By Mark Aldrich
“Most people don’t think of themselves as ‘tea people’ the way they think of themselves as ‘coffee people.’”
As I started to ask Corinn and Chris, co-founders of The Ridge Tea and Spice Shop my next question, I stopped partway and interrupted myself: “You’re right. I have a peppermint tea before bed each night, just like I have coffee in the morning, but I’ve always called myself a coffee drinker.”
Corinn Crawford and Cristhian Galeano know their customers, they know their business, and they know what they are passionate about, and New Paltz has started to embrace this unique tea and spice shop and café.
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9 North Chestnut, home of The Ridge Tea and Spice since March 2021, was the home of a landmark New Paltz business for almost four decades. A couple businesses struggled to find a foothold in the location after that business closed until Corinn and Chris opened The Ridge.
Chris speaks admiringly of this history. “The idea of a business being here for decades, and a community growing around it, that appeals to me. I’d love for us to be thought of in a similar way,” years from now.
The Ridge is on its way. Yokel visited The Ridge to meet its owners on a Wednesday, a day the café is closed during the summer. Several customers approached the door while we were there, and Chris greeted each one with a thank you and an apology that the shop is closed on Wednesdays. Each customer responded cheerfully with a thank you and a promise to return the next day.
When I first visited The Ridge Tea and Spice in the summer of 2021, I noticed that the bulk tea selection is displayed in clear glass mason jars, unlike the tin cans one might see in tea shops in a mall. Customers like me who know tea only as powder in a paper baggie with a string attached to a small tag with a pithy saying can see the wide variety of color and types of leaf that the simple word, “tea” implies. We can open a jar and encounter the aroma inside to better choose a tea that we may have never heard of. The same with the wide selection of spices. Corinn and Chris want to share what they have learned over years of study about teas and spices and build a community around this. Customers can mix and match and experiment and invent new favorite flavors.
In connection with this, The Ridge hosts regular tea tastings and workshops for the community.
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“We call ourselves pandemic pigeons,” Corinn says. Chris is a Floridian who moved to New York City without much more than a desire to build a full life. He worked in food services, learned how to present and photograph food, and started to entertain his passion for climbing. He was also someone drank tea more than coffee, which perhaps made him somewhat unique in Manhattan, and may only be important in the context of The Ridge. It is an object lesson in how one’s passions may be found in any and every part of one’s life if one stays aware.
Corinn bought and sold vintage goods and also had a passion for climbing. She and Chris met in Central Park soon after he moved to the city in a scene out of a rom-com film. Corinn knew New Paltz, so when the pandemic began in 2020, the move upstate made sense. The two had been a couple for several years, and they started a new life upstate.
As a couple in business, The Ridge’s co-founders work well together: Cristhian will have an idea and visualize it, and Corinn has a well-honed business sense. In conversation, they not only finish each others’ sentences, they start them. He saw the possibilities in 9 North Chestnut Street, and the two now have a growing business there which has quickly become a cornerstone of the community. They plan to expand the business when the possibilities make the most sense with 9 North Chestnut as the homebase.
The Ridge is ahead of curve in several aspects: in their embrace of a growing tea culture that the retail sector tried to pursue two decades ago. and in their focus on farm-to-table, local solutions to local needs. In just one example, The Ridge’s fruit purées feature local berries in season, “which can be added to any iced drink we make—most popular are our sparkling iced teas, tea lemonades, and matcha lattes. We do different seasonal purées, and the next one we will have is blueberry.”
The co-founders of The Ridge love that their shop is a part of a growing movement: “We want to breathe new life into an old idea. It’s exciting.”
More important, they love that their shop/café continues to grow day-by-day into a vital part of New Paltz life in its two-plus years in business.
An old building has new life in it, and a new community that loves it.
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Mark’s website: http://thegadabouttown.com/
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