St. Armands Circle is bustling with places to eat, drink and shop—it’s hard to imagine that anything might be missing. But when Taylor and Sydney Nichols began visiting Sarasota in 2020, they realized that the area lacked its own local coffee shop. “St. Armands Circle is such a novel aspect of coming to Sarasota, and something that’s been a center point of our relationship is going on coffee dates, and we always talked about how it was so sad that there wasn’t an independent coffee shop on St. Armands,” says Sydney. “We always thought it was a miss for a place that has over 130 businesses to not have a boutique coffee shop.”
This is how the idea for Le Shop, the couple’s new coffee shop, wine bar and market on St. Armands, was born. “My aunt was staying on Lido, and she said something like, ‘I can’t believe there’s not like a little market or somewhere to grab a couple of essentials,’” Sydney says about why she decided to create a market within the store. On how a wine bar was eventually added to the business model, Sydney says, “We love wine. We have spent a lot of time in Europe together and love to travel, and specifically drink a lot of French and Italian wine, and we just decided to weave that into the business.”
Sydney began working on a business plan in July 2023, but it wasn’t until after Hurricanes Helene and Milton that the couple found a store space to lease in late 2024. After nearly a year of renovating and decorating Le Shop, the Nichols’ first small business is officially ready to customers. In addition to the process of preparing the store space, they have carefully handpicked coffee, wine and market items. The store serves coffee roasted from a single origin bean, called La Pastora, from Costa Rica, and nearly 100 different types of wines. “We have all low-intervention wine, which means there’s been little to no manipulation in the process of developing the wine, no sugar added, no colors added, and a lot of our wine is considered natural,” says Sydney…