Mark and Evane Stoner
It was the display of brightly colored bonbons that first caught my eye when I walked through the door of Nashville’s newest chocolate shop Poppy & Peep.
Two glass cases are lined with more than a dozen different flavors, all decorated in different ways. Perusing the selection — bourbon-caramel topped with gold leaf, birthday cake dotted with a rainbow of confetti, and lemon-strawberry adorned with the tiniest hand-painted lemon — feels a bit like shopping for fancy jewelry. It’s all so dazzling and entrancing (and a tad pricey at $20 for a box of six), and if it weren’t for the glass barrier, I’d probably scoop them all up, just to hold them, just to see how they feel in my hand.
Poppy & Peep is tucked away at the end of Herron Drive in what was originally a one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit in the newish Alloy apartment complex near Nolensville Pike. It’s a strange place for a candy shop, sure, but there’s also something about the location that makes it feel like you’re privy to some kind of secret. And while Poppy & Peep is only about 600 square feet — with a good portion of that taken up by its kitchen — every nook is packed with tasty treasures.
Bins are full of individually wrapped pieces of caramel and nougat in flavors like passion fruit, strawberry-pistachio, espresso and ginger-orange-almond. Shelves hold a selection of chocolate bars for purists and more adventurous types alike — some are decorated with Oreo cookies, roasted pumpkin seeds and dried fruit, and others are made entirely in-house, bean-to-bar style, with beans imported from Haiti, Belize or Guatemala. There are tubes of chocolate-covered cherries and espresso beans, bags of chocolate-dipped dried pineapple and jars of hazelnut-praline spread. For the brave, there are even dark-chocolate bars laced with the mouth-burning extracts of ghost pepper and Carolina reaper peppers — apparently they’re hot enough to require a warning label. (I was too much of a coward to confirm.)
So who owns this confectionary wonderland? Mark and Evane Stoner, a father (Poppy) and daughter (Peep) duo who, before opening this shop, had no culinary experience to speak of other than really, really liking candy.
Mark is the founder and president of Ashbusters Chimney Service and SirVent Chimney & Venting Franchise, and he doesn’t shy away from embracing new business ventures. In fact, he literally wrote the book on it — 2016’s Blue-Collar Gold: How to Build a Service Business From the Dirt Up. It was while promoting his own business at a convention at New York City’s Javits Center that he grabbed an opportunity to get in on the chocolate business by way of Chocolate Moonshine Co., a Pennsylvania-based chocolate company that supports a network of independent operators around the country.
“We sold chocolate at two different malls and kiosks, and our company was called Chocolate Moonshine of Tennessee,” Evane says. “We did that for two years and were like, ‘OK, we’re either going to get totally out of the chocolate world or we’re going to go all the way in.’ ”
They decided to go all-in, but they had a lot to learn about the business. The two spent a year attending classes and workshops at chocolate companies around the country: Map Chocolate Co. in Eugene, Ore.; CocoaTown in Alpharetta, Ga.; and Barry Callebaut’s Chocolate Academy in Chicago. Evane also attended the Women in Chocolate retreat, hosted by fellow Nashville-based chocolatier Sophia Rea, in Santa Fe, N.M. (Rea is now Poppy & Peep’s chocolate sommelier, which is a job I never knew existed and a job I would very much like to have.)
“[Rea’s] business is about understanding the culture of chocolate,” says Evane. “When I went to this retreat I really started to understand what this whole bean-to-bar thing was, like where chocolate comes from and how it’s made and why it’s important to make all the effort to source chocolate sustainably. There’s a lot of child slave labor in chocolate. [Rea helps people] understand the dark history of chocolate. ... I think in the U.S. we have a really skewed understanding of what chocolate is and how it’s made.”
Evane and her two-person staff of pastry chefs make all the bean-to-bar chocolate bars in the shop. The rest of the candy — the bonbons, the chocolate-dipped fruits and some of the flavored chocolate bars — is made with couverture chocolate, which has a higher percentage of cocoa butter. And Evane is proud to note that the shop’s ever-evolving list of options reflects both her and her dad’s wildly different tastes.
“My dad loves really sweet sweets,” she says. “We have a totally different palate, so it makes for a good dynamic of different confections and chocolates. He’ll tell me, ‘Build me a chocolate box like I would like,’ and I will put chocolate fudge, sea-salt caramel and that kind of stuff in his box. Mine would be, like, pine nut and almond, the not-as-sweet stuff.”
And the secret to getting them to look so pretty? Nail-art tools. Evane has collaborated with different artists including Annie Phimmachack (@gelhiigh on Instagram), the nail artist whose client list includes Lily Aldridge and Maren Morris. Painting chocolate, though, comes with an entirely different set of challenges.
“It’s been interesting, because the chocolate has to be painted at 89 to 90 degrees the whole time,” says Evane. “You’re holding a heat gun in your hand and the temperature gun and a brush, and you’re painting into a hole, so it all has to be timed well.
“It’s been fun to experiment with other artists,” she adds. “I would like to have more artists come in and understand how the paint works so they can do more collaborations. I love collaborating with people, and that’s where I want [Poppy & Peep] to go.”
