The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘Every day is different’
Spice320 a dream come true for Colebrook chef, builder
COLEBROOK — The bell over the door to Spice320 jingled, and in walked a woman talking enthusiastically to owners Alan Thayer and Rich Marchesseault about the homemade soup she had purchased a day earlier.
“Yes,” said Marchesseault, “Alan keeps changing the recipes on some of the soups he makes.” The woman again complimented the owners on the soup’s flavor, and left smiling.
Thayer is a chef with 30 years’ experience. Marchesseault is a designer and builder, who spent two years renovating the circa-1850 former farmhouse at 320 Colebrook River Road where the shop is located.
“It’s been our dream for six years to do a business like this,” Marchesseault said. “Four years ago, before the pandemic, this property came up for sale. I’m going, ‘Al, it’s time for Plan B of our life.’”
Plan B was Spice320, which the owners describe as “a chef-driven marketplace.” In a new kitchen Marchesseault built, which he says is “all up to code and licensed by the Farmington Valley Health Department,” Thayer concocts soups, original spice blends and an imaginative macaroni and cheese dish with white chocolate, which was offered this year for Valentine’s Day.
“I use mascarpone and ricotta for the cheese sauce, nice and creamy,” Thayer said. “It’s something I made years ago at a chocolate festival. It’s award-winning. We entered it in the festival.”
When he tells people he adds white chocolate chips to his creations, “they’ll make a face,” he said. “But it works. People are a little hesitant, but Rick was sampling it the other day, and people just loved it.”
Thayer seems to have an affinity for white chocolate. One of his scone recipes pairs white chocolate with cranberries, as well as flour, sugar, heavy cream, baking powder and spices. He stores it in a refrigerator next to “Al’s Lentil & Date Soup,” which also features celery, carrot, onions, sumac, orange zest and cayenne.
“Sumac is a Middle Eastern spice, a berry, and it’s round and it’s very tart and sour,” he said. “I have some ginger there for the under-heat and black pepper and then kale.”
Thayer long dreamed of opening a business of his own. “I started out working in a French restaurant,” he said. “First I traveled to France for several months with a friend. I didn’t work
there, but I traveled extensively and ate all around and fell in love with the French cuisine.
“I came back and I found a job where I was working with a French chef, a French-trained chef,” he said. “And I worked with him for over seven years and moved up to running a small French restaurant in Essex.”More than 30 years ago, Thayer was shopping in The Home Depot in New Haven, when a man mistook him for an employee and said, “Hey, I need you to answer a math question.” It was Marchesseault, who was shopping for insulation for a house he was building and needed to calculate square footage. Recalling how they met, Marchesseault said, “I (was) just tired, you know, so I was like, ‘Help. Oh, you don’t work here?’”
They discovered they both loved to travel, and a few years ago went to Marrakesh, where they saw barrels of spices in a marketplace.
“Oh, we need this at home,” Marchesseault recalled saying to Thayer. “This is brilliant, you know, let’s bring these spices home.”
They began making notes in a journal about the kind of business they could create around spices.
“That trip to Marrakesh kind of crystallized what I wanted to do as a specialty food shop,” Thayer said. “Spices stuck in my head . ... You see cheese shops, you see pasta shops, you see coffee shops, but not so many small artisanal-based, hand-curated blends (of ) spices.”
They put Plan B into action. Marchesseault spent long days knocking down walls, repurposing scraps of antique lumber to frame windows or build shelving. Spice320 opened its
renovated doors to the public in December 2021.
Almost every detail in the store is Marchesseault’s handiwork, including a whimsical, round window near the bottom of the door to the kitchen, a porthole for children to look through to see Thayer and others working in the kitchen.
One of the kitchen workers recently was a young woman named April Bautista, a graduate of Northwestern Regional 7
High School. She was supervised by Valerie Richard, who works for Highlander Transition Academy, a vocational program for adults 18 to 22, Richard said,
“After they leave Regional 7, they can choose to come to our program,” Richards said. “We take them out into the community, and we teach vocational skills and have great businesses to come to like Spice320 that mentors our students and really
gives them a nice opportunity to learn skills so that they can be independent on their own in the workforce.”
Bautista said she enjoys making biscuits. “It’s nice. They have amazing stuff to sell,” she said.
In addition to Thayer’s original recipes, Spice320 consigns crafts, food items and books from more than 30 local artisans and authors.
“Every day is different,” Thayer said. “It doesn’t get boring.”
He said he sources spices and other foods locally and nationally and is working on acquiring them from other countries.
Marchesseault loves interacting with people. “I get excited helping out local artisans, because I’m an artist,” he said.
Spice320 is open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday through Monday, and is closed on Tuesdays. For more information, call 860464-2580 or go to https:// spice320.com.