Immigrants fuel Salt City

In line, Jake Gioiosa and Hannah Costeira, visiting from Bedford, Massachusetts, waited for their first taste of Singh’s Indian food. As first-time visitors to the market, they hadn’t realized they were about to support one of the six immigrant-run businesses housed in Salt City Market. 

“Amazing,” Gioiosa said when he learned this. 

For Costeira, the discovery felt like home. 

“We come from an immigrant city,” she said. “So coming here, you can see remnants of it from home. It just feels very homely and like they actually put effort into it.” 

CJ Butler, marketing and communications manager for the Allyn Family Foundation, which owns and operates the Salt City Market echoes Costeira’s remarks. 

“You have to be very intentional about taking down those barriers,” Butler said. “That’s really the mission of the market to take down those barriers and to uplift and create spaces where women, minority-owned businesses (and) new American businesses can thrive,” Butler said. 

For vendors like Singh, that intentional support has made all the difference. After living in Syracuse for 20 years, he opened his first Masala Heaven in Cicero to fill a gap he saw in the community.

“I just want to do good food like we are missing that food in (the) Syracuse area,” he said. “A lot of Indians, not even (just) my family, we were driving to Toronto, New York City, either we go to India. We (were) running for good food. That’s what I want to provide to people here.”

But the Cicero location struggled to attract customers. 

“I mean, I did it for good food and I don’t know why there was not much crowd there,” Singh said. 

The Salt City Market location changed that. Singh said the downtown location is more accessible, perfect for office workers and customers who do not have cars or can’t afford the ride to Cicero. With the market’s help, Singh hopes the word-of-mouth success downtown will be enough to save his struggling original location. 

“We got a lot of word of mouth. We had it before too,” Singh said. “We (are) still keeping the location because that is our main (location), so hopefully with this location we can save our sister one too.”

Like Singh, Latoya Ricks, owner of Erma’s Island and one of the original vendors since the market’s opening in 2021, struggled to find food that reminded her of home after arriving from Jamaica at 19 years old. 

“There was a lot of fast food; that’s not something that we were used to,” Ricks said. “Back in Jamaica, you know, you may eat it once in a while back then, but it’s like a commodity because you couldn’t afford to buy it even if you wanted it.” 

About 15 years after Ricks resettled in Syracuse, when the Allyn Family Foundation began recruiting vendors for Salt City Market, Ricks saw her chance. 

“The market was just up and coming. They’re looking for people that, you know, have the ability or the talents, but they may not have the resources to open up their own food business,” Ricks said. 

For aspiring entrepreneurs like Ricks, the biggest barrier was not talent or ambition, it was access to necessary resources. 

“You can have the best food in the world, but if you don’t know how to fill out a health permit or, you can’t take the risk of opening a restaurant because you have children to feed,” Butler said.

The Allyn Family Foundation addresses these challenges through subsidized rent and business support. Salt City Market vendors pay rent about 60% lower than market rate, Butler said. Market staff also provides technical assistance with accounting, marketing, operations and menu creation.  

“As small business owners, you really have to be a jack of all trades and it can be really difficult when you are not well-versed in certain areas,” Butler said. “So we want to make sure that we’re always stepping up to provide assistance for our vendors.”  

For Ricks, the foundation’s help in advocating for loans with the bank was crucial. She didn’t have much credit at the time and had nothing to show banks she would be able to make money back through a business. The Allyn family reached out to banks on her behalf to convince them her business would work. 

The foundation’s mission extends well beyond financial and technical assistance to the building’s design. They wanted to create a space that felt welcoming to everyone, not just vendors.

“Some of the feedback we got was that there are a lot of places in Syracuse where if you don’t look a certain way or have a certain amount of money, you don’t feel welcome or you feel barred from that space,” Butler said.

Butler says that the building features large glass windows allowing people to peek inside before coming in and see that the space is open and inviting. 

Butler, who has been working with the foundation since 2020, said that watching the success of vendors has been one of the best parts of her job. 

“It does something to you when you watch another grown adult’s dreams come true,” Butler said. “It really is a very emotional experience. We have vendors who before they came into this space, they never thought that they would own a home. We have vendors who have now owned homes, (and) they purchased cars. Vendors who are able to send their children to private school and not to mention our vendors who have opened additional locations of their restaurant.”

Ricks is among those who purchased a home and is expanding her business. She’s opening a full-service Jamaican restaurant in Armory Square at the former Modern Malt location, hoping to elevate perceptions of Jamaican cuisine and show it can be a fine dining experience. 

“I’m hoping to do an elevated version of Erma’s Island,” Ricks said. “I’ve always seen myself doing something a little better, like nicer,” Ricks said. 

Beyond accomplishing her lifelong dream of opening a Jamaican restaurant, opening in Armory Square holds personal significance. 

“It feels good to be in that space close to possibility and well-known establishments,” Ricks said. “Especially as a female and even as a person of color to be able to be among those established businesses.”