'It's like you fell into a paint can': First look at Bischoff's pop-up in Teaneck

Bischoff's, the cherished near 90-year-old ice cream shop in Teaneck that closed its doors at the end of 2022, officially reopened today as a pop-up with a new look, new menu and lots of aspirations.

What visitors will see and experience now is just a taste, albeit an exciting and dramatic taste, of what owner Steve Mather and three of his friends envision for the Cedar Lane restaurant when it eventually evolves into a full-on, permanent eatery next spring.

Mather and his friends — T.J. Quinn, Rony Alvorado and Edward Pierce, all Teaneck residents — are hoping to raise enough money (they've set up a GoFundMe account) to make their enduring dream come true.

"Right now, it's a palate cleanser," said Mather. "We want to erase what your thoughts of Bischoff's had been and help you imagine what it could be in the future."

From the appearance of the pop-up, which will run Wednesday through Sunday until Labor Day, the future looks very bright.

"When you walked into Bischoff's, it was plain colors," Mather said. "Now, it's like you fell into a paint can."

The walls have been painted with lots of different colors — teal, beige, purple, red. The paint was allowed to drip down the walls, like ice cream melting on a cone. The floors, too, have been painted with a slew of colors. Even the sidewalk outside the front door sports a bright teal rubber mat in a curvy shape, again mimicking ice cream trickling.

"It's a splashy, colorful design inspired by the bright colors of ice cream," said Pierce, a Tony-nominated Broadway set designer who is responsible for the look.

The candy counter is gone. Many of the booths are gone too.

Today there's a "photo wall" wearing a huge heart, with the words "I Love Bischoff's" on it, where customers can snap photos (consider it your "red carpet" moment). Another wall wears a tapestry of sheets of colored paper on which Bischoff's fans wrote their reminiscences when the store was closing. The restaurant has hundreds of them, Pierce said.

"We wanted to capture stories on pieces of paper, document them," Pierce said. In its final weeks of operation, the shop had a stack of papers and colored markers for anyone who wanted to share their stories.

Pierce was among the hundreds of fans devastated when Bischoff announced it was closing.

"It was like a dagger to my chest," he said.

Wanting to save it, he and Quinn proposed to Mather a new, bold concept for Bischoff's — before the store even closed.

"I've been wanting to build a community space for many years," said Pierce, who has lived in Teaneck for 23 years. But he said he never found quite the right fit. However when Bischoff closed, "a bell went off in my head. Bischoff's had the spirit of what I want to see in Teaneck."

Understandably Mather was too overwhelmed at the time to even consider their idea.

Two months later, however, he sat down with Pierce, Quinn and Avorado, chef and owner of Rony's Rockin' Grill, a funky, award-winning 9-year-old burger joint in Bergenfield, and began to hatch out a plan for a new Bischoff's. Avorado agreed to be Bischoff's new chef.

The plan for the permanent Bischoff's admittedly is ambitious. Not only will the restaurant serve its famous home-made ice creams and, thanks to a fryer (the store's first), French fries and onion rings, hot dogs and hot turkey sandwiches and "God knows what else," Mather said, it will also have a stage. The pop-up is serving ice cream and sliders.

"It will be a place where the community can come and express itself," Pierce said. School kids, local musicians, singers, comedians and poets will be able to perform. Events will also be held at the courtyard next door.

And come spring, the 3,000-square-foot space will be transformed again. This time, permanently and this time to look more like the Art Deco ice cream shop it began life as in the 1930s. The original store was founded in Manhattan by Mather's great-grandfather, Albert Bischoff, in the 1890s. It moved to Teaneck 89 years ago.

"When we come back in the spring, it will be all new, but it will look old fashioned," Mather said. "It will be quietly modern, We will have computer ports so that kids from FDU or the high school can do their homework."

There will also be video screens and plenty of spaces for snapping photos to feed your social media accounts.

It will also be taller.

"We found four feet of height hidden behind a dropped ceiling," Pierce said. "There are even old sky lights. It's like an archeological dig."

He added, "Bischoff's is not just a restaurant. It's a place where the community knows to go."

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bischoff's in Teaneck NJ: First look at the new pop-up