WILLIAMSVILLE-It’s Saturday morning at the newly-opened Williamsville General, and a staff of two joins proprietor Emmet Mahdavi greeting and cooking, serving and chatting up as strangers and neighbors come and go with takeout or to stay.
The ample space is filled with a mix of sunlit and shaded areas. Its old beams are cleaned and waxed, a handsome canopy to the wide-planked floors lined with café tables on one wall, a large table at center, and a potpourri of chairs.
The bar at the back boasts a new top Emmet built in collaboration with South Newfane woodworker Dan DeWalt. It now functions for coffee service, displays of glass-cased treats, and ringing up.
Appealing music plays. Emmet says it’s just his own personal mix, “just contemporary.”
“And it depends on the day. It’s really just whatever I feel like listening to,” he adds.
It works for me.
On the northeast wall is the kitchen, open to view with a long counter and shelves underneath that are starting to fill with treats, staples, and necessities. Eventually, Emmet says, he might have some bulk offerings or bring in hard-to-find grains. It’s evolving: He’s feeling it out.
The handsome wood-framed cooler behind the bar holds butter, eggs, and different kinds of milk for sale.
Stunning black-and-white images by Putney photographer Lynne Jaeger Weinstein line the wall. and exquisitely mixed flowers from Laura Xiao’s garden are for sale up front. Overall, it’s uncluttered, yet cozy and inviting.
I feel comfortable writing here. Though I’m starting longhand, I have to say, the Wi-Fi is strong.
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I was lucky to teach Emmet at Leland & Gray and to direct him in several shows. A still-waters-run-deep guy, he’s smart, witty, engaging, self-aware. And a good listener. He wants to know what folks want to see at the store; he invites input.
He didn’t really train for this. Emmet graduated in 2016 with a degree in theoretical math from Bard College. After a stint in restaurant work, he learned web development at a coding bootcamp, worked in Chicago, then moved to New York. He didn’t love software engineering and web development, but it paid the bills.
Even so, he says he missed having personal space and some greenery. So he came back to Vermont four years ago, expecting it to be a temporary thing.
But soon, with his sister, he bought a Williamsville village house that is close, as the crow flies, to the Newfane home of his parents, Bahman Mahdavi and Johanna Gardner, where he grew up helping on his mother’s farm.
“I was imagining having one last huzzah in tech when I moved back,” but the “writing was on the wall for the tech industry,” Emmet says.
“So I was already thinking about exit strategy,” he continues. “I freelanced for a bit while living here, but it just didn’t feel good.”
He began to root himself here, building potent connections with various communities — music, politics, food, agriculture.
Meanwhile, he started making bagels at home.
“I missed having good bagels,” he recalls. “And I had access to a recipe that my sister’s friend’s ex-boyfriend had developed in the Bay Area. So I started out by practicing and making tweaks along the way.”
Eventually, he realized “I could make money off of these. My parents used to sell jewelry at fairs, and now my mom sells crêpes at markets.”
Thus, Emmet has gleaned insight into the economics of the market.
“With very little overhead — just having a folding table and serving food in a field — it seemed really accessible,” he says. “So that’s what pulled me into this whole thing” — the birth of his Big Boy Bagels and their presence at area farmers markets.
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In 2023, once he started to live across the street from this handsomely stained clapboard store, dormant for years, Emmet says he thought how nice it’d be to walk across “and just have something there.”
He’d spoken to many who’d had dreams of doing something in the space because “it’s such a special building, and there’s such a desire for something.”
As one can probably see in every Vermont town, Emmet saw an essential need to nurture community. The potential for that to happen again at this store called him.
“Yeah, it’s like we’re in a time where I feel like one of the most impactful ways to bring anything to being is just to have people be together — just the idea of a gathering place where people get to know each other and, you know, despite their differences, are able to just like catch up and chat about whatever’s going on,” he says.
The wheels started turning and, after months of preparation, planning, renovating, permitting, and sweat-equity investing, Emmet opened the Williamsville General on Aug. 27.
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Many of us in Williamsville remember the store in one iteration or another.
Thirty years ago, it was run by Jim Lessing, whose heart was big enough to allow village teens to set up ramps and a quarter pipe outside for skateboarding and biking tricks. Jim sold single cigarettes out of a little cup at the register just for the folks who were trying to quit.
A peer of Emmet’s remembers when the store was run later by Rob Goldenhill and Kenny Schatra: There was always a big jar of pickles on the counter. She loved those.
If recollections of the late Lillian Thayer are correct in her booklet “Williamsville, My Hometown,” the store first opened in 1814, though other sources date it to 1828. It burned, was rebuilt, and went on over the next two centuries through several hands and intentions.
The Lessing family ran the store for 13 years, until 2002. Rob and Kenny’s store closed in 2007. In 2014, the Richardson family opened the Williamsville Eatery in the space, and it became a well-loved destination for visitors and villagers alike. The pandemic is largely responsible for its 2020 closure.
“What people now want from this space varies from person to person,” Emmet tells me.
“Some people are just hoping to have a spot where they can get dog food in a pinch, others are more interested in having a place to sit down with a laptop, have a cup of coffee, and work in a setting that’s not their living room,” he observes. “Other people, pretty much everybody, miss the Eatery and having really good farm-to-table food.”
Emmet’s thinking of a midweek guest-chef dinner, offering meals on Rock River Players’ show weekends, and doing pizza in the Eatery’s old oven, which is still in great condition.
He’s developing the menu daily by observation and intuition, and in response to customer feedback. He stresses that his planning and offerings aim to acknowledge what he’s hearing live and on Facebook, in chatter and in comments.
“It seems people really want to feel like they’re being prioritized over the people driving to Mount Snow,” Emmet says. “I think that’s a balance that I need to strike — having a viable business, but also not having prices or goods that don’t speak to people who actually live here.”
Inevitably, he’s facing some challenges: The state says his leach field can handle only two meals a day, for instance, and that’s something he wasn’t anticipating. And the seating capacity for the time being is regulated at 25.
And then there’s the East Dover store, newly opened up the road, and the Newfane Store, going strong in Newfane village.
“I love going and getting a nice coffee at the East Dover store, and getting a breakfast sandwich at the Newfane store,” he says.
He credits David Hull, of the Newfane establishment, for being “super generous — he’s offered so much advice.”
Not seeing competition as much as complement, Emmet adds, “I’m really emphasizing the sit-down component of this place.”
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Finishing my meal and wrapping up, I share praise about the scone with the staff and also tell them how much folks loved the cinnamon raisin bagels with maple cream cheese I brought to a potluck and how great the quinoa salad was last week.
I run into another former student who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and who works in IT. She wants to move back here. And then another, who introduces me to her fiancé with whom she’s just bought a house in Dover.
For this flash of a sunny morning, being at the Williamsville General with its fine food and atmosphere and the several encounters I enjoyed, it all feels good and positive — hopeful.
And so it may well be when gubernatorial candidate Amanda Janoo visits the store on Friday, Oct. 2, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Emmet says he and his team will be ready with bagels and more — and ample village hospitality.
Annie Landenberger is a regular writer and columnist for The Commons. The Williamsville General, at 26 Dover Rd., is open Thursday through Monday, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. The website — still under construction — is at Williamsvillegeneral.com.
This News column by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.