Wafel Shop

Not in the plans

by Sally Mitani

posted 6/24/2012

There was supposed to be a waffle shop on Fourth Ave., but you can't serve waffles without juice. Noah Goldsmith signed a lease for a Fourth Ave. space to start the Wafel Shop, a coffee shop serving two kinds of Belgian waffles, but when the plans began to get more specific, it became clear that the former O'Hair salon didn't have the electrical capacity for his high-powered griddles.

"I would have thought that with all those hair dryers going, they'd have plenty of power," says Goldsmith, "but a mechanical engineer explained to me that just using an espresso machine is like having twelve dryers going at the same time." He would have needed to double the electrical capacity to run his equipment, and even though building owner Michael Yi offered to pay for part of it, "I ran the numbers and it didn't make sense." Yi and Goldsmith parted amicably, and Goldsmith is scouting new locations.   

[Originally published in June, 2012.]