It might’ve been a touchy subject on its opening day, but it wasn’t for Gloria Novakov, one of the owners of the new Carrie’s Corner Cafe (59-02 Catalpa Ave.) With a smile, she told me, “And I have to say, it started with Norma’s. Truly, Norma’s gentrified the entire neighborhood.”
This didn’t bother Novakov, who lived in Ridgewood her entire life and was a fan of Norma’s, which closed three months ago. Novakov had been the first to get the call from Amy Ericson, a local realtor who posts on social media under the handle @ridgewoodrealestatewithamy, and who had been tasked with renting out the space.
“I knew this was the crown jewel of the neighborhood,” Ericson told me, adding that both she, Crystal Williams and Denise Plowman, the two owners of Norma’s, were handling the deal with a certain kind of care.
Williams and Plowman had landed on Novakov and her business partner Bahareh Parker because the two were both mothers and regulars at the cafe. Novakov also promised a certain kind of local authenticity; her grandfather had been Williams’ next door neighbor when Williams first moved to Ridgewood in the late 2000s.
Williams, however, would eventually leave Ridgewood, taking the Norma’s name and its recipes to their cafe in Wappingers Falls, a small town upstate where she decided to live instead.
But there still was the property, which commanded space on a rapidly changing street. After Norma’s opened, the natural wineseller Forêt (68-38 Forest Ave.) opened across the street, as did the cocktail bar eventually called Cassette (68-38 Forest Ave., storefront B) and then the small pie pizzeria Panina (68-38 Forest Ave. storefront A), described as “aggressively likable” by the Infatuation. Further down the street, of course, came Rolo’s (8-53 Onderdonk Ave.).
The future was bright, Novakov told me, and she was wearing shades.
“I’m very proud of the fact that the first Whole Foods is going to be in Ridgewood. I’m so excited for that,” said Novakov. She pictured the neighborhood of the future that it would bring: “It’s Whole Foods, then it’s Equinox, and then it’s Carrie’s.”
Carrie’s Corner Cafe is a tribute, they told me, to the character of Carrie Bradshaw1. They had pasted the walls with newspaper print, a tribute to the dress Carrie wears in “What Goes Around Comes Around” (season three, episode 17). They have produced a massive mock-up of Sarah Jessica Parker from the show’s intro, next to a billboard advertising her sex column. They have, however, switched that billboard out with one advertising their own advertising outfit, 1800Cantaso. It shows their faces next to lines that read, in bold white lettering: “1-800 CANTASO/ABOGADOS DE ACCIDENTES.” The company primarily collects referral fees by marketing legal services to people hit by cars.
“We’re really big in the Spanish-language world,” Parker said. They are not, however, lawyers, per a disclaimer on their site: “1800 Cantaso is not a law firm; we are a legal service that connects your case with expert attorneys in NY and NJ.” (None of this article constitutes binding legal advice.)
Carrie Bradshaw also inspired numerous items on the menu. In the place of the enormous biscuits that workers at Norma’s would bake in-house and fill with spicy bacon from a nearby butcher, the new pair sell paninis that they get delivered every morning, with Bradshaw-esque names they’ve come up with like “Mr. Big,” the “Hot Italian Affair” and “Carrie’s Cheat Day,” which all cost around $14. They tell me they would love for me to try one of them. Filled with well-prepared pastrami, a “Mr. Big” seems fitting enough for me, and it comes in a box and is a little sloppy, yet manages to stay together, like its namesake. They make the coffee in house, however, and promised me they used the same bean supplier that Norma’s used. New additions on the menu include the “Romani,” a frothing coconut latte that Novakov named in tribute to her heritage, part of a wave of Romani immigrants who first started settling in Ridgewood in the mid-1800s.
I don’t hold the re-heated meat against the pair; Norma’s closed because their ovens used up too much electricity and the owners didn’t want to redevelop the space to make a real restaurant work. “We get it fresh at 10am,” Parker said with a thick German accent and a smile. The vendors had been selected by Williams and Plowman, she promised me.
Parker and Novakov would have rather been silent partners and just kept the Norma’s name around with the same menu and all that, Parker said, but that wasn’t for sale. Instead, the Norma’s pair were paid to consult for the opening, which involved picking where the food came from.
“They go to a lot of those James Beard conferences. So the vendors all came from James Beard. James Beard, that’s the name,” said Novakov. The margins on selling these were pretty thin too. “You saw the prices. They’re not bad, but everything’s coming from outside. There would be no other way.”
Parker told me that Williams and Plowman had been invited to come by the opening, but didn’t appear when I was there. They were missing out. Parker had brought a sense of grandeur to the opening; she had hired dancers, a pair who dramatically blew bubbles while a DJ named Cardo McKie played Lil Jon songs that recalled the awkward urgency of middle school dances. Another pair, dressed in tutus and managed by an outfit called Julushok Entertainment, arrived later. Parker said came from connections she has through her husband, Jermaine Parker, a prominent Jamaican businessman from the Bronx who owns what Caribbean National Weekly calls “New York’s only Black-owned Clarks franchise,” as well as Blakk Hyenaz, described in a card she gave me as the “best commercial recording studio [in] Uptown Bronx.”
In trying to do right by Norma’s, they had hired, mostly, from the moody army who always worked at the place; one, who had moved to the area three years ago, covered their face like Marge Simpson in that meme when I approached and requested that I refrain from photographing them working there at all.
Unlike Novakov, Parker is the daughter of Iranian political refugees2 who settled in Germany. She had moved to New York because she wanted to work where Carrie lived, she told me, and the pair met after “a very famous big lawyer introduced us at Tao nightclub,” Novakov told me. “I went into Tao nightclub with the lawyer and I was just in awe of this girl.” 1800Cantosa is still going and you should still be able to catch their faces on the back of some buses, they assured me.
