Dear Editor:
Don’t go yet Ray. Hoboken needs you. The Secret Ingredient is more than just a cafe. It’s an island of caring community in a world that’s becoming more corporately sterile with each passing day.
Somehow it made me happy just to glance at the cheerful yellow awning and cartoonish Secret Ingredient lettering on the storefront window. Others apparently felt this way too. Recently I had taken to writing in my favorite window seat and would marvel at how many faces melted into smiles as people passed by the Secret Ingredient. The magic of this place called to you from the sidewalk.
Once inside the happy yellow world of the Secret Ingredient, you felt instinctively that you were in a kind, gentle place. Compare, for instance the colder, business-like tone of a Starbucks employee: “Tall or grande?” with the sensitive, touchingly shy “two sugars or three” of a Secret Ingredient helper who cares about just how sweet you want your coffee. Love has the power to infuse a place. In Ray and Bobby’s world, people mattered. Visits there were tiny, life-affirming experiences. I felt a genuine feeling of connectedness in the place that never failed to enlarge my sense of humanity — even if I was just running in to grab a bagel. Everything about it seemed touched by an almost spiritual sense of joy: the aesthetic decor, love-baked treats as pleasing to the eye as the palette and most crucially healing and connecting conversations that can only be born in a care-rich environment.
On a recent Saturday afternoon I took my 11-year-old daughter and her girlfriend to an arts reception at the Secret Ingredient. Luckily, we got a window seat! That day I discovered what a kid-friendly environment the Secret Ingredient is. My daughter and her friend had a valuable exposure to modern art (they even chatted with the artist!) as Bobby, in his ever-thoughtful way, played up the moment by bringing the girls lots of free hors d’oeuvres. It’s a day that continues to resonate magically for me. Fusing with other Secret Ingredient memories, it whispers hopefully of a possible future in which the terrible silences and social paralysis of our times might one day be overcome.
Neighbors mourned the demise of the Secret Ingredient like a death in the family. A spontaneous display of cards and letters appeared overnight on the storefront window, revealing the unique affection people had for the place. As folks clustered on the sidewalk to read these signs and share their feelings of shock and dismay, they produced a spontaneous moment of genuine community that’s rare in these alienating times.
Though it’s hard to get around the tax man, the kind of social capital Ray provided the community would be given more weight if a politics of meaning, rather than a bottom-line “show me the money” selfishness, was more predominant in our society and government. We need to change the paradigm in our shallow culture to value an ethos of love and caring, which Ray showed us are the real secret ingredients.
John Bredin