About this listing
Specialty and Middle Eastern grocery store
Place Details
Borough : Brooklyn
Neighborhood : Brooklyn Heights
Place Matters Profile
The scent of coffee grounds mingled with cardamom, the sight of 150 varieties of cheese (including five types of feta), the briny tang of an olive in your mouth: Few places tantalize like Sahadi’s Specialty and Middle Eastern Foods. It’s the mainstay of Atlantic Avenue’s Middle Eastern shopping strip in downtown Brooklyn, and it draws eager food-lovers from all over the city.
This is the place for bargains on bulk-rate grains, spices, and olive oil–at least twenty-four kinds of olive oil, in industrial tin vats and svelte glass bottles with herb sprigs suspended inside. Pass under a brick archway strung with baskets and you’ll find a room that contains more than one hundred containers of raw and roasted nuts, jars of dried fruits, bins of rice, oats, flour. All around are sacks of herbs, dried vegetables, and spices (including a special flavoring made from cherry pits). There are candied treats worthy of “The Nutcracker:” Turkish delight, halvah, pastel Jordan almonds. Racks
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The scent of coffee grounds mingled with cardamom, the sight of 150 varieties of cheese (including five types of feta), the briny tang of an olive in your mouth: Few places tantalize like Sahadi’s Specialty and Middle Eastern Foods. It’s the mainstay of Atlantic Avenue’s Middle Eastern shopping strip in downtown Brooklyn, and it draws eager food-lovers from all over the city.
This is the place for bargains on bulk-rate grains, spices, and olive oil–at least twenty-four kinds of olive oil, in industrial tin vats and svelte glass bottles with herb sprigs suspended inside. Pass under a brick archway strung with baskets and you’ll find a room that contains more than one hundred containers of raw and roasted nuts, jars of dried fruits, bins of rice, oats, flour. All around are sacks of herbs, dried vegetables, and spices (including a special flavoring made from cherry pits). There are candied treats worthy of “The Nutcracker:” Turkish delight, halvah, pastel Jordan almonds. Racks are stacked with bread, from traditional round loaves and baguettes to sheetlike Afghan handkerchief bread, which folds into quarters and can be used to scoop up the garlicky hummus that you’ll find in vats at the back of the store, alongside baba gannoujh and tabbouleh flecked with parsley and cherry tomatoes. In the middle of everything a ticket machine spits out paper numbers to lines of customers, while blue-aproned employees scoop and weigh and pour. The lines can get very long over the holidays but, miraculously, everyone stays friendly and calm.
The person responsible for this old-fashioned market atmosphere is the affable Charles Sahadi, known to all as Charlie. Charlie’s father came from Lebanon to New York after World War I and, following a long apprenticeship in his uncle’s grocery in downtown Manhattan, started Sahadi’s Importing Company in 1941 on Washington Street, near the long-gone but once-bustling Washington Market. This area was called “Little Syria” because it was home to the Arabic-speaking immigrants who had been arriving since the 1890s. A smaller colony existed in South Ferry in Brooklyn, comprising today’s Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, and that’s where Sahadi’s moved in 1948, displaced by the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. “I was four years old,” Charlie recalls. “I have the smallest recollection of banging nails into the walls, putting up the shelves.” From those first nails, a family institution was built. Today, Charlie’s brother, wife, son, daughter, and son-in-law work in the store, al no doubt prepared to press hammers into their children’s hands.
Over time, the clientele has changed, from the Syrian and Lebanese Christians who lived in the neighborhood in the old days to the gastronomically curious and the gentrifiers who have moved in to replace them. However, the bus from Bay Ridge, where many Middle Eastern New Yorkers now live, stops on the corner right outside the store. Charlie’s not going anywhere. Keenly aware of new competition, he frequently checks the aisles of Zabars, Fairway, Citarella, Dean and Deluca, and Gourmet Garage, to see who’s buying what and at what prices. He admits to feeling a little threatened by club stores like Costco, which have begun to stock more specialty and gourmet items. Ultimately, though, he’s confident in what he does. “I am not any of them; I am me. If I pay the wrong price, I find out where to get a better deal and I try to correct it. I’m an interested spectator and participant. I shop a lot, and I like to see what other people do. If I walk through another gourmet store and I see the shelves are in disarray, I actually straighten the jars out. It’s compulsive: You want the labels facing forward. I’m a grocer at heart.”
