Salim's, a pioneering purveyor of Middle Eastern foods in Bloomfield, sets closing date

Hal B. Klein / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For 45 years, Salim El-Tahch woke up around 5:30 a.m. to make his way from his home in Brookline to pick up supplies and start cooking Middle Eastern dishes for his small Bloomfield grocery and eatery, Salim’s Middle Eastern Foods.

Over the decades, Salim’s, 4705 Centre Ave., gained a legion of regulars, and curious newcomers still come by to see the treats stocked on his shelves and behind the counter.

“People come back and say I used to know you when you had hair,” he said when the Post-Gazette broke the news of his retirement in August.

Come October, El-Tahch will have a new routine: He’s set the store’s closing date for Sept. 29.

Citing time, age and health as reasons, he’s ready to retire when the lease on the building he’s rented since 1979 expires. He’s nearly 70, the age at which he long ago decided to retire. Both he and his wife are having health issues.

“Put those three together and it makes sense for me to go,” he said in August.

El-Tahch left Lebanon in 1978 during the early years of the country's civil war, which lasted until 1990. With family and friends already settled in Pittsburgh, he decided to study computer science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Instead, he fell in love, and, after a short courtship, married and had children. He dropped his university studies to earn money for his family.

During an English language class, he realized many people in Pittsburgh were also from Middle Eastern and Mediterranean countries and missed their native foods. This realization sparked an idea.

“They were studying English, just like I was, and they would always complain there was no place for them to buy Middle Eastern food, the food that they missed from home,” El-Tahch said. “And I thought, ‘Ah! This is the key. This is the key!’”

He learned how to cook his family’s recipes through sense memory and a lot of experimenting.

Opening a Middle Eastern grocery store in Pittsburgh in the late 1970s was tough going. There wasn’t yet much of a foundation for that kind of cuisine, so El-Tahch had to drive to New York to get many of the ingredients and supplies.

A gyro was a hard sell. A falafel sandwich? Forget about it.

“It's hard to believe, but people didn't really know what hummus was back then, what baba ganoush was. So you really had to explain that to people,” he said.

Eventually, he hired a trucking company to bring supplies in, and things generally got more manageable.

Hummus, falafel and baba ganoush are now commonplace dishes in the expansive American culinary lexicon. Supply chains and delivery methods are vastly expanded.

As one of Pittsburgh's Middle Eastern food pioneers, he knows he’s left his mark on the city. Now, he says, there is room for others to do the same.

“It's a bittersweet situation. I've done this for 45 years. So it's hard to walk away into something new. But it's also just the right time to do that,” he said.