Park Slope has grown wealthier, its residents’ palates more adventurous. And the war that drove the owners of this small gourmet market to America has long since come to a close.
Inside the shop, though, with its faded bins of fragrant spices, open barrels of coffee beans and crowded prepared-foods case, time softens and takes on sepia tones. A mother soothes her fussing toddler with a dried apricot, while Roger Salem, the kind-eyed, bearded co-owner, bags warm ciabatta for a young couple’s dinner. 

This is the way things have been — cluttered but enticingly homey — since Mr. Salem, 46, and his sister Nalie Salem, 60, took over an aging storefront on Seventh Avenue just shy of three decades ago. 

If the shop feels nostalgic for another time and place entirely, there is a reason.
The Salems’ grandparents, and then parents, owned a store and bakery in Btourram, Lebanon, a sleepy mountain town north of Beirut. “We would have eventually taken over,” Roger (pronounced roe-ZHAY) Salem said. 

Instead, the family fled Lebanon’s civil war along with more than half a million others. Their father was Christian and their mother Jewish, which made life in their homeland all the more fraught. 

Mr. Salem was a lanky 17-year-old when he landed in Bay Ridge’s Lebanese enclave in 1984. He felt drawn to Park Slope’s bohemian, small-village feel, but the neighborhood’s response to the market was lukewarm. 

“No one had heard of baba ghanouj or tabbouleh yet,” Mr. Salem remembered, “and we would throw away trays of food into the garbage.” The family tweaked its menu, adding dishes like baked ziti and chicken potpie, then slowly enticed customers with free spoonfuls of hummus or mujadara — a spiced dish of rice, lentils and caramelized onions.
Today, customers come precisely to stock up on labneh and rose water, as well as the prepared foods like bulgur salad threaded with cabbage and pomegranate seeds that Mouna Salem, another sister, makes in the tiny kitchen in back of the store. “It is a neighborhood treasure,” said Bobby Roelofs, 30, a lifelong Park Slope resident. “I come here to find ingredients the supermarket does not stock.” 

Many swear by the za’atar-covered flatbread. Others flock to the homemade hummus (including one variation made with wild black chickpeas), the grilled pepper and olive spread, and the homemade falafel and kibbe. 

The Salems import pistachio and sesame candies from an elderly Lebanese candy-maker — the same roving confectioner they used to run after in the streets of Btourram as children. The dense fig cakes made by another brother, Nabil Salem, come richly studded with dried fruit and nuts. And the bird’s-nest pastries, the baklava and the squares of semolina cake called namoura are painted with sweet syrup. 

“Our grandmother wrote all of her recipes down in a notebook — we changed nothing,” Mr. Salem said. So serious is the family about accuracy that when the notebook went missing over a decade ago, he said, they stopped making the dishes they did not have memorized. (The notebook eventually turned up in Mr. Salem’s home.) 

Among newer and sleeker Park Slope arrivals like Union Market or BKLYN Larder, D’Vine Taste can sometimes feel hidden in plain sight. The siblings expanded to an adjoining storefront in 2005 but returned last fall to their original configuration as the increasing rent became unsustainable. 

And yet the Salems have seen tougher times than these. They continue to stock the tightly packed shelves with farro flour pastas and pomegranate molasses, and offer samples and suggestions in a city where good olive oil is easier to find than good community. “What are you going to do?” Mr. Salem asked of the store’s recent downsizing with a gentle shoulder shrug. “We move on.”