in daily sales and visitors, and the new landlord, anxious about the prospects for recovery, refused to renew The Parlor’s contract in June of 2020, forcing them to find a new location.
Here’s how Daly describes this experience: “It was cool at first, it worked really well, and then I think COVID threw everybody a little bit. He [the landlord] was just confused and maybe a little scared about the future and our prospects for success in that space, especially right across the street from the college campus with the students being gone for so long. Our lease was going to be up in July; he came in one day in June and basically said he wasn’t renewing our lease. And then he gave us very little time to move out.”
In the same month that the café was forced to close, Tardive, living above the restaurant, was driven out of his apartment by a rent increase. This left him with no option but to move back home to New Jersey, where he remains essentially a silent partner in The Parlor’s current operations.
Moving locations also meant reapplying to the city for permitting and authentication, even though The Parlor had already been an approved and operational business on the other side of the downtown. “If you close a business in North Adams and reopen it, you basically have to start a whole new business,” Daly explains. “I had to go to the planning board again, get all of my licensing redone, all that stuff.”
While scouting for a new space, Daly had to find a place to store the kitchen equipment. “We had started talking to Glenn Maloney from Very Good Property Development pretty quickly after closing, but I had to store a lot of the café stuff at my house for a long period of time, which was very stressful. I had boxes of things all over the place. I was so lucky to have had roommates at the time who were gracious and accommodating.”
Thankfully, Maloney and his business partner Brian Miksic, co-owners of the HiLo, a live music and comedy space in North Adams, were interested in providing some help. “We were actually looking at a different space when we started talking to Glenn. I was straightforward about the fact that I needed to store refrigerators and things rather quickly; I couldn’t keep that stuff in my apartment. So, they opened up the back portion of the HiLo space and let me use that as storage even before we knew we were going to be working with them. It was nice, because my alternative would have been to get a storage unit that might not have had temperature control, which is important for the more sensitive machines.”
From storage to storefront, the transition into operating out of the HiLo space happened rather quickly and unexpectedly. “We looked at different spaces around town, and then one day Glenn said to me ‘so we have an idea, it might be a little crazy, but we just want to run it by you,’” Daly recounted. Maloney and Miksic explained to Daly that they needed a food vendor in that space quickly, especially since live music venues were struggling to get people through their doors during the pandemic. “They were focused on keeping HiLo’s name relevant during the pandemic. They were worried how long they would have to keep the doors closed, and they saw the value of having food for customers and musicians on site when they were eventually able to reopen.”
Daly admits this collaborative business effort was never in the forefront of her mind when she was looking for a new location. “I probably never in a million years would have ever come up with that on my own. It’s definitely not where I expected things to be, but all of the other spaces we looked at fell through, so I thought about it a little bit. Over time, it felt like for us, since we’d already been closed for so long, how long can you really be closed as a business before people stop paying attention, or stop caring, or just forget and have a new routine that they set into? Coffee is very routine-based.”
Some work had to be done in the space to prepare for opening and operating a functional café. “We were in here painting and cleaning up; we did a lot of work to get in. We needed the space to get built out a little bigger, too.” Daly says. This meant expanding the area where the food and beverages are prepared to provide a little more workspace behind the counters. “We put glass partitions in front of the counters, which really worked for pandemic protocol, too glass,” she said.
The workspace still poses some challenges, despite adaptations made during the move-in. “There’s still not a lot of room back there. There are certain things that work well in a small space and other things that are really challenging. The biggest challenge is mobility within the space. We really have to be on top of kitchen cues—letting people know where you are, how close you are to them, if you have something sharp in your hand. We are always one wrong move away from a disaster, and that slows everything down.” The Parlor Café currently has two employees: Kat Reid and Quray Clarke. “Another thing too,” Daly explains, “is that you can only have so big of a team when you have such a small space. Quray joins Kat and me on Sundays, and with three people back there, it’s challenging. Even though we’re all working together, we have to be conscious of the space and of not getting in each other’s way. More than anything, though, communicating is what makes that manageable. Our communication is great, and nobody’s working against each other.”
While Daly is an owner, she works alongside her team members in the kitchen, prepping coffees, crafting sandwiches, and also trying to greet customers as they walk in. “Another thing is that when there are problems here, it’s hard to analyze them because you’re so in the middle of it all. It’s what you do every day, you get accustomed to being here and doing things a certain way. It’s only when I can remove myself from the routine that I can see all the things that need to change.” During the summer of 2021, Daly did take a week to step away from the day-to-day to get a better handle on the issues at hand. Although she had strongly considered closing the doors, her time away was refreshing and the support she felt from the North Adams community on her return gave her the push she needed to find solutions to the problems and to accelerate the business forward. “I had initially told myself I wanted to put in at least three to five years,” Daly explains, “whether I was making money or not, whether it was really difficult or not, just to do it.”
