St. Albans is peppered with businesses that owe some of their backgrounds to Michele Bessett and Bob Iwaskiewicz, the owners of the kitchen shop As the Crow Flies on Main Street.
I t may not be far from Burlington to St. Albans, but the two cities draw on very distinct populations and present very different business challenges. Husband-and-wife team Bob Iwaskiewicz and Michele Bessett spent a long time getting to know what makes St. Albans tick before they launched their kitchen store, "As the Crow Flies," in 1998. The name popped up just before they opened the store.
"I realized that I spent a lot of time telling people in Chittenden county that St. Albans was only 26 miles from Burlington as the crow flies!" Bessett says with a laugh. The name decision was confirmed when she happened upon a piece of work by East Fairfield woodcarver Roger Adkins, a lovely carving of crows that still hangs behind the counter of her Aladdin's cave of a shop on St. Albans' Main Street.
Demand soon outstripped Bessett's ability to keep up with the cooking, and chef Connie Jacobs-Warden joined the team three years later, when they moved to the prime Main Street location that Jeff's Maine Seafood occupies to this day.
Susan MacKenzie is the store manager at As the Crow Flies. She and Michele Bessett handle the front-of-the-house operation, such as store design, inventory and customer relations. Bessett's husband, Bob Iwaskiewicz, works behind the scenes on the business details, including the stockroom.
Although Jeff's went from strength to strength, the strain of maintaining the growth began to tell on Iwaskiewicz and Bessett, who found they had no life for themselves. A number of tragic deaths in the family prompted them to change their flight path in 1996 toward a less-demanding lifestyle.
It wasn't long, though, before they found themselves toying around with the idea of a kitchen shop. "I thought I had an idea of what people would want in their kitchens," Bessett says.
The career they embarked upon when they bought that mobile fish business has made them into prominent players in St. Albans, first with Jeff's Maine Seafood and now with As the Crow Flies.
"They are very committed and dedicated to the community; they put in 200 percent," says Karen Bresnahan, executive director of the city's downtown revitalization organization, St. Albans for the Future. Bessett serves on SAF's promotions committee, spearheading downtown events.
Katherine Trahan (left) and Bridgit Steele are salespeople. Trahan is the fourth member of the shop's management team, along with Bessett, Iwaskiewicz and MacKenzie.
The seafood business was a natural for Iwaskiewicz, raised on the Massachusetts seacoast and a keen fisherman all his life. Fishing, however, had to take second place to business development for many years, and it's only since they gave up Jeff's that he's had a chance to get back to his passion.
Bessett is the ultimate cooking aficionado and is delighted to be able to offer to customers the fine kitchenware and ingenious gadgets that she loves to use herself. "The store has everything I loved about the restaurant business except the perishables and the long hours," she says.
The couple established As the Crow Flies in 1998 in a small incubator space on Main Street, checking out whether the area would support such a venture. It did, and the shop moved to its current, larger premises in 2001.
Her store stocks a huge range of kitchen goods from large cast-iron cooking pots and electrical appliances down to cookie cutters — including no fewer than five types of doughnut cutter.
There are some exclusives too, such as the superb handcrafted woodenware by Ed and Marie Belisle of Highgate. As the Crow Flies also offers gift-wrapping and a special-order service that will track down obscure kitchen items like cabbage shavers and pear corers. They even offer home delivery for housebound customers.
Former Jeff's chef Connie Jacobs-Warden, now chef-owner of Chow!Bella, a flourishing Italian restaurant on Main Street, recalls the early days. "When I first met Michele and Bob in 1988," she says, "they were in the middle of opening a restaurant, which is the worst possible time of someone's life, but even under those circumstances we forged a lasting friendship.
The two businesses come together to hold wine- and food-tasting events designed to tempt people into the downtown area. This year's joint holiday wine tasting featured organic wines and wines produced or blended by women.