“I love dessert,” she says.
Goldberg feels pretty confident that she isn’t the only one with a love for sweets.
Having hit a home run with her three-year-old TamalPie and with her modern Mexican eatery Playa set to open later this year in the former Champagne space, Goldberg, her chef and partner Scott Warner and manager Matthew Brown have been working feverishly in recent months on their latest creation: Bonbon.
The bakery, ice cream and candy shop opens on Thursday, July 9 (12pm–8pm) in the space at 34 Miller Avenue formerly occupied by Beth’s Community Kitchen, which has moved to Bolinas. Goldberg credits Warner, the acclaimed chef who became the head chef at Tamalpie in late 2013 after an acclaimed career at places like Rose Pistola in San Francisco and Bistro Don Giovanni in Napa Valley, for making Bonbon happen. “If not for him, none of it would be possible,” she says.
A peak inside the space reveals a bounty of sweets of every shape and size, neatly organized in self-serve jars along the right-hand wall, with another array of colorful treats on the shelves behind the counter. Given the abundant selection, it’s hard to imagine they’ve missed anything, but Goldberg describes it as “penny candy and chocolates to imported hard-to-find licorice and gummies from Denmark and Sweden and our own homemade Candycrackcorn – we have it all.”
But while candy grabs your attention as you walk in the door, ice cream will command it soon thereafter. Bonbon “will be the first and only scoop shop in the world serving Honeymoon Ice Cream,” Goldberg says, referring to the two-year-old, Marin-based ice cream brand that, while available at grocery stores all over the Bay Area, including Mill Valley Market and Whole Foods Market on East Blithedale, hasn’t been sold yet in any ice cream shops. The creation of David Young, a Texas native who worked in the tech world at places like Moody’s digital media group before moving into the food business, Honeymoon gets its key ingredients from Jersey cows at a nearby dairy in Sonoma County.
Goldberg says she’s been a fan of Honeymoon since she found it at Mill Valley Market more than a year ago, calling it “unlike any other ice cream maker because everything is made from scratch.” Bonbon will serve Honeymoon Ice Cream in homemade waffle cones made by Warner, who is also making Tcho hot fudge and caramel sauce.
Honeymoon will also be served inside hot-pressed ice cream sandwiches, courtesy of a machine that Goldberg says isn’t be used anywhere else in California as far as she knows.
The result: “hot, crunchy bread rolled in cinnamon and sugar on the outside, cold and creamy ice cream inside,” she says.
Bonbon will also serve old-fashioned ice cream floats with Boylans soda, including flavors like root beer and ginger blueberry lavender. They’ll also make ice cream cakes with meringue and crispy crusts in house.
Hungry yet? How about cupcakes, made in-house, in flavors like tiramisu, s’mores, peanut butter and jelly, cookie dough and coffee honeycomb crunch. Or homemade cookies like snickerdoodle, triple ginger, “the best chocolate chip on the planet,” Goldberg says, and chocolate cherry gluten free mudslide.
The 411: Bonbon is open every day, 12–8pm, at 34 Miller Avenue. Those hours will expand once they “move into donuts and breakfast” later in the year, Goldberg says. “More to come.”