Some issues remain, including finding ways to bring light into the darker parts of the space. Since HiLo hosts shows at night, most of space is dark and the lighting set-up is geared toward illuminating performers. The walls, floor and ceiling are all black, absorbing any light that comes in from the front. When the café opens in the morning, this dark atmosphere is not conducive to customers trying to wake up and start their day. “We’re still trying to find a way to brighten up that area a little bit more…maybe with something take could be taken down when there are performances there,” Daly says. At the same time, a local home bakery business, Bohemian Nouveaux, is operating a pop-up shop at the café on the weekends, and this brings more activity into those darker areas of the HiLo space, while also providing customers additional breakfast options to go with their morning coffee.
Another challenge for Daly is that she is operating in shared space. “When we were located on Ashland, the entire space was ours. I could do whatever I wanted with it; I could have events without having to check somebody else’s schedule or run it by somebody. On the other hand, the space that I do have for the café is larger than what we had on Ashland, it’s extremely well-lit and spacious, with plenty of room for tables and chairs, shelves lined with plants, and works by local artists,” she says, gesturing toward the side of the café that faces Union Strette, where floor-to-ceiling windows bring in great light for her plants and provide a comfortable space for customers to enjoy their meals. “I just wish I could do more with the space, but I am also really grateful that Glenn and Brian allowed me to have this area to kind of do my own thing. Space-making is really important to me. I’m always trying to find the right placement for things.”
The small-scale operation and physical transparency of the café’s preparation space allows the customer to see from the waiting area everything that’s happening behind the glass. “You can see the entire operation right where you’re standing,” Daly explains. “You can see everything that is happening, from the line. There’s maybe a person on orders, maybe a person on espresso, maybe a person on food. Sometimes we double up. We don’t really have the structure to do a call-out system for the food, real- café style; the layout isn’t great for that. But we want to encourage people to hang out and relax anyway, so it works.” The buzzing nature of the staff and the growing popularity of The Parlor as a local breakfast hangout is usually well accepted by customers, but every once in a while, patience runs thin. “We have to be here early and do all of our prep early. If I’m running a little late, then everybody’s watching me slice cheese and meat while they’re waiting for their coffee.” She says, laughing. “And some people are really forgiving and cool and understanding, and then some people are like, ‘why did my bagel take ten minutes?’” But she doesn’t let the high pressure of these situations get to her; “I always tell anybody that I’ve trained, it’s okay if it takes a little longer as long as they’re receiving the right thing. Most people are going to be okay with waiting a little longer as long as they get the right thing and it tastes good.” Quality of food, coffee, and overall atmosphere are some of Daly’s top priorities in running her business.
But her commitment to making a good, quality cup of coffee doesn’t only benefit the customer. “Coming into work, I love knowing that I’m going to have a good cup of coffee every day. I’ve worked other places where that hasn’t been that guarantee. I love coffee, and I need coffee, and I hate bad coffee,” she laughs. “So it’s nice to know I’m in control of that. And you could ask Kat, I’m a little crazy about the coffee. She has to pull the shots just right. There’s a whole thing going on back there which people don’t necessarily realize. It’s not all programmed, you do have to have a hand in what you’re doing.” She proudly serves Dean’s Beans fair trade coffee.
Another benefit to her workday is always being in good company. “A new cool thing is that I get to come in and work with one of my best friends every day, which is great. And somehow, we don’t hate each other yet, so that’s good,” she says about Kat Reid, with a smile. “We work really well together, we have fun, we support each other when we need it, and that’s important. That’s probably my new favorite thing about coming into work.”
The Parlor celebrated its three-year anniversary at the end of October, offering a free Halloween-themed snack from the bakery as a thank-you to their customers for all the support. Going into the winter, Daly says, this is the first time she will be reliant on the café as her only job. Although that is a challenging commitment to make, she expresses her gratitude for the flexibility that comes with owning her own business, despite the hardships. “I definitely used to have more hobbies before owning a business. Now it’s hard to have a social life; it’s hard to maintain everything that you like doing when you have a business. But that’s okay,” she says. “There are always ways of figuring out how to fit those things into your life.”
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