MANCHESTER, N.H. – Recently there have been plenty of business openings here in the Queen City, but few are as sweet as this one.
On Tuesday, May 27, Insomnia Cookies held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in advance of its official grand opening on Saturday, celebrating the start of Manchester’s first-ever cookie-based restaurant, or at the very least, Manchester’s first late-night cookie-based restaurant.
Insomnia Cookies began in 2003 when Seth Berkowitz was up late in his dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania, craving cookies. By 2006, he had taken the belief that there were plenty of people in the same spot he was and opened his first brick-and-mortar Insomnia Cookies store in Syracuse, NY. Within ten years, the brand had expanded to 100 stores in addition to a series of food trucks. Today, the company has 300 stores and sells cookies online across the country and also has opened a “laboratory”-style store in Philadelphia where guests can invent their own styles of cookies.
Insomnia Cookies New England Regional Manager Nancy Goedhart says she has been thrilled with the soft opening of the over the past few days, marking the chain’s first location in New Hampshire. She hopes that new store, situated near the corner of Elm and Mechanic Streets, can become not just a late-night snack stop but also a gathering place for the variety of groups that call Manchester home.
Honestly, we came here for the community, the businesses, the nightlife here on Elm Street and all the schools nearby. We wanted a place with a cross-section of that nightlife and where students are, so it made Manchester a no-brainer for us,” she said.
Insomnia isn’t the only late-night business on Elm Street, as the neighboring Zoo Health Club Express may start to pick up new customers looking to burn off cookie calories, in addition to potential other neighborhood business team-up opportunities.
Zoo Health Club owner Ed Baroody was excited to discuss those possibilities with Goedhart and reflect on the progress of the city’s downtown as a whole.
“I’m a true believer in downtown. I bought the Bond Building (at the corner of Elm and Concord) in 1998 and I’ve never looked back,” he said. “I’ve watched this downtown grow and I think it has more growth in it. I’m really to enjoy that growth with the rest of the community.”
Manchester Economic Development Office Business Liaison Erik Lesniak feels the same way as Baroody when it comes to the city’s downtown, and he completely agrees with Goedhart that there has been a trend of new chic establishments opening nearby recently,”
“If you look downtown, you see a lot of these trendier places opening up, it seems like we have a new business opening in the city every day” said Lesniak, who also helped the business establishment process move forward over the past few months. “(Insomnia) have been wonderful to work with and they’re going to be such a great addition to the city. You need things like this to attract visitors and continue to give people reasons to come back and explore.”
More information on the new store can be found on the insomnia website.