HERMITAGE, Pa. – Inventory at The Happy Eggplant Gourmet Food and Kitchen Shoppe spans cooking essentials and hard-to-find ingredients, but it’s the owner’s experience in the kitchen that sets it apart from chain and discount stores.
“I am not a chef, but I do know a lot about different recipes, different ingredients,” says owner Pamela Drobney. “I know how to cook, and I’ve done it for a lot of years. So a lot of people, I think, appreciate that I can answer their questions.”
Home cooks are the primary customers.
“It’s a gourmet food and kitchen shop, so we’re about half ingredients – specialty foods, fancy food lines – and half equipment and gadgets,” Drobney says. “My husband likes to put in our ads, ‘If you like to cook, come in for a look.’ It’s for home cooks.”
Hard-to-find ingredients include star anise, spice blends and multiple salt and pepper varieties as well as Stonewall Kitchen products. The store, at 1550 E. State St., Hermitage, Pa., stocks every manner of cooking vessel and utensil for the home cook. Several lines of knives, from the German Wusthof and Henkels to the Japanese Kikuichi and the American-made Lamson, line the store.
Other products include Heritage Steel pans and Le Creuset cookware.
“You can buy a pan somewhere, but if you want really good stainless steel, then we have Heritage Steel, which is a U.S. product made in Clarksville, Tenn.,” the store owner says.
She lauds the quality of Le Creuset as well. “It’s cast iron. If you watch anybody on the cooking channels, they’re almost all using the Dutch ovens from Le Creuset and they are excellent pans.”
But the most popular products at The Happy Eggplant are the refillable olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sourced from Greece and Italy, respectively.
“I always say this is the heart and soul of the store,” Drobney says. “This was here when we bought the store, and it’s an excellent product line.”
The oil is cold pressed by a family that imports it from relatives who grow the olives in Greece. The store stocks both select and organic lines.
“It’s a pure, unadulterated, cold pressed, extra virgin olive oil,” Drobney explains. “It’s the real deal.”
Some other brands packaged as olive oil contain other oils with flavors added to mask the taste, she adds.
The balsamic vinegar, which Drobney says is good enough to drink, is aged for 12 years.
“Usually if I can get people to taste it, it’s sold,” she says.
A customer buys a bottle of either the oil or vinegar and returns it to the store for refills. The cost for the first purchase is $3 more to cover the cost of the bottle.
The store buys from the olive oil and balsamic vinegar companies weekly to ensure the products are available. “We go through a lot of it,” Drobney adds.
Locally grown honey is another popular item. Two customers came to the store one Tuesday morning in late October to buy some. One woman said she uses it every day because she won’t eat processed sugar.
Drobney was a customer before buying the shop. She traces her love of gourmet cooking to watching Julia Child on PBS. Child gave new cooks permission to make mistakes.
When The Happy Eggplant’s original owner decided to sell it in 2016, Drobney and her husband, Michael, bought it. At that time, The Happy Eggplant was at the end of the plaza.
At first Michael wasn’t interested, but he relented, figuring Drobney would give it a shot and it would close within a year.
“He says, ‘I kind of messed myself up,’ because once we had it, he doesn’t like to fail,” Drobney recalls.
For that first year, the couple invested whatever they made into the store and the store’s following grew. A few years later, the bigger storefront opened, and The Happy Eggplant moved in. That location, next to Philadelphia Candies, has generated more foot traffic and more business.
The store’s customers are split evenly between men and women. Some are practiced culinary enthusiasts while others are experimenting with recipes to hone their skills.
“And I always say, you need to have some talent to be a good cook,” Drobney says. “But it helps a lot, too, if you have good ingredients and you have good equipment.”
Pictured at top: Pamela Drobney is the owner of The Happy Eggplant Gourmet Food and Kitchen Shoppe in Hermitage, Pa.