Linnea Covington
THE PEOPLE AT Grande Monuments, a headstone shop on Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, take life, death and the body of Christ to a whole new level.
Lying next to a statue of the Virgin Mary, in front of a handful of polished headstones, are dozens of loaves of bread. “It’s here by popular demand,” says Jerry Ragusa, third-generation owner of the shop. “People come in and buy a monument and leave with three loaves of bread.”
The bread wasn’t always there. Ragusa started stocking it in February after his 18-year-old daughter Angela brought home extra loaves from Il Fornaretto, the Bensonhurst bakery where she worked.
Jerry took the leftover loaves from dinner and gave them to a couple he knew in the neighborhood.They shared it with other members in the community, and before he knew it, the neighbors were calling up the shop wanting more bread.
According to the Ragusas, the area lacks a decent bread shop. After scouring the neighborhood for a good spot to open a bakery, they found the rents were too high. “Do you know how many loaves that kid would have to sell?” Jerry asks, gesturing toward his daughter. A new shop was out of the question. So, Ragusa pushed Angela to strike a deal with Joey Maggiero, owner of the Bensonhurst bakery. After all, he thought, why not combine the two? Maggiero thought the idea of peddling bread from a tombstone boutique sounded crazy, but he agreed to supply them with the baked goods anyway—it’s Brooklyn after all.
Ragusa cleared a spot in the front window and stacked the bread on it, right next to the white Virgin Mary statue. It was an instant hit and sold out well before the shop closed for the day.
The venture continued to prove so successful that the original 12 to 20 loaves that the store stocked daily increased; now, the father-daughter team pick up 80 to 100 loaves every morning and bring them to the shop.
The bread costs $1 for a panini roll, $2 for a baguette-sized loaf, $3 for bigas-your-head rounds and $4 for the Friday-though-Sunday Prosciutto bread. All of it’s kosher and all of it’s baked daily; everything tastes delicious.
“People in the neighborhood say it’s the best bread,” says Angela. “It sells out daily by 4 or 5, and by 2 on the weekend.”
Shortly after she says this, James De Lorenzi timidly entered the shop. “I al ways walk by here on the way home and see the sign,” he tells me as Angela bags a loaf of twisted semolina and a baguette. “It’s always sold out.”
Sel de Mer, a new restaurant on the block, buys and uses Grande Monuments’ bread for it for meals, and Angela says that every morning the guy from the fish market down the street religiously stops in for his bread. No one seems to mind that he has to confront death to get at his carbs. Actually, Jerry tells me, it has brought life, and business, to the shop.
“Two people have come in for the bread,” he says, “and ended up getting a monument.”
> Grande Monuments
382 Graham Ave. (at Skillman Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-782-1800
LGC
