(Anchor) So I’m here today with Adam Steadman, the market manager for salt City Market, kind of a public market and occlude all that shows off Syracuse hidden gems I know we talked about earlier. It’s such a neat concept, because it’s really not only brings food together, but it brings cultures together. And you guys have everything from Jamaican foods, cocktail bar to a cafe. What is one things you feel like you guys are missing that you’re hoping to add?
(Adam Sudann) Oh, gosh, I mean, there’s so many things we’re missing, right? Right now we’re in the process where we would call it Thursday tryouts. We’re vetting new concepts, people that we sort of put out, cast a wide net to the community, I randomly walk around a lot of neighborhoods and harass people. bodegas and mosques and reading salons and everywhere else you can think of, to try to sort of like, get this opportunity on people’s radar, the opportunity being that we have a stall opening up. We’re looking to bring in new talents. And we have had some, you know, I’ll be honest, we’ve had some areas where I felt like, oh, gosh, I wish we could represent there or we run surveys for the community in the community have said, Hey, we want to see this. The one big one for us, you know, national cuisines, sort of Latin cuisines. We’re right on the, you know, our near neighbours here at the near west side. And so you’ve got, you know, quite a few people, Dominican and Puerto Rican. A few Mexican people, we actually, were working with someone last week from Jalisco state. So Latin food, Indian food has come up a lot. All sorts of cuisines come up a lot. We’ve got Haitian food next week. So the cool thing is that we have all these places that we haven’t covered, but there’s so much diversity in Syracuse, I, I know that that hidden gem, that person’s that dream is out there. So it’s cool to sort of dig in and see who who ends up finding their way in here.
(Anchor) Absolutely. And you mentioned it Syracuse does have so much diversity and culture. And I believe this has been kind of like an auditioning week of vendor started to come to you have is there been a few that I’ve spoke with you that really caught your interest that you think you might be leaning towards one or two, certain venue vendors.
(Adam Sudann)So we put the call out, we got lots of lots of lots of interest. We were talking before about the challenges of the restaurant industry. So part of our process was that I ran a an information session, you know, come one come off. And it’s funny to face the crowd. If you got 40 or 50 people facing us, you’re talking about what’s involved in this. And you can sort of read the room at about 20 minutes in, some people say, Oh, now, I’m not going to do that. It isn’t an enormous lift to head to toe in a restaurant, even in this supportive environment. So we did identify eight. And so I’m leaning towards all eight of these concepts that are trying out. And we’ve just had one last week with a very a taco concept tonight we’ve or tomorrow night, we got soup and salad next week, we’ve got at the LAO coming up, we’ve got all sorts of different concepts coming up. So we shall see. Yeah,
very exciting. Is there kind of anything you could give? I know, you don’t have a decision, but maybe something for the community, or to whoever this next vendor will
look forward to in terms of
kind of just like, I know, you mentioned to the salad. Yeah, like a taco bar? Like, is there just anything that they should know? That’s gonna get them excited? For maybe what’s the comp?
Well, I would, I would say, in terms of community engagement, we do. You know, we call it Thursday tryouts. So someone’s trying out. So around the corner from where we’re sitting right now, we have a teaching kitchen. Thursday night, starting at five o’clock, people pop up in here, we invite the community to purchase tickets ahead of time, but purchase a meal ahead of time, or just walk up and check it out. See how people are doing give us your feedback on a survey, we’ve dropped one in every bag. So we really want to hear from the community what they think as we try to make this decision together, and really, you know, this place has always been about reflecting the community, the community owning the place. And this, this feels like a critical way that they can play a real role in sort of life for the market.
And lastly, I know we spoke earlier, this place has really been a dream of yours and to see it come into fruition like what is just then your everlasting goal and continues to be your goal with the salt City Market.
Yeah, so our goals right now are to for twofold. And I’ll add a third one in a second here. But our goals coming out of the gate are, you know, the individual in the hole I sort of split it up with so if we start with the individual, we’re talking about individual businesses, being able to start to build generational wealth doing what they love doing, right? generational wealth, doing what they love. And so we’ve been pretty successful. We can’t use the word generational yet that takes a little time to sort of say we’ve achieved that right, or the individual businesses have achieved that But things are going really, really well. In that regard. The other thing that we look to do so that’s the individual the whole is, is to be a sort of Crossroads or a Gora or or place at Syracuse can come together, we are an infamously siloed community, you stay in your corner, she stays in her corner, he’s over there. Never the twain shall cross paths. That’s a boring way to live. It’s also a way that breeds distrust and fear it’s part of. It’s not healthy. And so we are excited to come in and sort of create a space where we can sort of cross paths, see other ways of living, other ways of looking at the world. I think that’s a really healthy thing for a community to have. And then our third goal, which I think will come with time, we’re still trying to sort of understand what that looks like is neighborhood development. So this is our flagship operation. We’ve got the place running, I think, relatively smoothly. It’s been a couple of years now. Now we’re looking at how do we launch people out of here into neighborhoods in a way that they can thrive but they’re also building up a block that’s already got some sort of energy, some some busyness to it. We’re trying to identify those those nodes in the city. So it’s not just an island. It’s actually a an archipelago
