With a JCC down the block and a Chabad on the next corner over, it’s not surprising that this New York City bakery sells rugelach.
But a look around the small shop won’t reveal the usual Jewish kitsch or stylized Hebrew writing on the walls. Rather, a picture of the Obamas hangs where the kosher certificate might be.
And instead of advertising an Ashkenazi name, the front window of Lee Lee’s Baked Goods on West 118th Street (near the corner of Frederick Douglas Boulevard) displays a picture of Alvin Lee Smalls, the store’s black proprietor. Below Smalls’ photo is his slogan — “Rugelach by a brother.”
Smalls, 75, has turned his unlikely business into a Harlem institution. For half a century, he’s had two missions: to introduce rugelach to his Harlem neighbors, and to keep the craft of artisanal, handmade rugelach-baking alive.
“It’s something I learned to bake, and people love it,” he said. “So they make me want to keep baking it.”
Smalls was working as a chef in a hospital in 1964 when he found a recipe for rugelach in the newspaper. He isn’t Jewish and hadn’t grown up with the pastry as a child in South Carolina, but decided to try it out.
His secret is butter. In the long-standing debate between dairy and pareve (non-dairy) rugelach, Smalls comes down firmly, and moistly, on the side of dairy.
He laments that most of the rugelach bakeries he enjoyed in the 1960s and ’70s aren’t around anymore. But with Harlem’s Jewish population booming, he hopes to stay in business for a while longer.
“Most of them either retired or passed away,” he said of his rivals. “Today’s rugelach are now made in the factory, not like the old-time rugelach.”