In all honesty, the New York City bodega has become a hot-button topic for me. As I enter my middle age, my view of the city is warped by time. When I glance too quickly, I see the prices of a bygone era until my eyes rack focus and see what terrible American leadership (at all levels) trickle down to: an eight-dollar egg sandwich. Of course, that’s a reasonable price for a beef bacon-egg-and-cheese (gotta say the whole thing like, A Tribe Called Quest) on a hero these days. But not when you remember ordering the exact same sandwich, handing the Bodegero two formerly crumpled one-dollar bills, and feeling like a fucking rock star. Yes, the price is a head-turner, but the real shift in bodega culture comes from an actual shift in geopolitical culture; there are more Muslim-owned ‘Deli Groceries’ than there are Bodegas.

 

Muslim-owned means no pork, which means no pork bacon. With that, a delicate battle for the soul of NYC’s comfort foods plays out more like a dance across time and space. There are still snacks, the salty-savory through to the sweet and saccharin. Plantain chips, honey buns, and chicharron in some. Custom salads, Halal platters, and hookahs, among others. No shade, a deli grocery and a bodega get used interchangeably by transplants, and that ain’t it over here. Each has its own history. But like anything on earth, go back far enough, and you’ll find they were cousins the whole time. The bodega is the geopolitical nexus of New York City, and I love them in all their complexity.

 

Way back, like, Moorish Spain way back – the Arab influence on Spanish society came complete with the inclusion of the hyperlocal marketplace. In order to keep these local wares fresh and available, they are kept in storerooms or “bodegas” in ye olde Spanish. As Spain colonizes the Caribbean and the lower Antilles, these places adopt the bodega, but with an island twist. Cultural diffusion, imperialism, and enterprise worked hand in hand to leave us a legacy of culinary blending. So yeah, you might have gone in wanting a Dominican staple and walked out with a lamb over rice. It’s like that over here.

 

The thing is, that aforementioned imperialism never stopped rearing its head. So, as World War II saw Jewish refugees land in NYC and bless the city with the OG deli (short for ‘delicatessen’), that same wave of global turmoil brought Boricuas from their ‘Isla Bonita’, Puerto Rico. Fast forward a little, and a Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic brought those folks to NYC, too. More earth rotations after that, Arab North Africa comes under assault from inside and out, driving Egyptian and Yemeni refugees to the concrete jungle. Each of these geopolitical disturbances brought those corner-store cousins back to the block, with brick-and-mortar lifelines keeping NYC’s greasy heart going.