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Few places in New York are home to such a diverse cross section of the Jewish diaspora as Forest Hills, especially the broad stretch of 108th Street tucked behind the imposing apartment blocks that abut Queens Boulevard.

If you stand in front of Carmel Grocery, a plain-looking shop at the heart of the modest business district, you’re likely to hear Hebrew, Bukhori, Russian, Georgian and Yiddish along with the thick Queens accents of the neighborhood’s longtime Ashkenazi Americans. And many of the voices you hear are probably on their way into the grocery, lured by the smell of freshly roasted coffee.

The source of that smell is obvious as soon as you walk in. A cast iron roaster towers over the entryway, looking like a piece of equipment from a Victorian factory. Staff members scoop and shovel raw beans into the top of the machine using a 16-kilogram French feta cheese tin, and the coffee slowly loses its greenish tint, toasting to a deep shiny brown in the open drum. In the window, a staircase of glinting glass jars hold nuts and dried fruits. Past the coffee, a cabinet is lined with homemade hummus, ikra, smoked whitefish and Romanian eggplant salad. Toward the back of the store, trays of crisp bourekas, the Israeli staple with roots in the Sephardic communities of the Ottoman Empire, come stuffed with potato, mushroom, spinach and cheese.

With every square inch of the narrow space covered in Kosher delicacies, Carmel Grocery is like an Israeli Zabar’s in the heart of Queens. But oddly enough, as he is the first to remark, neither owner Stephan “Steve” Dumanian nor any of the staff at the mainly kosher shop are Jewish.

Steve is the last surviving member of a family of ethnic Armenians who fled Turkey for Romania in the early part of the 20th century during the Armenian Genocide – “We’ve been like the Jews, spread around,” he says. Born in the Wallachian town of Roșiorii de Vede, Steve has now lived in Forest Hills for 50 years. In 1983, his parents bought Carmel Grocery. How did the family end up running a beloved institution for local Israelis?

“We didn’t know what we were doing, probably,” Steve says with a laugh. “We bought the store from two Israeli guys. They weren’t doing that great, and at the beginning we weren’t either. We thought we’d try for six months. Then, slowly, it started working. And that’s how we ended up with an Israeli store!”

But Steve’s assessment doesn’t account for all of the shop’s longevity and its loyal customers, and the Dumanian family didn’t get into the coffee business by accident. Steve is a third-generation coffee seller – he learned the trade from his mother, who learned it from her Ottoman Empire-born parents. In the family’s backyard in Roșiorii de Vede, Steve remembers a heavy, clanking cast iron coffee roaster. His mother would build a fire under the drum and stir the beans by hand.

Six months after the Dumanians bought Carmel Grocery, they bought a similar machine from the French manufacturer Samiac, which has long since shuttered. For years, Steve would work on the machine himself when it needed repairs, and replacement parts are still difficult to come by. Unwieldy as it is, the machine is the centerpiece of Carmel Grocery and a vital physical manifestation of the coffee roasting tradition the Dumanian family brought from Turkey to Romania to Queens. “If I know one thing,” Steve says, “that’s what I know.”

The Dumanians also won the loyalty of the neighborhood by keeping the same Israeli specialties – bourekas, thin Israeli pickles, Middle Eastern salads and spreads – but working to make them better than the owners before them. Carmel’s bourekas are satisfyingly crunchy and don’t skimp on the fillings – tangy cheese, earthy mushrooms, chunky mashed potatoes. At Hanukkah, the store fries fresh donut-like sufganiyot filled with custard and jelly, and for Purim, they bake prune and apricot hamantaschen. And though Forest Hills residents have their pick of dozens of markets that specialize in bulk dried fruits and nuts, Carmel is at the top of the heap.

Though the shop has changed little since it roasted its first batch of coffee in 1983, 108th Street has changed around it. “Forty years ago there were no Bukharans, very few Georgians,” Steve said. “So most of [the customers] were young Israelis.” In recent years, many of the newest shops on the strip cut glatt kosher meat or dole out Bukharan plov. Carmel’s selection isn’t especially oriented toward the neighborhood’s huge Uzbek population, and though it’s nearly all kosher, the shop isn’t under strict rabbinical supervision. Since the 1990s, the clientele has diversified, but Steve says about 70 percent of his customers are still Israelis – they’ve just grown older.

Just as important to Steve’s success as his meticulousness with ingredients and his multigenerational coffee sense are his veteran employees. Gabriela Larie, who was born in Romania, has spent 15 years at the store, and chats in Romanian with a few neighborhood locals. John Ramos has worked at Carmel Grocery for 32 years, joining the staff soon after immigrating from Colombia. He remembers Steve’s father and sister, who died decades ago, and Steve’s mother, who died in 2020, as “such a nice family.” But he stuck around to help Steve through the pandemic and doesn’t imagine he’ll leave any time soon. “It’s because he’s a great boss,” John says.

Ike AllenIke Allen

Published on February 09, 2023

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