By Sara Poirier Correa
Sentinel Business Reporter
When Garrison Gunter took over as owner of Cook and Craft in late 2014, he brought with him more than a decade of experience at the Old Greenwich store, and nearly a lifetime of cooking knowledge. Since taking the reins, he has kept up the tradition of being the go-to cookware shop for those searching for unique and quality products that work, and has upped the ante when it comes to offering new items.
“[Unlike at big box stores] you’re not bombarded by a hundred choices of everything,” Gunter said of the essentials for sale at Cook and Craft. “It’s a very concise collection of things.”
“You always have to keep your eye on what might be new because I think things change; they change for the better, they change for the worse,” he added about mixing up the merchandise at his store on Arcadia Road. “If you’re not paying attention to all the things you have and knowing how they’re changing, you could be sitting there with a product that is really not something you want to represent anymore.”
Gunter and his store manager, Carla Bicalho, as well as a handful of other workers, find products and test them out so they know that what they are selling does what it says it does, and does it well.
“If we’re not acting as experts and are only acting as a vendor of a bunch of stuff, we’re not really doing our job,” Gunter said of the responsibility of a small business owner. Part of that responsibility, he added, includes providing feedback to the vendors if something is working, and especially if it isn’t.
Gunter added about mixing new with the old: “It’s really important for us to have things that are unique and interesting and try to stay on the cutting edge or the front line of what’s out there, but also retain relationships with people we’ve had for 15 years and that we love.”
Opened in 2000 by chef Brian Ebzery, Cook and Craft sells everything for the kitchen and table, from funky glassware by Pean Doubulyu to custom wooden bowls by Wisconsin’s David Lory to Le Creuset bake ware to the CM Scrubber, a chain mail cleaner for cast iron cookware. It even offers gourmet pantry items such as porcini and truffle oils and exotic salts.
The store also offers in-house knife sharpening, which has drawn a whole new customer base, according to Gunter.
“I felt like our customers could use a boost,” he said of incorporating new products into the store’s offerings. “It was time to step up the quality of what we were doing and bring them a little bit higher-end product.”
Gunter grew up in Hawaii, but his family’s roots run deep in Greenwich. His mother and her siblings grew up in town, and his grandfather was Charles P. Mason, an insurance salesman in town. Mason was good friends with the Tod family, Gunter said, and reportedly encouraged them to donate what is now Tod’s Point as beach property to the town of Greenwich.
Trained in technology, graphic design and photography, Gunter, a Bronxville, N.Y., resident who recently purchased a home in Old Greenwich, fell into small business life by circumstance. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he said, there were no technology jobs to be found, so he reached out to Ebzery, a friend of the family, for a job at Cook and Craft. Gunter worked side by side with Ebzery until he took over as owner.
“I had always had my finger on the pulse of what this store had been doing,” Gunter said.
“I’m coming full circle into a family community that my mom and her siblings all grew up in,” he added, “but I’m finding community in a space where my family has a lot of history. It’s kind of nice to be back here in a place I didn’t grow up in yet I feel very connected to.”
Cooking since the age of five, Gunter knows his way around a kitchen. He worked in restaurants and for caterers, and even holds his own at home, often baking bread in stone bake ware he carries at the store, among other feats.
Cook and Craft offers private shopping events, and Gunter said he hopes to offer cooking classes in collaboration with Wheelock Madique, a kitchen design store on Sound Beach Avenue, in the near future.
For more about Cook and Craft, visit the shop at 27 Arcadia Road, call 203-637-2755, e-mail theshop@cookandcraft.com, go to cookandcraft.com, or catch up on social media on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
