Tate’s Bake Shop, a Hamptons cookie monster with a national reputation, is expanding to accommodate a growing gluten-free customer base.
The Southampton mainstay is adding a 3,000 square-foot kitchen facility that will be CSA-certified gluten-free to serve up its new fare, Side Dish has learned.
Kathleen King, Tate’s founder and owner, said customer demand for gluten-free options is growing, as is her creative process in coming up with new products.
King is adding two new glutenfree cookies to her line, made with rice flour instead of wheat flour.
The new cookies — “ginger zinger” and “double chocolate chip” — are in addition to her gluten-free brownies and chocolate chip cookies, which are Tate’s second-best seller after her awardwinning regular chocolate chip cookies.
The gluten-free facility launches next month and can produce up to 400,000 cookies and brownies per week, increasing Tate’s Bake Shop’s gluten-free product output by 25 percent. Overall, the 13-yearold bake shop sells 1.7 million cookies a week.
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Chatter that Keith McNally’s Pastis was certain to close is not true.
McNally is negotiating for Pastis to stay in its Meatpacking District space, despite rising rents. He had called Pastis a victim of its own success, attributing the eatery’s draw as a key to the neighborhood’s gentrification and “trendification.”
McNally is also hoping to negotiate a new lease for Balthazar, on Spring Street. The current deal expires in eight months and sources tell Side Dish that the landlord and the restaurateur are “not even close to agreeing on a price.”
We hear Barneys and Nike are circling.
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WE HEAR … that Zach Erdem, of 75 Main in Southampton and Del Ray Beach, Fla., is in talks to take over Barrister’s, across the street from his East End eatery … and that Galleray.com is holding its first pop-up at 215 Bowery B until April 27. Galleray CEO Chad Lancaster once worked for Marquis Jets co-founder Jesse Itzler.