New Dining Option Opens in Station Place

By Avice Meehan

Despite an 18-month delay, Peter and Marinell Crippen held firm to their vision of opening the Icebox Café in Norfolk’s Station Place as a destination for good food and coffee. And finally, that day arrived on Monday, Dec. 2—fingers crossed.

For the first month, the Icebox Café will be open only for breakfast from 7 a.m. to noon, Tuesday through Sunday. In January, the menu will expand to include lunch, and the café will be open until 2 p.m. 

Icebox Café will be a family affair with Peter in the brand-new, compact kitchen that looks out toward the Norfolk Library and Marinell managing the front of the house. Son Rex and a friend, Luca Maiolo, will be helping, along with members of Peter’s highly entrepreneurial family.

“We are going to serve the kind of food you would eat if you were making it at home,” said Peter, a veteran of the Manhattan food scene, who ran Rex Café in Hell’s Kitchen until selling it two years ago. “Basically, I am opening my kitchen to everybody else.”

Well, it would be that kind of food if you were the kind of person who experimented with the best way to make an omelet. Or you kept tweaking a detailed binder of recipes assembled for you by Andrea Bergquist-Zamir, a noted New York chef. Or you searched high and low for a good (and affordable) brioche bun in Litchfield County, and you discovered it at Aldi’s. Or you went searching for pork shoulder and found a terrific source at Ford Farm, down the road in North Canaan.

The 15-seat café, a space that feels light and airy even on a rain-filled day, has undergone a complete renovation since an earlier incarnation run by Stephanie Gouey under the name Station Place Café. Although the space was still in the process of being put together on a recent Saturday, the walls were hung with colorful pieces by local artist Hilary VanWright. The stainless-steel surfaces in the brand-new kitchen were gleaming, shelves filled with a variety of dry ingredients.  

The breakfast menu will include oatmeal (kept at just the right temperature), a small selection of pastries, pancakes, breakfast sandwiches and burritos, bacon (from Nodine’s, of course) and other goodies. Those will include a vegan date bar that Peter swears by, and something called a cowboy cookie that sounds like chocolate chip on steroids. Coffee will be coming from Counter Culture, a coffee roaster based in North Carolina, and IceBox will Rishi Tea.

When service expands to include lunch, the IceBox Café menu will include three regular sandwich offerings: Cuban, vegan cauliflower sandwich, and flatbread-focaccia style with Italian cheese, prosciutto and arugula. In addition to a daily special, Peter plans to offer a soup and salad. Customers will also be able to pick up a loaf of homemade bread.

“The goal, eventually, will be to have a local person do something that’s their specialty,” said Peter. “The goal is doing as much community stuff as possible.” 

Alas, there will be no cappuccino or espresso since the power needs of the necessary equipment would overtax current capacity and Peter jokes that “pour over is the new cappuccino.” Anyone who has a yen can stroll across Station Place to the Berkshire Store—that’s community.