Working from a Coffee Shop: Honeybell Bakery and Cafe at Bell Market
Working from home can sometimes be tedious, so I traveled to Bell Works in Holmdel, NJ so I could work from there instead. Bell Works is a great space to work for the day, and if you’re looking for coffee and food you can grab it from Honeybell Bakery and Cafe located inside Bell Market food hall.
Because I work from Bell Works pretty often, I have become a frequent customer of Honeybell and have gotten to know their pastry chef and Honeybell’s mastermind, Marielle Nuval (known to the Bell Works community as Mari).
Mari fell into baking professionally as a sort of happy accident.
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“I used to work for a very tiny bakery café just outside of my university in Seattle. When the baker quit, my boss ended up taking over baking duties. He eventually started having me help in the back kitchen when things were slow up front. I started with helping to measure out ingredients for a recipe, which then evolved into actually cooking and baking. It finally reached a point where I was left to run the entire operation myself for a few days, so that my boss could fly back to Japan to woo his then-ex-girlfriend back. The experience fueled my growing passion for baking and I ended up going to culinary school right after I graduated college.”, Mari told New Jersey Isn’t Boring.
About a decade in the fine dining and bakery industries in San Francisco, including working for Iron Chef Elizabeth Falkner and Restaurateur and Chef Michael Mina, and a few years helping manage front-of-house café operations at Honeybell later, she is now the pastry chef of Honeybell Bakery & Café.
Mari has been a part of Bell Works since it reopened to the public in 2019. Her husband, Chad Spencer, is the head chef of Bell Market along with their partner Richard Corbo (of Corbo & Sons Pizzeria). They were asked to join in the Bell Market venture when the new owner was looking to include restaurants on its first floor. As a fun side note Richard’s dad had done some sign work for the building back in the ’80s or ’90s. (You can read all about my visit to Corbo and Sons here. I’m a big fan.)
Their menu features your classic coffee options (espresso, lattes, cappuccinos, tea, etc) but has many creative and special options including their Caramel Toffee (their most popular option) and Honeybell Orange syrups.
Another flavored syrup they use is Ube, a purple sweet potato native to the Philippines, which became so popular it was added to the permanent menu. Mari’s favorite way to use it is in a matcha latte with a little brown sugar syrup or in an iced cappuccino also with a touch of brown sugar which I enjoyed.
Matcha is another popular item at Honeybell Bakery. Their most unique offering is their Magnolia Matcha Latte which is harvested from fresh Magnolia blooms from the two huge trees out back by the pond at Bell Works. Magnolias have a very light, refreshing, floral ginger flavor, which she makes into a syrup using raw sugar in the base.
Be sure to visit often to check out the specialty drinks based on seasonality/holidays, something Mari loves to create.
I enjoyed their Peanut Butter and Jelly Latte which was a special for Valentine’s Day.
Their new seasonal “Holmdel Special” is an homage to the Manhattan Special espresso soda, with a couple of tweaks plus the addition of a cold foam topping to add a creamy element to the drink. For February it was a Cherry Chocolate Jubilee (chocolate cherry espresso soda with a rum cherry cold foam), and in March it will be a Irish Coffee rendition for St. Patrick’s Day.
And let’s not forget the food! There is always something delicious to order at Honeybell Bakery from cookies, to brownies, to blondies. Their most popular is their Sea Salt Chocolate Chip cookie which is a perfectly baked cookie with a crispy golden brown edge and a barely-set but still gooey center filled with a melty medley of milk and dark chocolate pieces.
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Additional food items you can enjoy include oatmeal, bread pudding, a soup of the day, salads, and more.
Mari has created lots of special items like their Ham and Cheddar scones (studded with chunks of ham, cheddar cheese, and sliced scallions, then glazed with ketchup and topped with cheese during baking), and their S’mores cookies (a brown butter cookie with milk and dark chocolate chips, graham cracker pieces, and marshmallows folded in).
One of the distinctive attributes of Honeybell is the building that holds it. The Bell Labs Holmdel functioned for 44 years as a research and development facility for the Bell System and later Bell Labs.
This modern building, dubbed “The Biggest Mirror Ever” by Architectural Forum, due to its mirror box exterior, was the site of a Nobel Prize discovery, the laser cooling work of Steven Chu. The building is so unique that it is the set location for the Apple+ show “Severance” and an upcoming Emma Roberts movie.
AND because Bell Works is dog friendly, it’s one of the only coffee shops you can bring your dog inside.
If you’re visiting Honeybell Bakery you’ll find it as part of the Bell Market food hall, right in the heart of Bell Works. They are open Monday – Friday 9AM – 3PM. They share the space with Jozu (Japanese cuisine with from-scratch ramen, poké bowls, and Japanese BBQ) and Corbo & Sons Pizzeria.
You can find them on their Website, Facebook, and Instagram at @honeybellbakerycafe and @bellmarketnj.
