Bella la Crema, a new retail shop, is ready to butter up Longmont. The store at 931 Main St. is a boutique butter shop and dairy market, selling cultured butter that’s sweet, savory and everything in between.
The business celebrated its grand opening earlier this month. “We’ve only been open two weeks, and we’ve sold out of many different butters,” said Shauna Lee Strecker, owner of Bella la Crema. In 2018, Bella la Crema opened in Lyons as a “butter bar” – a sit-down cafe that offered butter flights, similar to wine flights.
That building was sold three years later, and Strecker began searching for a new venue. The combined production kitchen and retail space available on Longmont’s Main Street turned out to be the right next step for Bella la Crema. After the Lyons store closed, Strecker sold packaged tins of her butter at Bricks Retail in downtown Longmont.
Strecker has enjoyed working with the Longmont business community so far; she said a chef at West Side Tavern recently came into the store and bought five pounds of her “Wildflower” butter flavor, which the restaurant used in a lobster special. Strecker has also maintained a devoted customer base from Lyons, with regulars from the old location stopping by as soon as the new store opened. “Kids in Lyons have grown up with this butter,” she said.
The butter flavors are infused with an impressive array of spices and other ingredients: nutmeg, lime zest, lavender, turmeric, vanilla, garlic, cinnamo.