Alison Roman to Open Boutique Grocery and Cafe in Brooklyn Heights

Roman's Catskills corner store is expanding to a prime storefront just blocks from the promenade

First Bloom, a Borscht Belt corner store from Alison Roman, appears to be expanding to Brooklyn Heights this fall.

The food media maven announced via newsletter that her curated, high-end, locally sourced grocer and appetizing shop with humble upstate beginnings will soon be “a permanent resident of the Big Apple,” sharing scant details about the project; only that “There will be no Caesar salads,” according to Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me, and that Roman’s looking for help.

However, we can gather from JDs posted for a handful of positions that there is, at least, need for a head chef to lead a kitchen, a head pastry chef to command a bakery, a social media manager to get the word out about whatever the other two are cooking up, and a general manager to pull it all together and keep the books straight. Brooklyn Heights is revealed as the (almost too logical) neighborhood for First Bloom’s second location in the listing for the latter, along with some indications of scale and mission. “It will be bigger and more ambitious than what we built upstate. There will be a nice coffee program, a small cafe with fabulous prepared foods, and a retail floor with spectacular produce,” reads the JD.

Roman launched First Bloom in 2023 in Bloomsville, NY (a tiny town of less than 200 people according to recent census data), just north of the Catskills, and intends to keep it open. But if the job listing is to be trusted, whatever’s being planned for its downstate debut is aspiring to growth in every direction.

As for precisely where it’s landing in Brooklyn Heights, that part has yet to be confirmed, though Curbed claims there are murmurs of it moving into 144 Montague Street, a few blocks east of the promenade.

See the base model for First Bloom below and hold tight for its arrival, in whatever form(s) it takes, in the months ahead.