Not much is ever truly new in Rhinebeck. “The businesses there have been around for a long time—it seems like forever,” Hudson Valley resident and Inness hotelier Taavo Somer says of the historic town. Which is why when a store in a restored 18th-century townhouse finally did become available on Main Street, it wasn’t even a question that he’d sign a lease. The only question was whether someone else would beat him to it.
Somer prevailed. On May 28, he and longtime collaborator Erin Winters open Little Goat: a bakery, pantry, and all-day café that epitomizes that low-key countryside chic that the Hudson Valley is known for. “We re calling it a cafe, a bakery, and a pantry because we want to hit all these different aspects of what we think the town needs,” Somer says.
What does that look like, exactly? There’s bread from nearby Sparrowbush Baker, cheeses from Talbott Arding, and balsamic vinegars from Flamingo Estate. On an entry table, abundant flower arrangements come courtesy of famed florist Ariel Dearie. (Some of her repeat customers? Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs, and Annie Leibovitz.) Grab-and-go food, including rotisserie chicken, are ready for the taking. In the back, waiters serve Mediterranean-inspired dishes like flatbread with broccoli rabe, stracciatella, and Calabrian chili, as well as grilled Hudson Valley steelhead trout from a menu by executive chef Brian Paragas (previously of Blackberry Farm and Zahav).
On the shelves, meanwhile, you’ll find vintage ironstone pottery and French ceramics sourced from local antique dealers. All of it is housed in a warm space, painted with Farrow and Ball shades of New White, String, and Wimborne White paints and lit by Nickey Kehoe sconces. The combined visual effect is like being swaddled in a cashmere blanket.
Somer says he took his interior cues from the Impressionists, and more specifically, Edgar Degas’s ballerinas. “A lot of the color palette came from looking at fabrics ballerinas wore and the role of curtains opening of the performance,” he says. Another muse? Meryl Streep’s Jane in It’s Complicated. The Nancy Meyers heroine is a Santa Barbara baker who lives in an idyllic Spanish ranch-style home; her bountiful kitchen is the stuff of domestic dreams. Rewatching the film, Taavo was struck by the way florals, herbs, food, and pantry goods were effortlessly displayed across her cabinets and tables. “It holds up,” he says, laughing, about Jane’s style. “It gives this very residential, homey aesthetic that we wanted to convey.”
The greatest influence, however, was Somer’s own daughters. He wanted to create a space that felt soft, feminine, and welcoming—where the two pre-teen girls would want to wander alongside their parents. And, well, everyone else in the community would want to wander too: “We want it to be sort of a place that people come back to multiple times a week,” he says.
The Little Goat is just the latest of a series of highly-curated, multi-hyphenate lifestyle stores—that allow you to eat, drink, shop, and relax—to open on the East Coast: the Hamptons recently saw the grand re-opening of the Sagaponack General Store, which serves artisanal cinnamon roll espressos from an in-house coffee bar all while offering penny candy, eggs, and other pantry items. Gem Home in New York, meanwhile, sells everything from textiles, to teapot, to jams as well as farm-to-table lunch service from their café. Why not have a store that does a little bit of everything?
