On a cold, sunny day in December, I made my way from Upper Manhattan to downtown Brooklyn. I was on a hunt for Christmas gifts with meaning. I pulled my empty bag towards my coat as I walked toward a store where I’d find readable, edible goods to fill it with: BEM Books & More, one of the only Black-owned, food-centric bookstores in the United States.
Sisters Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport created and have operated this delicious dreamworld in Brooklyn since 2021. The bookstore stocks cookbooks by Black chefs as well as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and childrens’ books that are related to food and written by Black writers. Their selection, which is available online, always includes new releases like Ghetto Gastro’s Black Power Kitchen and Tanya Holland’s California Soul, which Gabrielle, a native Californian, says she “can’t stop gazing at.”
“We knew there were food bookstores in the world and lots of wonderful Black-owned bookstores that we love, but we weren’t aware of a Black food bookstore,” says Danielle. “It felt like a really exciting, super tiny niche for us to dig into and to really think about all of the ways that food works in our storytelling and cultures.”
Based in Brooklyn, the sisters host pop ups across New York City—including a holiday popup at BRIC, an arts center in Brooklyn, this season—and maintain a large online selection of their products. They’re hopeful for an eventual permanent storefront, but in the meantime, they’re focused on the mission that fuels the bookstore: bringing joy to readers around the world through Black stories about the many wonders of food and cooking.
I sat down with the duo to learn what fuels the sisters, how they curate their selection, and what they’re reading now.
Why food?
Gabrielle: We both spent a lot of time in the kitchen with our mom growing up, especially when I was younger. I was on dessert duty, and mom and sister would handle dinner—it was a whole whole thing. As we grew up and moved into our own houses, so many of our conversations were around what we were eating, or cooking, or what groceries we were buying and from where. We figured, if we like talking about this as much as we do, surely there are other folks too, who want to be in these conversations with us and with each other and with the authors and chefs who are actually creating all this work that we’re so excited about.
We had been talking about wanting to open a business together well before the pandemic. At one point, we thought we could open a home goods store. And there’s a hint of that in BEM and what we’re doing now. We talked about opening a general interest bookstore. But it was exciting to land on something we actually haven’t seen yet. We haven’t heard about something like this, and we thought it would be a fun creative challenge to figure it out.
