(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Rude Betty on Glen Street
(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Flight Cafe's new interior.
Rude Betty, now bigger and with candy
Rude Betty has reopened on Glen Street in Glens Falls with their seasonal collection of Christmas decorations, with their fun and sometimes off-color housekeeping items — think wine glasses, place settings, or gravy boats — and with gifts, games and tchotchke. All of it is emblazoned with whimsical, funny or irreverent remarks.
They had been at 18 Exchange St. until their lease ran out in March this year.
The store is the fun sister to Happy Jack’s Surf Shop and Mrs. Whizzy Fizz Popp’s candy store, in Bolton Landing. Rude Betty now carries an assortment of candy.
Portions of the much larger space are still being outfitted, Manager Nikki Ogden said, and they plan to recreate the clearance sale section of Happy Jack’s items as they had previously.
Rude Betty reopened Saturday Nov. 26 after Thanksgiving, Ogden said. The store took over the location of the H.R. Tyrer Galleries at 170 Glen St.
The store left 18 Exchange St. shortly after Matt and Nancy Fuller bought the building a year ago. The signs went up in the storefront on Glen Street last spring saying that Rude Betty was coming in the Fall.
[Read about the sale here. About the move for Rude Betty here. About (g)row which took over the Rude Betty location here.]
While Happy Jack’s is open and busy during the summer months, it closes for the winter season. Rude Betty is open year-round, and core staff moves between the two stores for the different seasons, Ogden said.
[Editor's note: We transposed names in the original draft. Our apologies. Nikki Ogden is the manager.]
Flight Café gets new wings
After an unexpected closure earlier this year, Flight Café at 11 South St. in Glens Falls has reopened with a new interior space and a new menu. The new chef and manager says that the menu gives the café “cohesion” with the related Flight Wine Bar and Restaurant across the lobby of the Empire Theater Building.
The two establishments are owned by the team of John Homkey and Melissa Brennan.
"We didn't want to put a Band Aid on it,” Homkey said of the reopening after the closure. “We wanted quality people who did quality work."
It took a while for that to materialize, he said.
Kay Brooks is the now chef and manager of the café. She said learned to bake in Maine and then learned the business side of running a café at Spot Coffee on Glen Street in Glens Falls, where she was a kitchen manager. The barista and Assistant Manager is Kara Barosi.
Brooks said the café now riffs off the menu at the restaurant. For instance, the café offers crepes in the ways most people expect: topped with fruit or with veggies or cheese. However, they also offer one with an Indian flair because the restaurant currently is offering a Tikka Masala dish.
“We’re able to go along with their flights,” Brooks said.
The restaurant’s name is not only a nod to travel and international food but to samplings, such as a “flight” of wine.
[Read about their opening here.]
The café menu also has fun with this idea of travel and uses international airport identifiers to suggest the flavor of the food. Paninis include the AMS, the CDG, the FCO and BCN — or Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and Barcelona, respectively.
The chicken salad panini is called the GFL.
“That’s Floyd Bennett Field,” she said, the home of the Warren County airport.