The Treatery: From Pink '64 Shasta to Main Street Jamesport

When Christina Padrazo quit her career in e-commerce to take her baking hobby off the sidelines, the first thing she did was purchase Stella — a 1964 Shasta trailer-camper, Barbie-pink and ready for a new life. 

“I wanted it to be vintage, I needed her to speak to me … I found Stella during COVID, and even though I hate the color pink, when I saw her I said, ‘This just has to happen,’” Padrazo says of the pink food truck you might have spotted on the road across the East End. “Faced with no job, the world is in crisis, I cashed out my 401k and bought the trailer.”

She says that her family, which is in the restaurant business, initially heard her bold vision and thought she had perhaps lost her grip on reality. Why would she leave a comfortable career with a steady paycheck to sell cookies out of a “rinky-dink little trailer?” 

“I was like, ‘Dad, I did this,’” she recalls. Her father, once over the shock, helped Padrazo build out a commercial kitchen in her Setauket garage. Before she knew it, she was booking events for Stella — and it hadn’t even arrived in New York yet. 

“Once I posted on Instagram, I had DM inquiries, and then I booked it before we even outfitted it,” she says. 

The Treatery, in food truck form, has since been a hot commodity on the East End’s private event scene. She was booking weddings and private parties, and getting more requests by the day for her unique confections and baked goods that ranged from cookies, cupcakes and cakesicles to custom confections for weddings, engagements and divorce parties.

Of course, the Shasta — an Instagram-ready mobile billboard replete with Padrazo’s signature marketing touch — didn’t hurt. “I had an insane response, so I knew I was onto something,” she adds.

According to Padrazo, a major part of The Treatery’s rapid success has been inventing and reinventing its modus operandi on the fly, such as when she promised a customer looking for lunch options that there would be a lobster roll on the menu the next day, except that The Treatery was strictly a dessert truck and she’d never made a lobster roll before.

“I went and bought 30 pounds of lobster … using my grandfather’s recipe I did this scampi sauce. I sold like 50 or 60 lobster rolls the next day, and people were like this is the best lobster roll I’ve had in my life,” she recalls. Lobster rolls, both hot and cold, are now a regular part of The Treatery’s everyday lunch menu. 

Or take the story of The Treatery’s famous grilled cheese sandwich. Another lunchtime staple, it was originally meant as a kids’ menu offering that was instead hungrily gobbled up by the adults at the party. 

“I also feel like we kind of pioneered from the beginning, I was like a one-woman show, so I worked out of my house, in my garage that my dad built for me at my home in Setauket … If you saw what I used to do out of my house, you’d be like, ‘No f—ing way! Is this even possible?” Padrazo says.

Of course, the next step for her one-woman culinary show was to turn The Treatery into a brick-and-mortar location. She officially opened The Treatery last year in Jamesport, where, in addition to her fan-favorite cakes and cookies, she sells doughnuts, gelato and ice cream sandwiches and, of course, customizable confections from divorce cakes to on-request novelties like, yes, a meat cake made with skirt steak and iced with mashed potatoes.

Some of her best-known work among foodies, though, happens to be a grilled cheese sandwich called “The OG” — gruyere and caramelized onion, bacon and fig jam on homemade sourdough bread. Other steady items on the limited lunch menu include her unique variations on pulled pork, mac and cheese, and chili.

“We’re only buying a small quantity of everything, so if you know, you know … don’t sleep on the North Fork,” she says.

The latest chapter of The Treatery’s rise includes Padrazo turning her one-woman operation into a platform for collaborations with several other woman-run North Fork businesses, including 1610 Sourdough, where she gets her sourdough, and Disset Chocolate, whose chef/owner, Ursula XVII, was her partner in the summer pop-up known as The Treatery After Dark, which Padrazo describes as a “Michelin meets mainstream” outpost for late-night eats with a locally sourced and gourmet twist.

A huge hit, particularly with seasonal hospitality employees, she plans to make it a standalone restaurant in the next two years. “Hopefully,” she adds. “If someone gives us a lot of money.”

The collaborations have been a natural fit and Padrazo says the North Fork is evolving to the point where there’s room for everyone. “It was like, ‘Why are we doing this separately?’ The four of us women have found an amazing way to coexist … We’re not overly rah-rah, but there’s a wicked sense of empowerment of what we get to do with having one of the few women-run kitchens around, which is pretty dope,” she says. 

The Treatery is located at 1564 Main Road, Jamesport. For more info, visit thetreateryli.com.