• Courtesy
• Andy Burke during the build-out of Scout's new Pine Street location

Scout owner Andy Burke has had his eye on the former frozen yogurt shop next to New World Tortilla at 696 Pine Street for a long time. By the first weekend in June, it will become the third Burlington-area location for his espresso bar and ice cream company.

"I grew up in the South End, and I've been driving past the old SoYo [Frozen Yogurt] building for years," Burke said. "I told my partner, 'If I could pick any location in the South End to have a Scout, it would be this one.'"

The Pine Street shop will have the same menu — and the same hours, once things are up and running — as its North Avenue and Winooski sister shops. The café will brew beans from a rotating roster of coffee roasters, including Middlebury's Iluminar Coffee, and serve housemade ice cream in flavors such as vanilla and oak, smoked maple and sea salt, plum and candied black walnut, turmeric and cinnamon, and apricot and bitter almond.

It won't be the first South End location for Scout, which operated a café serving breakfast and lunch inside the Innovation Center of Vermont at 128 Lakeside Avenue from 2015 until the start of the pandemic.

The new Scout a few blocks away will occupy both the former fro-yo shop — which was most recently New World-owned Sweet Hazel Fresh & Frozen — and Brio Coffeeworks' original Pine Street roastery and training lab. The new café will resemble the North Avenue one in size and décor, Burke said, with concrete floors, lots of windows, plants and color on the walls.

The original location on North Avenue opened as Scout & Co. in 2014, followed by the corner spot at 1 East Allen Street on the Winooski circle in 2015. After a rebrand earlier this year, the trio of shops will be known simply as Scout.

"That's what everybody calls us, anyway," Burke said.