Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood, I always felt that Desi and Jewish culture were similar. Unlike WASPs, we’re big into food, we have warm but meddlesome families, and we love to argue. So I was tickled brown to see a recent report of a desi bagel and bialy store owner named Ravi Agarwal who opened his third store in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He seems to make a pretty mean bagel, and his bialys are even better.
And no, it’s not a shanda for brown (non-Jews) to make Jewish food. Earlier we wrote about how a desi is the source for the perfect egg cream. And although it’s a different shade of brown, New York’s most famous bagel store, H&H Bagels, was founded by brothers-in-law Helmer Toro and Hector Hernandez.
My favorite aspect of this story — as reported by the Grey Lady — is that Agarwal’s ethnicity is never alluded to at all. It’s simply about how he, as a businessman from outside the neighborhood, goofed up in naming his bagel shop “Arena Bagels and Bialys”:
Mr. Aggarwal’s two teenage children had suggested the name after reading online about the planned new home of the New Jersey Nets. He thought it was a smart idea; the shop is in Park Slope, a few blocks from the site of the proposed Barclays Center arena, part of the [controversial] Atlantic Yards development…Soon, however, workers in the space began noticing negative reactions from passers-by… A few people even entered the shop to complain. And then a few more. In all, Mr. Aggarwal said, 20 or 25 unhappy people trooped in.
Mr. Aggarwal… quickly figured out that a word that is innocuous in Queens — he lives in Forest Hills, near one of his other two bagel shops — may be anything but innocuous in Brooklyn. [Link]
The problem was that many locals oppose the Atlantic Yards project, including the Arena, and so they pressured the shop as their way of voicing dissatisfaction with the development plan.
In this case Aggarwal screwed up because he’s an ousider, but by outsider the journalist means a businessman from Queens rather than an immigrant, a brown-man, or even a non-Jew. It’s just good local reporting.
[The original story in The Brooklyn Paper does mention that he’s an imigrant from Punjab, but only in the context of saying that he was a hard working man who worked his way up from dishwasher only to have his business get caught in a local battle over the stadium.]
