Grocers of Legend: From Fruit Stall to Food Empire and Embracing “Local”

Posted by Julia della Croce at 11:05 pm Add comments

May 302015

Andy Balducci sweeping outside his produce shop in 1971. Photo: Courtesy of Emily Balducci

Andy Balducci outside the family produce shop in 1971. | Photo: Courtesy of Emily Balducci

Once upon time, there was Balducci’s, the grocery-cum-take-out market that started people thinking about real Italian cooking at the outset of America’s food revolution. Maybe they even started it, at least the Italian flank. NYC was the epicenter of the foment in those days and it sent shock waves across America. In the 1970s, when other “Italian” grocers were selling the usual American-Italian provisions and Italian-style restaurants were still thinking along the lines of tomato sauce and blankets of cheese on top of everything, or branding their restaurants “Northern Italian” (only the color of the sauce changed, from the perfunctory red to indiscriminate white), the Balduccis were redefining “Italian.” They were bringing in native vegetables from the motherland that were unknown on this side of the Atlantic and getting their customers to love them because of how Mamma Balducci cooked them up. Eventually, Andy, together with his wife, Nina, started crisscrossing Italy for the best artisan foods and importing them to New York.

Cime di rapa, called rapini in America, or more often, "broccoli rabe." a misnomer. Photo: Nathan Hoyt, 2014

Cime di rapa, called rapini in America, most often known as “broccoli rabe,” a misnomer. | Photo: Nathan Hoyt, 2014

It all started when the young Italian immigrant, Andy Balducci, returned from the Normandy front after the last world war and convinced his father to get rid of his ice truck in Brooklyn and instead, sell fruits and vegetables in Manhattan’s cool Greenwich Village, a neighborhood that was “the richest in New York, rich with talent — artists, musicians, actors,” he explained when I spoke to him recently. The first Balducci’s was no more than a stand on a three-foot strip of sidewalk at the corner of New York’s Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street. The inside space had a dirt floor that shook whenever the 8th Avenue el thundered overhead. It was cold and damp in winter; stifling and zooming with flies in summer.

James Beard. Photo: Dan Wynn, via Food Republic

James Beard, “Mr. B,” was a regular. | Photo: Dan Wynn, via Food Republic

Still, the locals that lived in the storied neighborhood flocked to the little stall where Mamma and Papa Balducci, their children Andy and Grace, and their family friend, Joe Doria, worked the business seven days, day and night. James Beard — “Mr. B” to the Balduccis – bought their fruits and vegetables. A young Boris Karloff (of Frankenstein fame, for anyone out there too young to remember) would stop by in the middle of the night wearing a big black cape and hat to buy the tired cauliflower, soft tomatoes, and other “off” vegetables they sold at a discount to the struggling actor. The business grew and grew. It eventually moved to new digs on Sixth Avenue and West 9th Street to become New York’s first full-stop Italian food specialty shop, a sprawling and dazzling emporium in the days when a cook might have to comb the greenmarkets of the city just to find Italian parsley.

The aisles groaned with the best olive oils, canned tomatoes (“pelati” to the Italians), vinegars, and other alimentari from all over Italy. A butchery, bakery, fishmonger, salumeria, every food specialty was added until it was like an Italian mercato with everything under one roof. Meryl Streep was a regular. Mel Brook’s wife shopped there every day. Candice Bergen opened an account. Lauren Bacall followed Nina around the store before closing to see what she would bring home for dinner. Of course, the city’s chefs would come by, excited about the fresh foods and Italian specialties they hadn’t seen before. It was then that Andy and Joe began Baldor, a business delivering their specialties and fresh foods wholesale to their restaurants.

The new focus: American-grown, hand-made. | Photo: Nathan Hoyt

These remembrances all came to me as I partied with the Balducci clan to celebrate their American farmer partners that recently gathered together with them in Manhattan. The fabled grocery in Greenwich Village is long gone (the family sold it in 2003) and stores of the same name are just that, Balducci’s in name only. While there is Eataly and — dare I mention it in the same breath — Whole Foods, there is no full-stop mom and pop shop anything like it and there may never be.

Baldor's Emily Balducci-Cardone, center, talking shop with Chef Anthony Theo; his friend Erica on left, and me on the right. | Photo: Nathan Hoyt

Celebrating with Emily Balducci-Cardone, center, Chef Anthony “Theo” (Theocaropoulos) of Cooklyn; his friend Erica, left. | Photo: Nathan Hoyt

Whereas Andy and Nina went abroad for the best ingredients, largely because that was where the best was to be found, today, the younger generation has gone local, making it easy for chefs and grocers to buy food from local producers. And that, I would say, is progress.