image description — Lulu's Tiny Grocery offers a range of breakfast breads and pastries and salads, wraps and sandwiches.

Thistle and Mirth Owners Open Third Downtown Eatery

By Brittany PolitoiBerkshires Staff
04:49AM / Monday, August 08, 2022Print Story | Email Story

Co-owner Austin Oliver says featuring bagels at Lulu's Tiny Grocery was a good initial draw to breakfast and lunch spot.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The owners of Thistle and Mirth recently opened their third downtown eatery: Lulu's Tiny Grocery.

The breakfast and lunch spot, located inside Crawford Square at 137 North Street, offers coffee and tea, bagels, sandwiches, pastries, and more. It opened in late May and has been well received by old and new customers.

Joad Bowman and Austin Oliver had been utilizing the space as a commissary for Thistle and Mirth and Flat Burger Society since the beginning of the year before opening Lulu's. They saw a need for a bagel spot in that block after the popular Bagels Too closed in 2017.

"I moved here like two months before Bagels Too closed," Oliver explained. "There's never been a bagel place since I've been here, so I figured that was a good initial draw people in."

The mission is to be an "approachable, good, sometimes creative, sometimes indulgent" breakfast and lunch option on North Street, he said.

The menu includes both staples and rotating items.

Bagels are imported from a Brooklyn bakery in flavors such as onion, jalapeno, and cinnamon raisin. The signature Lulu's Bagel has cream cheese, egg, tomato, and onion on it.

Items such as watermelon and tomato salad, a Penny's peppered pork sandwich, and a chicken bacon ranch wrap have been featured in the "Today's Lunch" section. The meats are all fresh, as opposed to processed deli meats.

All of the pastries are made in-house and Oliver reported that the chocolate chip cookies have been a big hit.

"I get here really early in the morning and in my tired stupor I just start coming up with things," he said.

Coffee and espresso drinks from Barrington Coffee Roasting Co. and soft drinks are available to accompany the food. The eatery doesn't carry Coca-Cola products so as to introduce customers to new products.

Braise Worthy, which makes locally sourced frozen meals, and Red Apple Butchers were prior tenants in the space.

It has been a busy year for the co-owners, reopening Thistle and Mirth as a ramen restaurant in spring 2021 and opening Flat Burger Society, a burger joint and performance venue, in the former Flavors of Malaysia a few months after.

The spacious kitchen at Lulu's is utilized as a commissary kitchen for both of the other eateries due to the small nature of their kitchens.

Flat Burger uses beef from local, whole cows that are butchered in-house. It has also become a popular place for people looking to be entertained, offering regular live music, comedy, and trivia.

Oliver said having all three restaurants is working out well. They are located within a couple of blocks of each other.

Lulu's Tiny Grocery is open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. All three restaurants can be found on Instagram and Facebook.

Tags: new business, restaurants,

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Pittsfield's This and That Sports Celebrating Six Years

By Breanna SteeleiBerkshires Staff
12:34PM / Friday, October 23, 2026

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — This and That Sports is celebrating its sixth birthday with a party.

Owner Reggie Davis opened the collectables and card store at 128 Fenn St., pursuing a hobby he has had since he was a teenager.

He started with small card shows and later collected a broad range of items, including sports memorabilia, autographs, Beanie Babies, and Matchbox cars.

"It's been a long time, and it's not just cards. I mean, I collect everything. I love sports memorabilia, autographs," he said.

Originally from Great Barrington, he moved to Connecticut and operated a collectibles store there from 2004 to 2014 before moving back to Berkshire County. He worked for FedEx before opening the new store in 2020.

For the first six months, he balanced the store with his career with FedEx, with help from his wife, Crystal, who worked around her own overnight hospital shifts. He left FedEx to focus on the store full time and works with his son, Bret.

He said it is more than a job and he is happy to open his doors to the collecting community.

"It's like something that I looked at as a pleasure business. It wasn't about the money. It was more like bringing the collecting part of the hobby to Berkshire County," he said.

Davis said he misses live baseball in Pittsfield, recalling Pittsfield Mets games. He said collecting brings him closer to that feeling of watching a local team when he was younger.

"I've always remembered growing up as a kid of the Pittsfield Mets and then the Pittsfield Suns and baseball being here and I was a big sports person, I played a lot of sports, and it's kind of sad and I think I want to continue the sports collecting part, the hobby. You can't go to a baseball game here unless it's like a high school game. So it's kind of continuing the collecting part of the hobby without the actual sports being here," he said.

Davis said the store's customers have become friends. He added that he likes to see the younger generation open packs of cards.

"The amazing part about it is not just the kids, but the customers. Like, I have customers that've been coming in for four, five, six [years] even new ones that just started coming in like a month ago," he said. "We've been out to dinner with these people. We travel. Customers have become friends, even close friends, which is nice."

He said one of the most challenging parts of the business has been to keep everything in stock especially with the surge in popularity of Pokemon cards.

"We have people that stop in all the time, and they're like wow you got a great selection of Pokemon, you have a big selection, and I think that's you know we have distribution for sports and Pokemon, but it sells so quick," he said. "I think the hardest thing is to be able to keep product on the shelf."

Not only does he sell collectibles, but he also purchased a card grading company called Revolutionary Card Grading that he opened next door. The company, based in Georgia, produces specialized color-matched designs but card grading and customer submissions are now handled locally since taking full ownership of the company last year.

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