The Peach Comes Back

The Naughty Peach Provisions opens on College Street this month, in the building the credit union left behind. It sells bread, produce, flowers, cheese, cured meats, prepared food and wine.

It is a good store. It should have been here six years ago, and the reason it was not is the City.

What happened the first time

Chef Odessa Bell and Margo Tillery opened The Little Peach in 2019, in a strip building on the highway three miles outside the city limits. It was not where they wanted to be. It was where they could be.

They had tried downtown first, twice. The first attempt ended over a sign permit. The second ended over parking: the use classification the City assigned their concept carried a minimum they could not meet on the parcel, and the variance process was described to them as lengthy.

It was lengthy. They stopped calling.

The Little Peach ran for four years on the highway, on a lease it could not renegotiate, in a building whose owner and the City spent a considerable portion of that period in disagreement about matters that had nothing to do with the tenant. It closed in 2023.

People drove out there. That was the thing about it. In a city that spent four decades asking how to get people to come downtown, there was a shop three miles outside town that people made a trip for, and the City's contribution to that shop was a sign denial and a parking minimum.

"I have read the file," the Economic Development Manager said. "There is no version of it where we come out well. We did not have anything against them. We had a process, and the process did what the process did."

The cookbook

Chef Bell published a cookbook in late 2024, written mostly in the year after the shop closed. It was not expected to do much.

It has now gone through eleven printings.

The proceeds are what made the return possible, which the founders have been direct about. They did not come back because Notcross improved. They came back because they could finally afford to be choosy about where they went, and by then Notcross had improved.

"We looked at four towns," Tillery said. "Two of them wanted us badly and could not tell us when we could open. This one could tell us the week."

The building

58 College Street was built in 1957 as a credit union branch and has been vacant since the institution consolidated its operations in 2019. It is a plain brick box, well made, with a good roof and eleven-foot ceilings.

The conversion opens the storefront with folding glass doors, adds a striped awning, and puts flowers and produce out onto the pavement. Inside are bread and pastry, a cheese and charcuterie counter, prepared food, a wine wall and a short grocery of things worth carrying home.

The vault stays. It is now the cheese cave, which the founders describe as the single best argument for the building.

What the City did this time

The application was submitted in April and approved in May. No variance was required, the parking minimum that stopped them in 2018 no longer exists, and the sign permit — the same category of permit that ended their first attempt — was issued in four days.

The City would like to be clear that it is not claiming this as an achievement. Issuing a sign permit in four days is not an achievement. It is the absence of a previous failure, and the City is aware those are different things.

The name

They left as The Little Peach. They have come back as something else.

The founders decline to explain the new name beyond noting that it is theirs, that they chose it after the closure rather than before, and that anyone who wants the full explanation is welcome to come in and ask, ideally while buying something.

The sidewalk board reads: Good food. Local roots. Naughty little secrets.

The part the City would like on the record

For most of its history, Notcross treated small businesses as applicants. The distinction matters more than it sounds. An applicant is somebody asking for something. A business opening downtown is somebody bringing you something.

The Little Peach was the clearest case of getting that backwards that the City has on file, and it is the one staff cite internally when a process starts to take longer than it should.

The Naughty Peach Provisions opens later this month at 58 College Street. The City did not bring it here. The City stopped preventing it, and someone with a cookbook did the rest.