Scandalust313
Unshakeable Unbreakable Victorious
Gloria's Caribbean Cuisine at 764 Nostrand Avenue
For legions of hungry New Yorkers, the name Gloria conjures images of steaming goat curry, jerk chicken, and fried chickpeas dribbling out of craggy flatbread. Located on Nostrand Avenue and Sterling Place in Crown Heights, Gloria’s Caribbean Cuisine has served up authentic Trinidadian dishes from a colorful corner shop for nearly two decades. The family-run restaurant was immortalized in the finale of No Reservations, as Anthony Bourdain found himself in an impromptu reunion of The Wire while feasting on oxtail.
Then last week, Gloria’s went dark. Overnight, the bright green facade and its fading palm tree signage vanished, exposing bare plywood underneath. The news prompted a rush of mourning online — “this one hurts,” read one representative tweet — and on the street beyond the shuttered gate.
"I loved the fish and the cabbage there,” said Marie D, a 68-year-old Crown Heights resident from Haiti. “The Caribbean people, we ate a lot from them. It's good to have your food, your ethnic food."
Despite appearances, Gloria’s is not another COVID casualty. The storefront has stayed open and busy in recent months, and sent free meals to frontline workers during the darkest days of the pandemic.
The actual impetus for the restaurant’s closure stems from a byzantine legal battle, spanning nearly 20 years and more than a dozen civil court judges, attempting to get to the bottom of a seemingly straightforward question: Who owns 764 Nostrand Avenue?
In February of this year, Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Bruce Balter delivered his decision. Nicole Cumberbatch, the eldest daughter of the late restaurant founder Gloria Wilson, was found to have “unlawfully occupied” the building, under a convoluted deed theft scheme cooked up in 2001. In the view of Judge Balter, Gloria’s had successfully squatted for 19 years.
He ordered Cumberbatch to pay $50 million in damages — a sum that housing attorneys say is unheard of for such cases — and vacate the premises.
“I’ve never seen a judgment so harsh,” said Oda Friedheim, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society who specializes in deed theft litigation. “Even if they don’t get the $50 million, they can destroy her entire life.”
The future recipients of those hefty damages are Marty Riskin, a 92-year-old mortgage lender, and his controversial attorney, Ravi Batra. Nel-Del Realty, a real estate corporation set up by Riskin, and placed under Batra’s name, is now the rightful owner of Gloria’s.
“We own everything that Nicole Cumberbatch has, and that includes the name Gloria’s,” Batra told Gothamist. “All I have to do is say [the word] to the sheriff and he goes and seizes anything. The can of juice in her refrigerator, we own that.”
The former home of Gloria's in Crown Heights, as seen on Saturday
Gloria’s hasn’t yet been liquidated, and the defendant’s attorney is holding out hope for a new settlement agreement. But the stress of the court ruling has caused “the whole family to break down,” and left them no choice but to pack up the beloved shop, according to Gloria’s grandson, Bryan “BJ” Cumberbatch Jr.
“It’s cruelty. We can’t pay the money that Batra wants, so we’d rather walk away and let him keep his building,” BJ Cumberbatch said. While helping to run Gloria’s for the last ten years, the 39-year-old has lived above the restaurant with his wife and two daughters, paying rent to his aunt, Nicole Cumberbatch, he said.
On Saturday, as BJ Cumberbatch packed his family’s possessions into a van, he assured worried customers that the restaurant would return in a new form. A second Gloria’s, run by another family member and located near Empire Boulevard, is only closed for renovations, he said. But Cumberbatch admitted he wasn’t sure what would happen if the attorney followed through on his threat to seize all of the family’s assets.
“They’re trying to say my aunt stole a building?” he asked Gothamist, incredulously. “There’s just no way.”
Read rest of the article here: Gloria's In Crown Heights Abruptly Closes Amid Wild Claims Of Fraud, Deed Theft, And "Cruelty"