It struck me that Novakov was not the first local business owner to bring up the Whole Foods purportedly opening down the street. “When I saw that Whole Foods was opening, I got very nervous,” Vanessa America told me. America had moved to the area almost two decades ago and a dozen years into that, she had opened Tiny Art Supply down the street from Norma’s. The coming Whole Foods had seemingly sent her running to a new location a few blocks away. (6-12 Woodward Ave.)
But Novakov and Parker were doing something else. They were not people who applied their arts degrees to hosting workshops in order to pass around the same folded $20 bill.3 They were making money the way everyone’s parents did, off people who lived in a different part of the city. Online, people had discovered a photo of the pair with Andrew Cuomo during his failed mayoral run alongside a caption from Novakov that appeared to support the current Trump administration. (“#GreatMenComeFromQueens @andrewcuomo @realdonaldtrump.”)
It was peculiar, perhaps, to try to make this work in a neighborhood that split 80% for Zohran, more than any other neighborhood in the city according to the New York Times. But if Andrew Cuomo stood for anyone, it was for people making a living off brutally injured immigrants with a limited understanding of the English language or the US legal system.
After publication, Parker told me that she was not a supporter of Trump, actually. Novakov was. “We have different political views but we never let that come between us,” wrote Parker. In fact, Parker was particularly not fond of the ongoing war in Iran.
“I actually hate him, he bombed my country where I am from,” she added. Her feelings about Zohran and Cuomo were more than mixed too. She was in that photo next to Cuomo, but it was from “a lawyer networking event and he was there and of course I wanted a pic I would take a picture with any political person.”
“About Zohran, I was so happy when he won because he is Muslim, like me, but I do not 100% agree with everything he’s doing for businesses,” she added. “So I am still watching before I give my full opinion [about him]. I want to see what he do for NYC.”
Comments from the transplant community were mixed.
“A SATC themed cafe? Run by some trashy broads who look like they’re from Jersey? I get the hate,” a former Ridgewood resident and Norma’s regular wrote me, after fleeing NYC for a house somewhere in the midwest. “The influx of tacky shit like this is what pushed me out.”
Others were suspicious that transplants like themselves would fall for what Carrie’s was selling.
“No presumably hip transplant in Ridgewood likes maximalist, themed, tacky cursive chalkboard aesthetics, let alone themes from an almost 30-year-old show whose protagonist is consistently dunked on by this same demographic,” wrote in one local restaurant worker who had moved into the area with a degree from a Massachusetts college.4
They continued: “The irony of it all is that the ‘oldheads,’ most of whom I don’t even empathize with because they’re largely right wingers who hate transplants, not because of actual gentrification, but because [we’re] left-leaning and call them on their bullshit—lucky for the ‘oldheads,’ the transplants make perfect scapegoats for the gentrification that’s actually caused by many of them, who are landlords, most of them think that transplants actually like these cringey, tacky storefronts, so this will give them yet another opportunity to scapegoat us, not realizing, because they are too stupid, that this shit only appeals to their very own tacky Republican middle aged children.”
“The hate against Carrie’s is implicitly pro-gentrification,” wrote in a different transplant, who had settled in nearby “East” Bushwick. “Even though transplants support some local and immigrant-run businesses, they feel the need to assert their right to curate what’s allowed to remain in the face of the change they produce.”
When I talked to Novakov, she took a longer view of the area’s history.
“I grew up in Ridgewood, I worked at every place on Fresh Pond Road. I used to work at Kraupner Pharmacy, Pants Pantry. And [Pants is] gone now. It was such an iconic spot. Nothing we can do about it,” she told me.
“We really want to be a part of the neighborhood because I’m from the neighborhood. I want to cater to everyone. I want to cater to the oldest, slavic people I know next door. I want to cater to all of Ridgewood, not just to the newer crowd, but also to the people who grew up here the same way that I did,” she told me. Something would be different about that, she told me. Norma’s, she said, was “more like get-your-ranchero-and-leave, and I want people to sit here and chill.”
She was nevertheless happy the area had changed, even if the people who moved in were, to some extent, less chill, and were, in fact, telling me that the decision had been reached to hate her guts because she hadn’t curated her beliefs or aesthetic well enough to match their own. Then again, what hasn’t she seen?
“I think having CityBikes across the street is the coolest, most gentrified thing ever,” Novakov told me. “The neighborhood used to be very unsafe. Like, you could not walk alone on Knickerbocker. It was really—” she lowered her voice “—ghetto.”
But things are different now.
“I love Rolo’s,” she told me. “I’m honestly so flattered to be down the street from a Michelin-listed restaurant. I think they did great for this community. I was telling one of my clients in the law field about Ridgewood and they were like, ‘Oh, that’s the new Dumbo.’ People are saying that about Ridgewood. I really think that’s true. I think that the value is just going to go up and up.”
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
- It was somehow the second time in my life as a reporter that I experienced someone using the Bradshaw name in this way, after once dispatching a columnist who described herself as “Bushwick Bradshaw,” who promptly got arrested outside Market Hotel. Hope you are well, Ms. Bradshaw! ↩︎
- She named her drink the Azizam, after the Persian word for “beloved,” and which has already been used for this purpose to name an Ed Sheeran song. The drink itself, made with a thick strawberry syrup, was delightful. I didn’t try the very colorful “Birthday Cake” latte, but it looked great too. ↩︎
- On that subject, one of the pair’s friends had arrived and insisted on paying with a crisp $50 bill, inscribing it with a good-luck message. Novakov taped it on the wall. ↩︎
- And part of a growing community: as likely future Ridgewood Assemblywoman Samantha Kattan once told me, “I actually went to Boston University not Boston College! If not too late to make that edit in the article.” ↩︎
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