Middle America's Mecca

Where spice is still sold by the pinch

Before Muhammad was born there and made it a mecca, Makkah was a city of caravans. The spice trade made its detour through Arabia after the traditional routes became too murderous. In the west, a mecca has come to mean any place of attraction.

William Klentos and James Pinos opened Mecca Coffee Company in 1921, on Boulder Avenue. Jim Economou, of the Coney Island Hot Weiner Shop, remembers when one of them would come into the Greek Orthodox Church, their clothes reeking sweetly of roasted coffee. The old Mecca, he told me, would roast a blend to your specifications while you waited. Who would offer that now? Who would wait?

But Mecca sold spices, too, and cheese and olives and a thousand and one other Old World novelties during a time when a bowl of chili was Okie manna.

Mecca is now on Brookside, in a strip center it shares with a Laundromat. Parking a car there is like folding a cowboy boot into a shoebox. Before I began buying spices at Mecca, I bought them off the rack, the McCormick assortment over by the flours, all the tidy vials of indiscriminate size. I’d pinch out of the same jar of cream of tartar for years.

Spices are like relatives. Only a handful do you really call upon, and the rest you tend to avoid.

The Klentos and Pinos of the day are Michelle and Charlie Culbreath. Michelle mans, as it were, the shop. She and a handful of other women whose names are not as familiar to me as the Tellicherry, Juniper, and Star Anise they proffer. The Mecca website says they stock 150 spices priced economically by the ounce. “Shop us and compare,” it reads. I have, and nothing does.

We all used to see more of Charlie, before the latest boom dragged him back into that other field of Culbreath Oil & Gas. I miss Charlie, who used to allow me into his cooler for samples of his latest batch of coffee porter or India pale.

I usually visit Mecca on Saturdays so I can take my time, and I spice up about every 10 weeks. It takes that long to run out of cumin and coriander, seasoning salt and black Malabar pepper, nutmeg (at Mecca, it comes in actual nuts that you grate into a magic that is nothing like the powder) and vanilla (beans, which I bury in a tub of sugar, thus flavoring a million grains), and paprika, Hungarian and smoked.

I study the rows of glass containers and make my choices. Things like Grains of Paradise and Herbes de Provence. Places you want to get to some day but might never. I call them out one by one and they are scooped into the copper bowl of a scale that measures in hundredths of ounces. I’ll buy seven or eight spices at a time, and it takes several minutes for this barter to go down. I’ll spend $20 dollars, a math that mystifies and slightly terrifies me.

In these days of packaged lettuce, it seems preposterous that anybody in retail would take the time to ladle spices an ounce or two at a time. It seems Roman. So, as Mecca sifts my semi-annual measure of ground chipotle, I pontificate—randomly, wildly, Socratically—and gladly pay.

Things are changing, though. Gone are the rices and salts and savory sundries that had a hard time carrying their weight in the aisles of Mecca and, in their place, self-help olive oil and vinegar bars. They lend an industrial, if exotic, aspect to the mix. Mecca’s always been a good spot to locate a paring knife or a solid set of tongs. The tongs I bought there still, 15 years later, snap like an alligator. But that aspect, too, seems threatened by the widening reach of Amazon.

Some people use the post office for therapy. I get my fix in the spice jars of Mecca. Buy a spice online? How do you smell that?

I work and play in Midtown and dwell vaguely south. There’s a Mecca at 101st and Sheridan that I’ve never been to. Some day, I’ll make a pilgrimage. But Mecca will always be Brookside to me, where it fits nice and snug with the rest of the spice trade that colors the old Ribbon.

A woman named Jo took care of my spice fix for years, until one year she died. I didn’t know her from Eve, only behind the spice counter at Mecca, but I miss her all the same. Like a familiar curry blend that hides in an unlabeled tin in the back of the pantry, out of sight if not of mind.

Mark Brown is the author of “My Mother is a Chicken” (This Land Press, 2012).