A realtor first took me to Norma’s (59-02 Catalpa Ave). It was one of those late and chilly springtime afternoons. By the time I would move into Ridgewood, filling another urgently remodeled railroad apartment, it would be the summer that Anthony Bourdain died. It was hard to remember, even then, what reasons the nervous realtor–we met after watching him do improv in the city–had given for taking me out here, but whoever he was1, he wasn’t alone. “The thing is, we didn’t tell realtors to start coming, and they just started, and so we have to acknowledge that that’s true, but it wasn’t where we intended it to be,” said Crystal Williams, who opened Norma’s with Denise Plowman on the corner of Forest Avenue in 2012.
This month is the cafe’s last, with Williams deciding to take her business entirely out to Wappingers Falls, a small town upstate where she has been running a cafe of the same name for the last four years or so.
Williams had sold her Ridgewood cafe to Gloria Novakov and Bahareh Parker, a pair of locals who have mostly been in the legal advertising game. (“You’ll see them on the back of buses,” she promises.”) More importantly: “They’re both regulars and [Gloria’s] grandfather and I used to be backyard neighbors,” Williams told me. “They’re thinking of calling it Carries’ Corner Cafe.” An opening date has not yet been set. The closing date for Norma’s is March 29.
It’s hard not to feel wistful. When she moved to the area in the late 2000s from the Lower East Side, she was paying $1,400 for her three bedroom. “It’s not that anymore,” she said. “I know that.”
“Walking in, it just felt like the sunlight was pouring through the windows and birds were chirping,” remembers Williams. Handing the cafe off to Novakov and Parker, who plan to run their own cafe, felt poetic, in a way.
“So we want to pass it on, pass the torch to other women who are also raising children and in the neighborhood and trying to pursue a dream,” Williams told me. The final departure felt like the extinction of a significant dodo, and all throughout the last month, former employees have been showing up to take shifts, slamming together bagels, and those creaking, bacon-heavy biscuit sandwiches in the backroom one last time, blaring unlistenable hyperpop out of their Bose speakers, as here was a space where the misguided hope of the Biden administration could go on forever. On Reddit, presumably uninvited disgruntled former employees sounded off, venting their petty frustrations one last time.
“We’re just a coffee shop who makes egg sandwiches. We’re not, like, curing cancer or, like, making a major impact in the world. But it matters to us,” Williams said. It sounded right enough. Norma’s was special, and felt like the first of something when she decided to open up shop in 2012, taking the place of what was going to be another 99 cent store.
“I would say we were the first cafe that was just kind of random,” she says now.
The decade since has seen the surrounding area filled with cafes that were all just kind of random too, with names like Nomad, Honey Moon, Nest, C-Lo, Good Days, Abracadabra Magic Diner, Cute Cat Cafe, and so on. A Starbucks showed up two years ago, too. Williams tells me that she’s always been of the “the more, the merrier” opinion, and would have continued her own business indefinitely, even after ending table service in years after the pandemic because of an extended “some infrastructure issues from Con Edison.” But perhaps it’s only incidental. And listening to her go on about it, it was hard not to hear the calling of upstate life.
“When we take that and compare it against this other experience that we’re having in the Hudson Valley, which is a reminder of what community feels like and what it feels like to be able to get creative again,” she muses out loud. It’s a real cafe over there, she tells me. They have spaces where people can play acoustic guitars and walls filled with art from local artists.
Norma’s had started modestly too, Williams remembers. Another West Coast veteran (“hippie childhood”), she had floated around urban addresses in Manhattan, Williamsburg, Greenpoint etc. before landing in Ridgewood, incidentally and at just the right time.
“We didn’t give a shit about real estate. We thought that was stupid. We just wanted to make good food in a neighborhood that wanted it and was really receptive,” she said. By then, she had just finished a pivot to culinary school and would eventually win a desert-making round on the Food Network TV show Chopped. In between, she would start Norma’s and then, quietly, help start a brunch spot called Julia’s down the street, which is unaffected by Norma’s closure.
“I think that we would be lying if we didn’t take some responsibility for the fact that people have told us that” the cafe bears some relationship to the neighborhood’s rising popularity among the realtors who frequent it. Last year, the real estate website StreetEasy put Ridgewood on the top of a list of “10 NYC Neighborhoods to Watch in 2025” It’s nice to know they’re watching. (though Bushwick has gained a new #1 spot per StreetEasy economist Kenny Lee)
“Their biscuits are phenomenal,” writes Ridgewoodqueenz, an anonymous local Instagram account that complains about local graffiti and clout-chases off local businesses. When I bring up Norma’s, the account owner immediately thinks of a video the account posted in 2024 of an influencer polishing off an egg sandwich-filled biscuit at Norma’s (260,000 views: we didn’t know how good we had it).
And yet, Williams tells me, something persists. “I think that the old Ridgewood is still here, because the thing about this neighborhood is that I still see those people every day. It doesn’t feel that different to me, honestly. It just feels like there are more restaurants and that the rent is just a little higher. Well, a lot higher. But, as far as the vibe of the neighborhood, I still see my old friends from when I first opened here.”
Top photo taken by Andrew Karpan.
- He later was kicked off his improv team following an “incident” involving “completely ridiculous” allegations of “groping.” I don’t know why he told me any of that, either. ↩︎
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