Alison Roman’s latest project? A grocery store

Alison Roman, viral recipe hall-of-famer, cancel culture survivor, and bestselling cookbook author, has embarked on a new project. No, it isn’t the culinary show she’s been shopping around since she lost her deal with Hulu, it’s a small grocery store in upstate New York. Called First Bloom, the shop opened recently and according to food writer Callie Hitchcock, it feels “like a physical world expansion of the gregarious and inviting persona around which Roman has built her brand.”

First Bloom is about three and a half hours from NYC, in a tiny town called Bloomville, population 173. Celebrities ranging from Adam Driver to Yoko Ono allegedly live nearby, but Bloomville isn’t a tourist destination (at least not yet). The old building that houses Roman’s store was built as a private residence, had most recently been a small pizza restaurant and now serves as the home of a store that carries an eclectic variety of culinary goods ranging from DeCecco pasta ($4/box) to Cantabrian anchovies ($72/tin). Roman sometimes sells homemade items as well, which at the writing of the article including fresh tomato sauce with Calabrian chile and Semolina cake with lemon and fennel (the recipe, found in Sweet Enough, has a five-star rating in the EYB Library).

Roman had laid out her plans for the store two years earlier, telling The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins about buying the building for around $300,000. It seems like the store’s atmosphere echoes the ethos of its proprietor, being “a true extension of the Roman universe…part joke, part instruction, part confession. It’s warm, friendly, and ripe for forming the kind of parasocial relationship Roman fans tend to have with her,” says Hitchcock. Is Roman poised to be the next lifestyle/culinary icon in the mold of Ina Garten, Martha Stewart, or Nigella Lawson (to whom she has been compared)?