Elixirs, ice cream, and soon lunch at Tiffany’s

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

The building at 10213 W. Front St. in Empire has been many things to many people. Built in the late 1800s, a steady stream of merchants have sold, among other things, dry goods, millinery supplies, groceries, pharmaceuticals, hand-carved eggs and theater tickets.

“We can probably assume it was a pool hall and billiards, too,” said Dave Taghon, director of the Empire Area Historical Museum and life-long Empirian.

In its most recent incarnation, the building at 10213 W. Front St. is a marriage of old pine floors and shiny new espresso machines, fresh paint and outdoor seating. The business formerly known as Tiffany’s, where many a resident and visitor made their ice cream connection, is still Tiffany’s — and then some.

“We’ve kept the cute, old-fashioned ice cream parlor look,” said Megan Schous, who with her husband Peter and his parents, Peggy and Pieter, bought the business in 2014. “We still have the little counter with the stools that twist and turn. And a dipping cabinet with 16 ice cream flavors to choose from.”

Sounds familiar, but there’s more.

Tiffany’s, which reopened Memorial weekend after an extensive period of gutting and remodeling, is Phase One. Phase Two is The Little Finger Eatery. It will occupy the other half of the building. This quick-stop café opens early in June with to-go salads, fruit and yogurt parfaits, paninis and “an evolving menu of chef’s specials during the week,” Megan said. The Schouses have added a porch with seating on the building’s west side overlooking a profusion of bedding plants and perennials at Deering’s Market’s next-door greenhouse.

Megan and Peter, both 30, are downstate Michigan natives who found themselves living in Chicago in the early part of their marriage. They started down that familiar Chicago-Leelanau County path about a decade ago and found themselves falling in love with their Leelanau vacation spot. They began cutting their ties to Chicagoland in 2013 when they bought the Empire Lakeshore Inn. Megan managed it while Peter continued working as a district manager with the Hershey Company. A year later, Tiffany’s went on the market.

“We thought it had so much potential,” Megan said.

Peter has permanently relocated here, and further invested himself in the community. In addition to being a business owner, he also sits on the Empire Village Planning Commission.

Of the many things to many people the Tiffany’s building has been, one of Dave Taghon’s fond memories is lodged in the mid-1950s. Tiffany’s was Marshall’s Drugstore then. Typical of drugstores of that era, this one dispensed all manner of medicine, and the teenage Dave Taghon regularly partook of their restorative elixirs. Marshall’s was the halfway point in his paper route – he provided the Traverse City Record-Eagle to 114 families — and he’d stop here for doctoring.

“I’d get a chocolate malt or cherry Coke. The first time I ever had a cherry Coke was at Marshall’s,” he recalled.

With the arrival of the Schous Family, Tiffany’s resumes its presence on the village ice cream scene. For the time being, Megan said, it’s a seasonal business. Doors open at 7:30 a.m. and there’s scones, cookies and pie to go with something medicinal from the espresso machine or coffeemaker.

And perhaps, for the next generation paperboys and girls, a few new memories will be made at the building at 10213 W. Front St., Empire.