Greenwich Village Spice Shop With $5 Pepper: Sullivan Street

Sullivan Street Tea & Spice Company is a narrow spice shop at 208 Sullivan Street, a couple of blocks south of Washington Square Park, and it is open every day from 11 am to 7 pm. The room is packed to the rafters with glass jars of organic teas, herbs and spices, sold in 2-ounce, 4-ounce and 1-pound bags. It is the easiest place in the Village to pick up a single good spice without committing to a whole supermarket jar.

The storefront has a past that the jars don't advertise. A 2013 profile by Baruch College writing students describes how, from the mid-1960s, 208 Sullivan Street housed the Triangle Social Club, the blacked-out front room linked to the Genovese crime family and its boss Vincent "the Chin" Gigante. In March 2011 the Greenberg family took the space over and, in the profile's words, converted it with a hammer, cleaners, teas and spices.

The Greenbergs were not new to the trade. Siblings Jenny and Mark Greenberg had opened Grounded, an organic coffee and tea house in the West Village, in 2004, and the profile says rising tea sales there led them to look for a retail shop selling loose tea and spices. The shop's own homepage now says it has called Sullivan Street home for 15 years, and it has since added a second store in Stockton, New Jersey, on the Delaware River.

Start with pepper, because it is the cheapest way to taste the difference fresh stock makes. Black Tellicherry peppercorns are $5.00 for a 2-ounce bag, $9.00 for 4 ounces and $27.00 for a pound, all listed on the shop's online store. Szechuan pepper, the numbing kind used in mapo tofu and dan dan noodles, is the splurge on the same shelf at $22.00 for 2 ounces, so buy the small bag and grind it as you need it.

The chile flakes are where this shop beats a grocery aisle. Aleppo pepper is $9.50 for 2 ounces and Urfa biber, the dark, raisiny Turkish flake, is $8.00. For heat rather than flavor, the bird's eye chile, sold as peri peri, is $13.00 for 2 ounces. Ancho chili powder runs $11.00 for the same bag, and Spanish smoked paprika is $9.00, which is enough to cover a winter of roasted potatoes and chickpea stews.

Two pricier items are worth the money if you bake. Saffron threads are $12.00 for 1 gram and $20.00 for 2 grams, and Madagascar vanilla beans are sold singly at $6.75 each or ten for $54.00. Black cardamom pods, smoky and camphor-like, are $18.00 for 2 ounces and turn up in biryani and pho broths, so one bag lasts a long time.

The shop assembles most of its tea and spice gift sets by hand on site, using recycled pulp paper boxes, biodegradable cello bags and reusable glass vials. Its About page names the Culinary Salt Box as a huge seller. The current version, Salt of the Earth, is $34.00 for six glass vials in a wooden slide-top box, including Cyprus flake salt, French fleur de sel and hand-harvested grey sel gris.

The other local joke is the New York Pizza Rescue Kit at $17.00. Because the shop sits in what its own copy calls pizzacentric Greenwich Village, the kit pairs Italian black truffle salt, a house Italian seasoning of oregano, basil, marjoram, sage and garlic, and crushed Aleppo pepper to shake over a slice. It is a cheap, light souvenir for visitors who want something better than a fridge magnet.

The store is small, so weekday afternoons are calmer than Saturdays, when Village foot traffic spills in from Bleecker Street. The About page invites visitors to try a cup of freshly steeped tea and to sniff around, so ask to smell a jar before you buy. Buy the 2-ounce bag of anything you haven't cooked with before, and step up to the 4-ounce bag, labeled stock up and save, only for spices you already use every week.

If you can't carry much, everything on the shelf is also sold online at onSullivan.com. Orders of $70 or more ship free, and smaller orders ship for a flat $6.75, so it can make sense to taste a few things in the shop and order the heavy pound bags later. The shop's journal is still active, with posts from September and October 2026 on autumn cooking spices and chai.

Washington Square Park is a two-block walk north, so you can carry your bags past the arch and the fountain and sit on a bench to compare smells. Going the other way, Sullivan Street leads down into the old Italian South Village, past church fronts and small bakeries toward Houston Street. Bleecker Street, one block south, is lined with cafes and pizza counters if the Pizza Rescue Kit has made you hungry.

For a longer loop, walk west along Bleecker to Father Demo Square at Carmine Street, a small triangular plaza with a fountain, and then follow Carmine and Bedford Streets into the West Village. MacDougal Street, one block east of the shop, has old espresso bars where you can finish with a coffee and a cannoli before heading home with your spices.

Sullivan Street Tea & Spice Company, 208 Sullivan Street, New York, NY 10012, in Greenwich Village. Open daily 11 am to 7 pm. The closest subway stop is West Fourth Street–Washington Square on the A, B, C, D, E, F and M lines, about a five-minute walk. Prices in this article are from the shop's online store at onSullivan.com.