Bengal News West Reporters
The retail strip of the West Side known as Grant Street has seen a great deal of change over the past couple of decades. With the introduction of African and southeast Asian refugees to the area there has come a change in the businesses – particularly in its food markets and restaurants.
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Take a walk down from the campus of SUNY Buffalo State, and as the rows of houses and community centers give way to business, the number of ethnic food and clothing stores becomes apparent.
“It’s amazing, to see how diverse it all is,” Grace Guercio, part of the family who owns Guercio and Sons, Inc., a grocery store that has stood at 250 Grant St. since 1961.
She has been involved with the business for 10 years, and she remembers the neighborhood as being mostly Italian before she joined the store. Now, she said, the shopkeepers see everyone from Somalis to Muslims come to buy their wares.
As a result, Guercio’s still has a heavy Italian influence, but among the jars of olives and bags of pasta one can find rice of every variety, from long-grain white to sushi and purple sticky rice. There are also coffees from Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Sumatra (an island in Indonesia) as well as the United States, Italy and Colombia. Gluten-free varieties are even available.
Guercio said the store’s stock is based on demand and what it can order from its markets, which are largely based in bigger cities like New York; however, Guercio and Sons does carry plenty of specialty items, and the store is open to requests from customers.
“Basically, whatever you’re looking for, that you can’t find in other stores like Wegmans or Tops, we’ll try to get for you,” she said.
Other stores like Vineeta International Foods, at 98 Grant St., just about five blocks south of Guercio and Sons, cater to specific ethnic crowds. The shelves hold different types of flours, rice and spices specific to the foods those from Southeast Asia know and love.
Another spot on Grant Street known for its cultural flair is the West Side Bazaar at 25 Grant St., a part of the Westminster Economic Development Initiative. The brightly-lit storefront, which started in 2009, is home to a number of clothing spots and restaurants providing Burmese, Ethiopian, Laotion, Peruvian and Thai cuisine.
WEDI’s executive director, Benjamin Bissell, said the point of the Bazaar is to help those in the community essentially create their own market based on what their needs are.
“We don’t directly encourage people to create certain goods for the community,” he said. “We let them decide that for themselves.”
Good business planning, he said, stipulates that you create a business plan based on the needs of the community you plan to serve, and so owners will state in their plan what the need is and how they will serve it.
“We let the market essentially decide,” he said. “If you offer product and people have the ability to buy it, then that’ll kind of show whether they will be there selling it.”
Manager Michelle Holler has been a part of the process for just three months, but she first came to the Bazaar for the food and loved it.
“The food is a huge hit on the West Side,” she said. “It’s actually doing a lot better than the retail side right now, but hopefully that will change when summer comes.”
Indeed, the Bazaar is filled with the smell of spices, meat and coffee, and people of all ethnicities mill about. Holler said the presence of restaurants that provide a taste of home for the refugees in the area also has fostered a sense of community for customers and vendors alike.
She pointed out Kyen Sein Hein, a Burmese eatery owned by Soe Maung, and said: “Every single day, he has a huge following of Burmese people that come here, his family, his friends. Just to be able to come in here and speak the language and to have the sense of community is huge.”
Those who are interested in experiencing different cultures also get their fix. Maung said scores of people from the city and suburbs come to sample the Bazaar’s offerings.
The West Side has proven to be a breeding ground for those of all nationalities and creeds to offer a piece of their homeland to those in the area, and the diversity is encouraging to Bissell.
“Our (WEDI’s) goal is community and business development,” he said. “We’re here to support all businesses, and provide more healthy food options, more food options in general – just more options, and it’s great. I’m very excited to see that.”
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