Abby Lawal outside Supreme Floral, which she opened with her husband in August. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Downtown Red Bank has added a new flower shop and lost a longtime restaurant, while another plans to expand.
Read all about them, plus a phone store that’s cloning itself, in this summer-closing edition of redbankgreen‘s Retail Churn.
Al Alahmad’s cellphone franchise takes over a former real estate office on Shrewsbury Avenue. Earth Pizza, below, leaves a vacancy at 95 Broad Street. (Photos by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
• Earth Pizza, at 95 Broad Street, closed abruptly Wednesday, after a notice was posted on its Facebook page.
Information about the reason for the closing could not be obtained by Churn Thursday.
Paul and Lisa Finkler opened the restaurant, which specialized in gluten-free pizza, as Pizza Fusion, a franchise operation, in 2010.
But they chafed under the rules of the franchise agreement, and three years later went independent, changing the name to Earth Pizza.
• Supreme Floral opened last month at 12 Monmouth Street.
The shop is owned by Shrewsbury residents Abby Lawal and her husband, Sakor Dean, who already have another business in town: Supreme Tint, at 268 Shrewsbury Avenue, which offers automotive window tinting, advertising wraps and such.
Lawal, originally from Nigeria, said she and Dean, a native of Liberia, see the flower shop as “something closer to the heart,” because it reminds them of their time working on farms growing up.
The shop provides floral arrangements for walk-in customers as well as events, plus an array of home decor items.
The space was last occupied by the Spice and Tea Exchange, which closed in May, when owners Howard and Lisa Bernstein retired after running their shop for five years.
• Al Alahmad has opened his second Metro T-Mobile shop in Red Bank, just blocks away from his first.
Yes, business is that good for his products because of their competitive prices, he tells Churn.
The new place is at 140 Shrewsbury Avenue, on the northwest corner at Herbert Street, and should open in the next three weeks or so, said Alahmad. The space was formerly a real estate brokerage office.
Alahmad’s other shop is at 64 Bridge Avenue, opposite the Red Bank train station.
• Chef Chuck Lesbirel’s Semolina restaurant, at 13 White Street, has obtained borough permission to break through a wall to expand into space formerly occupied by T-Spoon iced treats shop next door.
No information was immediately available about when the work would take place and its impact, if any, on Semolina’s operations.
Lesbirel took over the space formerly occupied by Dish restaurant in mid-2018.
