Popular New York-styled downtown Marshall bakery to close
MARSHALL - This spring and summer, Marshall bakery Ivy and the Poet grew so popular that owner Shawn Barry said she had to temporarily close the shop at points due to the high demand.
But now, the shop, located at 133 S. Main St. in Marshall, will shutter its doors permanently.
Barry said Ivy and the Poet will close in mid-September, and she plans to move to Miami.
The namesake for the shop is drawn from Barry's middle name, Ivy, with a nickname for her partner, Ryan Ashley, who established a name for himself in Asheville crafting street poems on a typewriter, and also works weddings.
The owner said she "felt sad" about having to close, but added that she isn't ready to close the door on Ivy and the Poet in Marshall forever.
"We are looking at some production kitchen spaces to continue our local wholesale and special orders with delivery," Barry said. "It just didn't seem right to take up a whole retail space for a production kitchen."
At the Marshall bakery, mostly everything is made from scratch.
"It's pretty much all my own prep cooking," Barry said in a previous News-Record article. "Like that black and white cookie, I wanted to recreate the one that I remember from my childhood that seemed so perfect to me that I could never find anywhere again.
"We go to New York a lot, and I would make a day of it," she said. "I would go to bakeries and just try a rainbow cookie. I would be like, 'I don't remember it tasting like this,' you know? So, I started to realize that most bakeries just buy those big tubs of almond paste, and they have preservatives and chemicals and artificial flavors. You can really taste it in the cookie. So, we make our own almond paste from scratch, so we know it's nothing but good ingredients in there."
With the shop's closing, the downtown Marshall bakery will no longer be where Barry brings that New York experience to Madison County.
Reflecting on the massive growth in the few years in Marshall, the owner said she was sentimental about the move.
"It was a lot of work getting that place running with zero dollars," Barry said.
But Barry said she's confident that Ivy and the Poet will find a way to continue to offer products to its Marshall/Madison County customers.
Barry said she's also exploring opportunities to use kitchens in order to keep her small staff working in the interim.
"It would still be Ivy & the Poet, and when I come up like once a month to see my daughter, I can take special orders for birthday cakes or wedding cakes and plan around that when I'm in town," the owner said. "I'm mainly hoping for a new production space that I can have certified gluten-free and potentially start getting a few of the products into grocery stores."
Barry also said she and Ashley hope to operate a "vintage cart" in South Florida, and Barry didn't rule out the possibility of bringing the cart to Marshall.
"I hope to bring it up here during the summer though!" Barry said in a text message. "I'm hoping I'll be busy enough in Miami during the winter that I can be off in the summer and spend time up near my parents."
For more information on Ivy and the Poet, visit the shop's Facebook page.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Popular New York-styled downtown Marshall bakery to close
