Notable Edible – The Cook Shop

By Larry Egan
| Photography by Larry Egan
| May 18, 2026

What type of shopper are you? Do you pop into a shop just to browse the shelves and gander at all the items? Just stroll around, with no urgent need, pick up the pieces, and think, “I could use this”. Or perhaps you’re task-oriented and only shop when you need a certain something. No matter what type of shopper you are, wandering through the aisles at The Cook Shop in Brewster will satisfy your curiosity or needs.

“We have over 30,000 items in here,” Shaunna Danclause points out. That staggering figure is made even more impressive when you step foot into the small shop. “We’re very ambitious with our inventory. It’s the amount of things a regular grocery store would have.” Shaunna is the fourth generation of the family that has called The Cook Shop in The Lemon Tree Village Shops home on Route 6A for nearly fifty years. “It started with my mother, Jane Potter,” Shaunna’s father Bruce explains. “She opened Lemon Tree Pottery over there,” he said, pointing to the other end of the collection of shops in the development. “That was in ’65. A divorced mother with two little kids running around in diapers, my brother and myself,” he remembers. Slowly over time, neighboring properties came up for sale, and she expanded the footprint, building out more and more shops and studios to lease to other artists. “Somehow she got it into her head to open a cook shop,” he recalls. The Cook Shop opened in the spring of 1978 in the building that formerly consisted of three small apartments that she and her second husband, Clark, managed. “It grew organically from very little. My grandmother, Mary Walley, ran the day-to-day. She was a great cook, and she loved all the cookware, picking out all the food items, the gadgets, the whole thing,” he smiles. After a major renovation in the late 1980s, the building took on the layout that dedicated shoppers know today.

Every shelf is packed with all manner of kitchenware. From non-perishable specialty food products, to an impressive selection of American, German, and Japanese cutlery, and all the other equipment necessary to prepare a meal, to the tableware and linens to serve and present it, The Cook Shop has everything covered. “We’re like a hardware store,” Bruce exclaims. Some items on the shelves originally were found in hardware stores. The line of Microplane graters and zesters originally came from the world of woodworking. A Canadian housewife grew tired of her dull grater and picked up a wood rasp, and a new product was born. Guaranteed there’ll be something that’ll have you saying, at the very least, “I need that…someday”.

Members of the Danclause family (from left): Louise, Shaunna and Bruce amid the tea kettles. Opposite page: From cutlery and Le Creuset cookware to colorful table linens, dishes and more, The Cook Shop has everything to create and serve a meal.

Online trends keep the Danclauses busy staying up on the hot, new kitchen supplies. Made In cookware has replaced All-Clad as the popular choice for pots and pans. “When the big companies stumble because they’re being run by accountants and not people who are passionate about cooking, other companies will step up their game,” Bruce describes. “Made In has definitely done that.” In the world of cast iron, there’s only one: Lodge. “They’re really the last man standing,” he adds.

The innovations of the kitchen tools today focus on style and form; “Changing colors to be more on trend,” Shaunna says. “Making them more compact so they fit in the (kitchen) drawer, and not big and bulky.” Some innovations stand the test of time, and others fade away. “Names like ThermoWorks and OXO are good and you know they’re going to work,” Bruce states. He adds a basic tenet of retail to make it clear, “If people keep buying it, you keep ordering it.”

On the food product side of the shop, there’s a world of tastes to explore. Spices, seasonings, and rubs for all styles of cooking from Asian and barbecue to French, Italian, and more are available alongside teas and coffees. There’s a local flavor to things as well with bags of locally roasted coffee from Cape Cod Coffee and Beanstalk Coffee, and a line-up of items from Lighthouse Keeper’s in Yarmouth Port.

Kitchen shops are becoming more of a rarity on Cape Cod but not for the lack of business. One might think with the explosion of online shopping, small stores like a kitchen supply shop are falling by the wayside. The demand remains, however, as people still like to examine and handle products. “We have a lot of people who say they want to shop local,” Shaunna says. The reality is when shop owners are looking to retire, there’s no one to take over. “It’s a lot. It’s a tough life,” Bruce’s wife Louise points out. “It’s seven days a week. It is forfeiting vacations your entire life. It’s all absorbing.” Bruce adds, “You have to be married to your business.”

For the Danclause family, it’s almost all hands on deck when it comes to The Cook Shop. Along with daughter Shaunna, Bruce and Louise’s son Harrison is also at the shop year-round. While son Wesley is on site during the winter, the rest of the year he’s in Amherst working on Old Friends Farm growing ginger and turmeric. “They (the farm) pioneered being able to grow ginger in the Northeast,” Shaunna explains, showing bottles of turmeric honey and ginger syrup. “We carry their products.” Son Spencer is the Town Planner for Plymouth.

Having the right tool for the job is half the battle. The Cook Shop is the epitome of the one-stop shop for both the at-home and professional chef. You could very well find yourself taking it all in while uttering phrases such as “I like that”, “I want that”, and “I need that” – sometimes standing in front of the same tool. And if anyone asks what you need it for, you can always tell them, “I don’t know yet.”