Women’s clothing store Anima has opened in the former home of a Duxiana bedding shop. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
We’ve got a new women’s boutique, a new gym and a new name for a restaurant in this edition of redbankgreen‘s Retail Churn.
Nikki Grandinetti and Chino Ablan, the new full owners of the former Danish Café, have renamed it the West Side Eatery. (Photos by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
• Open since last weekend at 37 Broad Street is Anima, a women’s clothing boutique.
The store is the creation of Anita Amatya, whose family owns the Nirvana shops in the Grove at Shrewsbury — it was previously on White Street in Red Bank — and in Pier Village in Long Branch. This one, though, has distinct ownership and a different concept: an appeal to women across generations, Amatya said.
“We get the mother and the daughter and the grandmother” seeking fresh fashions, she told Churn. “I can already see they’re willing come explore the merchandise.”
The space had been vacant just shy of two years, since the departure of bedding retailer Duxiana in January, 2016.
The building has an interesting history. Marked by an escutcheon near the roofline as the “Temple of Fashion,” it was constructed in 1894 by the Weis family, milliners. The family of Sigmund Eisner, who married one of the Weis daughters — Bertha — later owned the building, which in 1940 had an A&P store on the ground floor. It’s now owned by a trust associated with Jack’s Music owner Jack Anderson, and his son, John.
• The Danish Café has been rebranded the West Side Eatery. Nikki Grandinetti and Chino Ablan became full owners of the business in August, about two years after partnering with Lone and Claudi Kofod, the Danish couple who launched the coffee-and-sandwich shop in the Galleria of Red Bank on Bridge Avenue in 2012.
The name change, said Grandinetti, was made to reflect a reality all too evident to the restaurant’s clientele with Scandinavian roots: the menu was no longer as Danish-themed as it was originally.
While vestiges of the concept remain, “it’s not 100-percent Danish anymore,” she said. In addition, there have long been non-Danish sandwiches that did not appear on the menus but were available to customers in the know. Those and other offerings are now listed as “Westwiches” on the new menu.
According to the new owners, the Kofods, who had opened a second restaurant in Brooklyn, lost a long legal battle over their United States residency and were forced to move back to Denmark.
• According to a post on its Facebook page, Pilates Blast opens today at at 134-136 Broad Street, where it has converted a portion of the 7,300-square-foot retail space long occupied by the Professional Pharmacy to a gym. The space had been vacant for five years.
The gym was formerly located in Tinton Falls.
