Salsa Gets a New Kinda Kick in Brooklyn

In these dire financial times, going back to the drawing board on simple pleasures like salsa might not seem like the most imperative of actions, but the argument could be made that improving on party staples is in fact, crucial. Matt Burns, Rob Behnke Bowman, and Jake O’Connor would certainly agree: they are the founders of the Brooklyn Salsa Company, and have single-handedly taken it upon themselves to make Brooklyn the red-hot center for great salsa. And why not? Salsa is a somewhat inexpensive concoction, but to the guys at the Bushwick-based company, it’s nothing less than an art that requires the finest ingredients.

“We just couldn’t stand it, we were so bored with conventional salsa, the preservatives and sugar and vinegar and bland flavors,” Burns says of the various jars that line the snack isles of local grocery stores. Burns, so fed up with these second-rate salsa varieties, took matter into his own hands. “I was making it fresh from home. So now we’ve got a brand that is 100% organic and 99% locally sourced through a direct trade model, only our tropical ingredients come from over seas and we’re hoping by the time we jar this summer we’ll have solidified our farmers for those as well.”
The very idea of a high-quality salsa being created in New York has always been sort of an inside joke among purists. In the 1980s, Pace Picante brand salsa launched an ad campaign featuring cowboys complaining about salsa made in “New York City”, calling to “get the rope” for a chef that suggested they use a jar manufactured on the East Coast. According to these commercials, any salsa made in New York was second-rate compared to Pace, supposedly made in San Antonio, Texas. So it might come as an even bigger shock to purists when they find that the idea for Brooklyn Salsa Co. was born in the converted Opera House lofts in Bushwick. As Burns tells it, “we started Brooklyn Salsa out of there first as a Vegan Taco Delivery service. We set up the kitchen every night for a huge chunk of that summer and friends ran our tacos out of there on bikes, boards and blades. We used OHL [Opera House Lofts] as our recipe laboratory but have never manufactured salsa out of there. The delivery service was a word of mouth, under the radar kind of thing for the Bushwick community to start spreading the word.” But the reality of the situation is this—North Brooklyn has fast become a hotbed for Mexican food. The Endless Summer taco truck is now a fixture on Bedford Ave., Union Pool has a taco truck stationed in their backyard, Papacitos is a true Greenpoint favorite, countless other small Mexican eateries have popped up all around the top of the borough, and Bushwick is the thriving capital of the tortilla—Burns notes, “the tortillias out here are for real!”
It’s the American dream to start a buisness, and to make a living by creating something you love. In the case of the founders of the small Brooklyn-based company, Brooklyn Salsa Co. also serves as something of a love letter to the city that they call home—their selections are named after each of the five boroughs—and what they hope will become the Mexican food capital of the East. Shockingly enough, their home turf isn’t the number one of the five different flavors; that honor goes to Queens. Using coconut milk, pineapples and a variety of sweet and hot peppers, the Queens variety is original, exotic and something of the crown jewel—it has sold out for the year. But, so have all of the other flavors; those hungry for the Brooklyn’s number one party food are going to have to wait just a little bit longer.