Bookery Manchester, Manchester, N.H., has handed over management of its café to Tom Puskarich, who owns a variety of food businesses, including Restoration Café and Good and Planty, Manchester Inklink reported. The store had managed the café since it opened in 2018.
Bookery owner Liz Hitchcock said that Puskarich's "level of food is exactly where I want to be. A little bit nicer than your typical sub shop but also quick and easy to grab... like a sub shop." She said the café's quality had been inconsistent, adding, "There's been many iterations on it, and it's been kinda one of the sticky parts. Running a restaurant is extremely hard."
The goal is to return to Hitchcock's original idea of an "elevated" café with specialty items like fresh-baked donuts, soups and artisanal breads and fewer things like barbecue chicken sandwiches and paninis.
Puskarich said the goal is to make the café a destination to drive incidental traffic for the bookstore, just as the bookstore drives traffic for the cafe. "We wanted to create a destination sort of like 'I want to come to this cafe because it has the best X, Y and Z,' " he added.