The Taste That Built My Childhood

Artwork by Vasu Arora

A few years have passed since my grandmother died, but her house in Whitestone, Queens, still feels alive with her routines. The faint smell of espresso lingers in the kitchen, and her large wooden rosary beads hang from the portico, just where she left them. On my last visit, while opening the junk drawer to find Werther's Originals, I came across a stack of old restaurant menus. They were soft at the edges, creased from years of use, and marked with her looping handwriting, phone numbers, notes about prices, and stars beside her favorite dishes. 

Each one felt like a small map of my childhood, guiding me through the places my grandmother used to take me, the stops that shaped our weekends: the restaurants, bakeries, and markets across Queens. There was the pizzeria around the corner where Elio always cut my slice in half without asking, and the German bakery where Sonja tucked a honey-crusted strudel into a paper bag before I could even point to it. And then there were the afternoons we’d visit her friend’s house, Stata Baba, an old baba, a great-grandmother, who was always cooking something. Her apartment was thick with the smell of roasted chicken or fish and crispy, freshly fried potatoes waiting in a bowl lined with paper towels. She would wave me in with her wooden spoon and insist I eat right away, before my coat was even off. Sometimes Stata Baba would pour small shots of rakija she’d made from the fruit in her backyard, sometimes peaches, sometimes figs, hand one to my grandmother, and they’d clink glasses. “Medicine,” my grandmother would say, laughing before taking a sip.

The menus also carried the memory of our drives to Astoria, where my grandmother, before dementia stole her ability to drive, would switch to Croatian the moment we stepped into the butcher shop. The men behind the counter knew her by name, always ready with a story or a question about her family: asking how her brother, the chef out on Long Island, was doing, or mentioning how her sister, who’d spent a year in New York decades ago, had left quite an impression on everyone she met. I remember the glass cases lined with neat rows of raw ćevape, small, hand-formed sausages ready for grilling, and stacks of cured meats wrapped in paper. Shelves above the counter were crowded with imported Croatian cheeses from the islands of Pag and glass jars of marinated eggplant, perfect for spooning over freshly grilled meat. The cool air was thick with the smell of garlic and fresh meat. 

Next door was the bakery where she bought burek, flaky, buttery, stuffed with cheese or spinach, and where Croatian and Serbian women stood shoulder to shoulder, speaking softly as they waited in line. There was a quiet civility between them, an ease that felt almost sacred, even though the not-so-distant war had divided their homelands and torn through so many families’ lives. Here, among the scent of pastry and coffee, they seemed to choose connection over history. 

What I remember most wasn’t just the food, but the rhythm of those afternoons: the way the paper bags felt warm on my lap in the car, the way she’d sing Ave Maria in her beautiful soprano voice, and the way she’d say, “We’ll eat when we get home,” even though we’d always tear into something before we got there. At home, the kitchen counter always had room for plates, where Baba would stack her palacinke, thin crepes dusted with sugar and topped with fruit, one on top of another, until the tower leaned slightly to the side.

Now, when I sit at her kitchen table with the menus spread out before me, it feels like she’s still here, somewhere in the ink, in the folds of the paper, in the recipes that connected us. The food, more than anything, is how her memory stays alive.

Gia Randich

Art by Vasu Arora