New ice cream shop serves up sweet success in Lakeville

LAKEVILLE — Grassland Dessert Café has been slammed since a not-so-soft launch on May 31, filling a clearly-needed niche in Lakeville and bringing back the timeless atmosphere of an ice cream parlor.­

“The reception from the community has been unbelievable,” said founder and owner Bill Colgan.

Colgan said that while opening an ice cream shop has been a dream since his childhood, what really matters to him is for the confectionery to become a place for people to come together.

“Community is the one word of what we do… it’s about all those connections that are made,” he said.

He recalled one afternoon when an older couple enjoyed some cones in the store, and while on their way out they ran into some old friends they hadn’t seen for a long time and ended up staying another half hour at their table.

“To me, that really is the measure of success right there,” Colgan said. “These people had a conversation they might have never had if we hadn’t been there.”

Since unfurling the open sign, Colgan said that business has been steady, rain or shine, even keeping staff scooping ice cream until 9 p.m. one on occasion while they’ve usually been trying to close by 7 or 8 p.m. Colgan said a grand opening is upcoming and will announce official hours, which he anticipates being seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. with a quick breather on Monday morning, when the shop will open at 3 p.m.

Colgan explained that the redesign of the building at 343 Main Street in downtown Lakeville was intended to promote a welcoming atmosphere. Formerly housing a Chinese food restaurant and several apartments, Colgan said it had been vacant for 15 years and was a “real eyesore in the town.”

Teaming up with Norfolk carpenters and twin brothers Mike and Scott Sinclair – “we like to do the strange and unusual,” Colgan said – the trio transformed the 150 year old building into a friendly and welcoming space for the community, including the reinstallation of a big porch which was part of the building a century ago but had disappeared over the years.

The porch lends a nostalgic familiarity to the space, Colgan said, reminiscent of a kind of homely Americana that says, “Welcome, come on in.”

“It’s a beautiful building now but it was hard to see that three years ago,” said Colgan, explaining that he enlisted the assistance of a Broadway designer, a connection from his days working as a stagehand on Broadway and at Madison Square Garden.

While Colgan is proud of the building and the goods it serves, which includes drip coffee and espresso beverages, gelato, baked goods, smoothies, and other treats besides the obvious hard and soft serve ice cream, he said that the story of the Café does not belong to just him, but to the community. In addition to working closely with local business and tradespeople — “the core of the community,” in his words — the parlor’s staff is almost entirely comprised of local high schoolers from Housatonic Valley Regional High School, The Hotchkiss School, Salisbury School, Berkshire School, Webutuck High School and others.

Despite a warning from a fellow hospitality business owner, Colgan said “We decided to go the youth route instead of more experienced, and it was the 100% absolutely right decision.”