amuse-bouche

It’s time for the 2nd Annual Independent Food Festival and Awards. My chosen category is Best Coffee Shop in Defiance of Starbucks, and the winner is:

    Baruir’s, Sunnyside, N.Y.

I first encountered Baruir’s in 1998 or 1999, when I lived in Astoria, Queens, well before my coffee tastes were honed by the refinements of a few years in coffee-crazed Seattle. A homey, cramped crazy quilt of a shop with faded wood panels and well-worn shelves, it’s been serving the Armenian and Greek communities in the Queens neighborhood of Sunnyside for four decades from a bustling strip along Queens Boulevard – in the shadow of the 7 train, nestled between anachronistically quaint barber shops, Colombian bakeries, auto repair garages and the occasional strip club.

Martha and Mike Nersesian run Baruir’s with the same Old World spirit that Mike’s parents, Baruir and Maria Nersesian, embodied when they opened the self-named shop in Nov. 1966. Ethnic Armenians who fled Romania after the communists took over in 1948, the elder Nersesians attempted to recreate the same business Baruir Nersesian operated back home in Europe.

Yet Baruir’s is a sort of open secret among an inner circle of outer borough New York food cognoscenti. You will not find it in the Zagat Gourmet Marketplace, nor among the usual lists of New York coffee haunts, most of which are trendily forgettable. You will, however, find the occasional Chowhound post or offhand recommendation insisting Baruir’s offers the best coffee beans in New York. I can’t confirm that outright, but I can explain why it demands love and loyalty.

    

Baruir’s immediate purpose is evident as you walk through the door: A shining two-tone Diedrich coffee roaster is front and center, the store’s focal point and meeting place for elderly regulars to sit and yammer. Walk in at the right moment on any weekday morning and you’ll be overwhelmed by the scent of roasting beans.

“The whole neighborhood smells coffee,” says Martha Nersesian. “Customers come in and say, ‘Oh, I was walking for 10 blocks and I could tell you were roasting coffee.’”

This regular roasting routine might not have been exotic for first-generation immigrants who simply wanted to reclaim the simple pleasures of life back home, but it’s curiously rare nowadays in New York City. New York is a town awash in overpriced beans and mediocre brews, sleek espresso bars and latte hounds — yet with a few exceptions, it’s totally reliant on roasters in far-flung corners of the nation.

    

Armenians take their coffee seriously: brewing it right over a flame in a small metal pot, hot and eye-blinkingly potent, somewhere between the Greek and Turkish varieties, complete with fine grinds at the bottom. Thus it’s no surprise that Baruir’s takes coffee plenty seriously too.

Indeed, it was their iced coffee that hooked me: a simple item at first glance, poured from a chilled Mr. Coffee carafe into a paper cup. But the ice cubes are made of coffee too — a tradition Martha carries on even in the dead of winter.

It’s a minor detail, but it says everything it should about how much the Nersesians truly care about their coffee, even a simple $1.50 cup. Caramel macchiatos and venti lattes can be checked at the door.

That said, Baruir’s certainly is as sophisticated as any coffee hut you’ll find in more upscale corners. A long row of brass canisters sits behind the counter, marked with bean varieties: Guatemalan, Ethiopian, Tanzanian, double-roasted Columbian Supremo, organic Java. Roasting levels are admittedly tailored to drip-coffee tastes and to the needs of Armenian or Greek coffee drinkers — more dry, straw-like notes, lots of body and a bit more bitterness than in a northern Italian blend. The Nersesians produce two house blends to accomodate various tastes, and Mike Nersesian flavors the flavored coffees himself. The quality is unimpeachably high.

More importantly: One glance around, and it is as though Starbucks and its corporate brethren never existed — though admittedly, coffee chains are rather scarce in this part of Queens. The closest Starbucks is across Northern Boulevard at Kaufman Studios in Astoria. Perhaps Baruir’s mojo has kept the the Emerald City Behemoth at bay. For now.

