The first-ever Monroeville Summer Night Market went off without a hitch on July 22, with several local vendors attending the event in the parking lot of the convention center.
The gathering featured a small beer garden and a DJ for live entertainment, maintaining a steady flow of customers that one local baker said “provided a pretty good conversion rate for his cheesecake business.”
“It wasn’t super busy, but being the first market like this, it was good,” said 28-year-old entrepreneur Kyle Rozycki, who owns Kyle’s Cakes N’at. “I had a steady flow of customers, and for the most part, a lot of people ended up buying something,”
Rozycki was serving up a variety of handmade mini-cheesecakes that were made from scratch using an old family recipe that proved to be popular.
“When I was in sixth grade, I entered a countywide baking competition using this recipe, and it won first place,” he said.
Kyle’s Cakes N’at started as a covid business experiment that succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
“I went to college for history and nonprofit management, but I decided to try selling these cheesecakes, and it just took off. Now, I have a fully certified kitchen in Millvale where I make them, and that location will offer walk-ins soon. I’m hoping to do a grand opening in September,” said Rozycki.
For now, you can preorder cheesecakes at kylescakesnat.com. If you see Kyle at one of the many festivals he attends, including regular appearances at the Bloomfield and Squirrel Hill farmers markets, you can grab some there, too.
Other local food vendors were serving up baked goods at the market, including Cathy Kelly and Erin Tabon. They have been best friends for over 20 years and decided to go into business together with their own franchise of Nothing Bundt Cakes.
The Wilkins Township location has been open for about nine months, and so far things have been going well.
“We love what we do. Both of us had previously managed stores for Nothing Bundt Cakes and after a while we were just, like, hey! We can do this on our own,” said Tabon.
Even though Nothing Bundt Cakes has nearly 500 locations, all the cakes are baked fresh daily in each of the stores.
“We take walk-ins. We can do weddings and we even do tiered cakes, said Kelly. “And we have a little gift shop in the front of our store that is affectionately named the Bundtique.”
Despite the many dessert options, shoppers with a sweet tooth weren’t the only ones eating well at the market.
Caribbean Village had a large stand set up, and the smell of curry and spices was billowing out of the food warmers each time Kahila Miller opened them.
Miller is originally from the island of Antigua but has spent many years in Pittsburgh. She has made a business out of serving cuisine that is native to her home country, as well as other similar islands.
“I make dishes from Antigua and Barbuda, Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica,” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing: I was the first person to serve gravy with jerk chicken.”
Miller explained that jerk chicken is usually served with dry rub in Jamaica, but often American customers would ask her to put a little gravy from the other meats on their chicken dish.
“I’ve been serving things like oxtail, curry chicken, rice and beans, cabbage, and jerk chicken for many years,” she said. “I have a location right here in the Monroeville Mall now, but I was selling food even back in 2003 when I lived in Homewood.”
Next up for her Caribbean-inspired restaurant is a full complement of vegan choices.
“We will use tofu and some other stuff, but with similar spices and flavoring,” said Miller.
Along with fine food, the Quasics robotics team from Gateway High School caught the attention of passersby, especially youngsters. Team members had Gladys, the 2023 competition robot, sporadically throwing dodge balls into the sky as kids would laugh and cheer as they tried to catch them.
The team competes in the FIRST Robotics competitions against other high schools around the country and in some cases, the world. As a matter of fact, the Gateway team is coming off its first ever trip to the world finals, in April.
“It’s definitely not cheap to compete, and we really don’t get a lot of the same funding opportunities as our competitors do so we just try to get out in the public as much as we can and hopefully meet potential sponsor’s or get people interested in what we do,” said head coach Sean McMahon.
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Businesses or individuals interested in donating to the robotics team can contact the Gateway School District for more information.