New York City has around 13,000 bodegas. These neighborhood institutions — part grocery store, part sandwich shop, part coffee shop — are key nodes in the city’s network of social infrastructure. They are places where New Yorkers engage in what Samuel Delany calls contact: the fleeting moments of connection with strangers that may not seem like much but can become the building blocks of community support systems during a crisis. Frequenting bodegas during some of our rawest and more vulnerable moments, we practice public intimacy. When we buy frozen dinners because we are too exhausted to cook for ourselves, when we are sick and drag ourselves out of bed to buy tissues and cold medicine, when we are on our periods, when we need hangover cures, when we need condoms, and when we indulge in late night guilty pleasure snacks. For Jessica Angima, like so many residents of North and Central Brooklyn, the grocers known as Mr. Fruit are cornerstones of care for self and community. – DL & LY
Mr. Carrot is 0.4 miles walking distance from my home. I make the trip weekly. It’s become a ritual of sorts: drafting a list of ingredients, grabbing a canvas bag, driving the vehicle of my body along the same streets there and back, selecting my produce, paying, unloading my goodies, and packing them away at home.
Repeating this process each week shifts my mind to contemplation and care. There’s the meditative quality of the walk, in which I feel my feet on the sidewalk beneath me and observe details along my route. I note what is static (the magnolia tree in front of a building) and what is shifting (the building has a box of free things outside, the magnolia tree is in bloom). I reflect on the events of my day, process a thought about work, leave a voice note for a friend, listen to local news. Then, at Mr. Carrot, the satisfaction of crossing items off my grocery list. I reaffirm my commitment to self-care. Yes, I will feed myself. Yes, I will nourish my body. Yes, I will care for myself.
In my twelve years living in Brooklyn, the micro-chain of green grocers colloquially known as “Mr. Fruit” has also been integral to how I take care of my loved ones. Last fall, when my best friend called me, sick in bed and unable to keep food down, I traversed the 1.5-mile distance to her place, stopping at Mr. Carrot to pick up a small care package of supplies: saltines, bananas, and Advil. In the long heat waves of summer 2024, before meeting friends at Fort Greene Park, I stopped by Mr. Mango to contribute snacks: grapes, tortilla chips, and Abraham’s Traditional Style Hummos. Going to a dinner at my friend’s place in Greenpoint, I stopped at Mr. Berry to pick up a gift: fresh flowers.
This care for myself and others is in turn dependent on an intricate network of labor, from the farmers who cultivate the food to the truck drivers who transport it here. The produce journeys from all over the world to the Bronx and then to Brooklyn to get to my home. Mr. Fruit’s Operations Supervisor, John Yoo, reports making daily trips to Hunts Point in the early morning hours, securing the freshest produce of the day in bulk. For every bundle of green onions or almost ripe peach that I select, there are many unseen hands working through the small hours of the morning at Hunts Point Produce Market, through extreme heat and cold, through rain and snow, to provide a consistent food supply to New York City.
Dappled throughout Northern and Central Brooklyn, Mr. Fruit offers consistency across its ten stores. Comfort, regardless of which location you stumble on. You can expect to be met with produce spilling onto the sidewalk, and a fresh juice bar inside. The Mr. Fruit grocery chain is owned and operated by Korean American brothers Jack, Joon, and Jun Yoon. Incorporated as KiCoPi LLC (a portmanteau of the first three stores, Mr. Kiwi, Mr. Coconut and Mr. Piña), each Mr. Fruit takes on the moniker of a fruit or vegetable.
Each store provides an immediate sense of intimacy, while seeming to reflect the unique energy of the neighborhood. Mr. Kale (Crown Heights) is the most compact of the stores. There’s a delightful Tetris-like feeling to the layout, each item clicking into its allotted space. Mr. Kiwi (Bushwick) is the most frenetic, perhaps a reflection of its location right under the elevated Myrtle Avenue and Broadway JMZ subway station.
As Heather, a long-time member of my local community garden, put it, “I have had intimate relationships with Mr. Melon, Mr. Kiwi, and most recently Mr. Kale, which I think may be my favorite. This is a topic I feel strangely sentimental about because I associate each chapter of my Brooklyn existence with a different Mister.”
Last year, Grub Street senior writer Chris Crowley published an article titled “Do You Know Mr. Mango?” evoking enthusiastic response among store patrons in the comments section of the article’s Instagram post. Several people commented on how they had met their partner at Mr. Beet (Boerum Hill) or how their best first date ended in a late-night snack run to Mr. Lemon (Bushwick). During a Brian Lehrer Show interview with Crowley, Mr. Fruit loyalists took to the call lines, shouting out their favorite locations and sharing moments of personal connection with the chain.
Mr. Fruit is one place where we orient ourselves within a particular neighborhood. The love language of urban environments speaks in the mundanity of perfunctory errands that embed us in our geography. Mr. Fruit becomes a site of intimacy, transforming rote interactions into deeper ways of relating to the people and spaces in the city we navigate.
There is possibility, a tenuous energy, that exists between soon-to-be-lovers, or soon-to-be friends, shopping together in one small space. They are watching what snacks the others prioritize placing in the cart, rehearsing domesticity, perhaps making a note for a future gesture of care. Mundane acts usually performed in isolation, now witnessed, foster intimacy between two people. The poetics of the space open up the possibility for this connection, moving us beyond the tedium of purchasing groceries into a shared experience.
