Rebuilding After Losing The Lease on a Shop

By PAUL LIN

After Rochelle Zabarkes's landlords failed to renew her lease in New York's Grand Central Terminal, the spice and condiments purveyor had to mark down products by 20% to 25% to clear out her entire stock, and then went to “buy one, get one free.”

On the last day of the store, items were down to $1 apiece. “There was not one dented can left,” she marveled when the shop she ran for seven years, Adriana's Caravan, closed in March.

This is the reality of shutting down a store you -- and your customers -- love. Profit suffers from the fire sale; revenue suffers from loss of foot traffic, and then there are leftovers. Ms. Zabarkes wonders when $16,000 worth of custom cabinetry from her defunct store will sell on Craigslist.

Still, she’s starting fresh, since she had to quickly liquidate her retail space. And she’s slowly working to reinvent and rebuild her business.

Ms. Zabarkes now meets customer demand for her 1,500 items through her Web site (www.adrianascaravan.com) which is updated weekly. She first launched it in 1998 and redesigned it in 2003. She is planning to send out a printed catalog in the fall, and is also considering starting a wholesale business.

With her retail space gone, it’s all happening in Ms. Zabarkes’s loft in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. As she described her business rising from the ashes, a visitor couldn’t help but notice an intense, smoky, herby aroma, a scent so potent, it smelled almost illegal. “Smoked paprika,” beamed the feisty 63-year-old grandmother. The unusual product comes from Cattleman's Smoked Products on Long Island, and exclusively distributed by Ms. Zabarkes.

Using regular paprika instead of this more aggressive kind in a chicken stew, she explained, would be like flavoring with "pocket lint versus spice. It's not for the faint of heart."

The same could be said about Ms. Zabarkes, who has sold spices, exotic flavorings, hot sauces and more for about 15 years. The Grand Central Terminal shop was her second shop to close in 12 years, even though her rent “was paid to the penny,” she said, a much different scenario from 1994, when she was forced to close her first New York store amid a financial squeeze after her rent was raised. She fought to keep that store open even as she recovered from a mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Spicing up people's cooking is Ms. Zabarkes's second career. For decades, she did commercial art and audiovisual slide presentations for IBM and AT&T.

This time, the loss of her shop has been neither as dire on a personal level, nor has it been a complete financial disaster. At Grand Central, "I was making $500,000 a year. If I'm lucky, I probably will make $75,000 this year," said Ms. Zabarkes. But given the sudden 92% plunge in rent -- to $400 a month from $5,000 -- a drop in expenses like insurance, and a decline in staff to 3 from 8 people, she may still turn a profit this year.

Still, she frets about her former employees and keeps track of how they are doing. "I've always hired older men and women, people who were not anybody else's first pick," she said. She was able to give those who were let go a severance bonus, though she says it was "smaller than it should have been."

Ms. Zabarkes’s personal touch and flair have helped her succeed in drawing media attention without spending much on marketing. She said her store was in every travel guide in New York and garnered "over 200 articles and mentions in seven years."

Foodies also raved about her spices, said Ms. Zabarkes, from Gourmet magazine to the Manhattan User's Guide. And online, she’s been cited by cooking diva Nigella Lawson as a resource. Adriana's Caravan was recently mentioned on the Today Show by Hillary Mendelsohn, author of The Purple Book, a guide to the best online vendors, Ms. Zabarkes said.

Adriana's Caravan was one of the tenants invited in the late 1990s by the original developers of the Grand Central Market, to bring "the best of New York" retailers and revive the terminal after decades of deterioration.

"The quirkiness of her merchandise, the creativity of her taste, imports from all over the world were all together in this little space. That made it always an adventure," said Judith Fried of Manhattan, who made a point to stop by the shop -- named after Ms. Zabarkes's daughter -- to buy gifts for family. "Not only did I shop there, I brought people there who would never go to Grand Central."

She's eager to reopen her shop and actively looking for a new retail space in the city, but is being careful in her search. There are more retailers, including grocer Whole Foods, carrying spices and Ms. Zabarkes is wary of losing her niche. She has considered space in a new development on Manhattan's Lower East Side, but is worried she'll have to wait too long to build traffic in the neighborhood.

"I love being a retailer," she said, but "I simply do not want to be struggling with a store when I'm 70."

Meanwhile, the tiny 238-square foot space she occupied in Grand Central will soon be filled by national spice chain Penzey's. So the business of spice selling will go on, but some customers say New York -- for now -- has lost some local color and flavor.

“Penzey’s is a wonderful organization for spices, but they don’t have the kind of panache that Rochelle has,” said Dalia Carmel, a local who used to buy Syrian Aleppo pepper from Ms. Zabarkes’s store.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, owner of Grand Central Terminal, stands by its decision not to renew Ms. Zabarkes’s lease. “It was an opportunity to keep the terminal fresh and changing, and we took it. Nothing negative, just a little tweaking,” said the MTA’s Director of Grand Central Terminal Development Nancy Marshall.