“Not everybody can hold on this long,” says Martha Nersesian. “It takes a lot of love and caring and responsibility and commitment.”

Which is why the store roasts 500 to 600 pounds of coffee each week, much of it sold wholesale to other European stores in the tri-state area — still supplied by the same New Jersey coffee broker who Baruir Nersesian dealt with nearly 40 years ago. Even so, the coffee has changed with the time; Jamaican Blue Mountain and Hawaiian Kona now take their place alongside beans from Indonesia and Africa.

Coffee is just where Baruir’s charm begins. Its aisles are lined with jars and tins that could easily have you thinking you were in a sleepy market in the Caucasus, and you wouldn’t be far off. Labels are immediately exotic — not in that Dean & Deluca way, but with garish colors that signal food eaten not for a dollop of yuppie exoticism but by people whose ethnic ties bring them here for a taste of home.

Apricot jams strive for space alongside less obvious options, like fig with sesame and gooseberry; nearby sit eggplant and pistachio preserves. Trays of halvah and baklava sit on the counter as a quick impulse treat. Bags of dried apricots and pears are tied and labeled by hand. My regular Saturday-morning treat in the late ‘90s would be to drive over for a coffee (hot drip in the winter, iced in the summer) and a bag of dried peaches, to be consumed in nearby Astoria Park, watching the barges churn through Hell’s Gate.

A rickety fridge full of feta, halloumi and other briny cheeses rests in back of the shop, near the deli counter and a line of olive vats — Moroccan, Greek, Kalamata. A half-pallet of Romanian sparkling water, Borsec, sits opposite the cash register. Turkish coffee sets and espresso machines line the side wall. Bins of filberts, cashews and peanuts (which the Nersesians roast when not working on their coffee beans) sit nearby.

Baruir’s is subtitled “Fine American and European Foods,” and that’s a precise abstract: It is a gourmet store gloriously trapped in the era before such things existed, back when Zabar’s had a near-monopoly on what then was called “appetizing” and supermarkets existed to hawk Wonder Bread, not lemongrass chicken. Baruir’s products are hardly gourmet; they are legitimate and honest staples for the customer base, foods that manage to be rare without taking on the mantle of exoticism. This is a mandate Mike and Martha took on in the early 1980s when Baruir — who’s still alive at 102, by the way — intended to sell the business. Mike, an engineer by trade, refused to let it leave the family.

“We had to learn a lot from his parents,” says Martha.

And did I mention the cat?

My late-‘90s visits were never complete without a stop to pet a tiny white kitten that patrolled the aisles, rubbing up against any patron willing to say hello. After nearly eight years, the kitten has grown as you’d expect of any feline living life in a store packed with such goodies. It is now a hefty, slightly lumbering cat, waddling at a pace that indicates it has no interest in moving one step faster than it currently is.

    

I am happy to report that it’s as friendly as ever, as are the Nersesians — willing to pour you an iced coffee that won’t become diluted, to bag you a pound of their heady coffee beans, to sell you a jar of tarama (carp roe) or a packet of lentils at prices fit for a working stiff. The biggest concern may be how the Nersesian family will continue the traditions they’ve established. Martha and Mike’s two nephews are both engineers, are focused on careers of their own. [An earlier version identified them as Martha and Mike’s sons. Not so. My apologies -jb] The neighborhood has morphed over the years; many of the eastern Europeans who settled there have died or moved away.

It’s a sobering reminder that places like Baruir’s struggle to justify themselves. Coffee may be fetishized, but increasingly we love it only for its gourmet frills — not its more humbling roots.

And yet: For all their robotic efficiencies and rubber-stamped comforts, the Starbucks of the world simply will never emulate Baruir’s charms. Not without an army of amiable white cats.

Baruir’s, 40-07 Queens Blvd., Sunnyside, N.Y. 718.784.0842

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 2:00 am and is filed under new york, caffeine, products, queens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.