, and they’ve been selling very well. She came across the sausage maker at a gift market her church hosted. She said, “I got back to my shop,, I sent my office staff a link and said, ‘Call him and see if he does anything but these little markets.’ And he said, ‘I will!’”A full-time store employee since she was 18, Sahadi Whelan is from Brooklyn, and talks like it. On the day we met she wore all black and seemed to begin one word before she’d finished the last.
Her store opened to serve the needs of Lebanese immigrants, but in the 1970s, when the neighborhood changed, Sahadi’s changed with it. “A lot of the Middle Eastern customers, they live in Jersey now,” Sahadi Whelan said. “They come in once every three months. I can’t exist on that business, nor do I want to.” Aside from the old reliables, the store’s offerings reflect the whims of the neighborhood as well as whatever strikes the fancy of whoever is in charge of the store.
To a certain extent, the offerings also reflect the nuances of sourcing from an unstable part of the world. There’s still a branch of the Sahadi family back in Lebanon that pitches in—they do quality control, they prepare the shipments and the paperwork.