04/03/2024
Join us in warmly welcoming and supporting our new neighboring business Risers Kitchen! 💥Opening soon 💥
I had an interview on Monday with the young entrepreneurs opening Risers Kitchen in Auburn: Emily Marie Rivard, Andrew Rivard, Ryan Reed, and Ashley Kaye Nickel.
I walked in impressed—the space is huge and beautiful, well-designed with brick walls and a separate, smaller lounge area with couches and a fireplace. They plan to serve breakfast, baked goods, coffee, and lunch in a casual, community-focused environment, driven by the idea that this is a place their community needs.
It's an idea seven years in the making. The building is one of the two oldest buildings in Auburn, a building that sat vacant for 30 years, a building that started to give up on itself by collapsing little by little, brick by brick.
But seven years ago, Emily, Ryan and Andrew walked through it and said, "We have to do something."
They wanted to do something important in a place that was important to them: Emily and Ryan's grandparents opened La Pizza in 1986, an Auburn staple just down the road, and their parents bought this building from the city a few decades ago to open a health food store in what is now the lounge area.
That business eventually closed, but they remembered growing up playing street hockey in the building as their parents worked, understood that the community they grew up in needed a place like this, a place of food and community, and decided to fill that need.
Along with filling a need, they wanted to build a life that was less focused on being at work and more focused on being with their families.
"When Andrew said, 'We just want to be with our families' and asked me to come on board," Ashley said, "I said, 'HECK. YES.'"
And then, feeling a bit like a comic book, the Fantastic Four was assembled:
Ashley is an accountant and good at numbers.
Emily is an artist and handled the design.
Andrew is the "people guy" who can talk to anybody or pick up a phone and make things happen.
Ryan has a background in computer science, bringing an attention to detail.
And over the course of seven years, this family of four young entrepreneurs became a family about to see their Big Idea become a reality.
"It's emotional for us," said Emily. "We talk about the legacy of what we're building and what we're leaving. We have a nine-year-old son and we're also adopting a daughter, and they're both here watching it. My son was two when we started this project, and he feels it and loves this space. I show him the pictures about what we're doing and why. I love that we're building something not just for us and not just for the community, but also for our little ones. We're making something that's hopefully going to be long-lasting.
It gives the next generation a reason to stay here and to respect it. This town has been here for a long time. My son especially, because he’s seen it take shape. He's played here as his parents were working, just like Ryan and I did. He sees what we've been building and he knows things don't just happen or appear—they take years of work.”
I sat with these four incredible humans who have done the years of work, talking together for an hour and half. They were excited, anxious, passionate, and determined. I'm not much older than they are, but at one point in our conversation, I felt like I needed to impart some kind of Old Man advice.
But they don't need our advice.
Having looked at the faces of these sons and daughters of Auburn building something beautiful for this little town of 2,000, I will tell you that the only thing they need from us is our support, support that loudly and proudly tells people about these "four kids from Auburn" and support that walks through the doors to buy a coffee or a breakfast.
They need our encouragement, not just for the success of their business, but to show other young people with Big Ideas that we are community that supports Big Ideas.
They need us to rally around this group of talented and incredible people who could have left but decided to stay—and stay in a BIG way.
They stayed not just for themselves, not just for their families, but for us, too: to save history, cultivate community, serve some good food, and create a better future for all of our families.
It just doesn't get any better than that.
Risers Kitchen opens soon at 100 W Midland Road in Auburn. Follow their page for details, and Hey, Bay City for their upcoming story.
