In Bolinas, a town long endeared for its love of chilled beverages, one woman with a blender is pioneering new ground. Through her new shop, Bobolicious Smoothie Lounge, which opened last October, local dietician Julie Augustyn is using frozen fruit and her extensive knowledge of food combining to create healthy, flavorful blended drinks in a trendy downtown environment.
Augustyn, a native of New Jersey who first moved to Bolinas years ago, describes her current venture as the perfect combination of art and science. “As a dietician, I promote food first,” she said. And by the steady flow of customers on a recent weekday morning, so does her community.
“Wood Glue—It’s a good one,” said one young customer named Thor, who was wearing a backwards baseball hat. He had come to pick up a smoothie for his friend’s mother, who was recovering from oral surgery.
Wood Glue, a curious and mouth-watering concoction of coconut water, pineapple, acacia fiber and maca root, is but one of the many refreshing and playfully titled smoothie varieties available nowhere other than at Bobolicious.
Augustyn said she got the idea for the business years ago, while in college, but doubted it would ever come to fruition. Early last year she noticed a “For Rent” sign downtown, on a space that is owned and managed by the Bolinas Community Land Trust. “As soon as I saw that I thought, ‘If I don’t give it a go now, I’ll never know.’” Augustyn pitched her idea to the trust, and the shop was approved for development.
With help from a local architect and cabinet maker, who each donated their services pro bono, Augustyn was able to get Bobolicious up and running in just over nine months. “In fact, it’s been very much like having a baby,” she said. “For the first few months we were busy just learning about the business and its quirks and trying to meet the community needs as they fit within the confines of health and safety regulations.”
So far, despite the requisite obstacle of “learning the ebb and flow of weather and tourists in a small town,” feedback has been abundantly positive.
“I don’t necessarily look at it from a want-to-own-my-own-business perspective,” said Augustyn, who had previously been commuting daily to San Francisco, where she worked at a hospital. “But more from an I-want-to-be-a-bigger-part-of-my-community perspective.”
Bobolicious is open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. all other days.