The Greek market on South Broadway in Hicksville called New Bakaliko, whose owners said this week they hoped to sell and retire, holds close to $1 million worth of feta slabs, olive oil in three-liter canisters, spoon sweets and other assorted imported gustatory treasure.
You can have the business — though not the real estate, which is rented — for somewhere in the range of $350,000, George Miglis, who runs the market with his wife, Chrystalla, said one recent bittersweet morning. “It’s time to get off the boat and let the boat sink, or somebody else takes the wheel,” he said.
He is 69, she is 68. Their three children pursued other careers. They have not taken a vacation together since their honeymoon, close to half a century ago, because one of them always had to mind the store. In retirement, he said, “We’re going to go to Greece, Cyprus. We’re going to take a long weekend.”
Customers at Bakaliko treated this like a Greek tragedy. “All these products are from Greece,” said Marina Hirakis, of Old Westbury, who bought cake, spinach pies, cheese pies and olives. “We want that part, especially during the holidays, and it’s important for us to keep, even if it’s something simple, part of home, because Greece is home for all of us.”
Bakaliko — the word means grocery store in Greek — is not the only Greek market on Long Island but it is among the oldest. Its narrow sole aisle, with a little space carved out in front of the cash register, is the scene of something more than the mere exchange of money for goods. “They come here just to talk the language,” Chrystalla said. “They feel they’re in Greece.”
The store opened in 1987, drawing customers largely, though not exclusively, from a population of about 37,000 Long Islanders of Greek extraction. About 6,000 Greek-Americans lived in Oyster Bay at the time. George Miglis started working at the store after talking with the priest from the nearby Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church. George lived in the erstwhile Greek enclave of Astoria, Queens at the time and had worked in restaurants. Chrystalla, a refugee from Cyprus who was shot in the leg during Turkish-Greek fighting on the island, worked in a garment factory in downtown Manhattan. The Miglises bought the store a few years later.
Between 1990 and 2024, the number of Greek-Americans living on Long Island dropped to about 33,000. The population of Greek-Americans living around the store also dropped modestly. Many Long Islanders of South Asian descent moved into Hicksville, some opening their own specialty markets.
It got easy to find some of the product categories Bakaliko sold at area supermarkets at competitive or cheaper prices, though the products were often not sourced, as almost all the Miglises’ still are, from Greece. This week, the website for Stop & Shop, the chain that operates a store a few miles away from Bakaliko, offered 38 olive oils and 22 feta products including a vegan “Just Like Feta Cheese Alternative” that sells for $5.99 for 8 ounces and takes as its base, instead of milk, coconut oil and potato starch.
Bakaliko has no website or cheese alternatives. It sells a handful of varieties of feta, mostly imported from Greece and made from the milk of ewes and goats, rather than cows. Dodoni feta sells for $15.99 per pound, a price Miglis said was higher than was good for business, driven up by Trump administration tariffs and a weakening dollar. He had this to say about another feta variety, Arahova: “It used to be shipped in wood barrels. It’s aging like a Scotch. You put it in a barrel six months, it becomes sharper. It has a peppermint taste … It gives you a nice taste in your salad, on your omelet.”
Other factors hurt business in recent years, George said, including stretches of extreme heat and low rain across the Mediterranean that hurt olive harvests and drove up costs.
Perhaps the biggest factor was COVID, which drove away many store regulars who have not returned, George said. “We lost a lot of customers, a lot. They move on. They got scared … They pass away.”
Rose Marie Walker, the Nassau County legislator whose district includes Hicksville, said while some of the newer South Asian shops and restaurants had turned the area into a culinary destination, several well-known restaurants and delis had closed during or after COVID.
George Pieri, president of the parish council at Holy Trinity, said George Miglis was “an institution. Everyone knows him.”
Pieri’s own family once ran a diner, so the Miglis’ predicament felt familiar, he said. “These older generation Greeks came here, built a life and wanted their kids to be more educated. You see all of these old diner owners and their kids are not taking over the business — they’re becoming doctors, lawyers.”
A younger generation of Greek-Americans still patronizes Bakaliko, but their buying habits are different, George said. They buy traditional foods for the holidays, like Vasilopita, the sweet bread with a lucky coin hidden inside, for the New Year. “They try to teach [their children] the Greek koultoúra,” he said. But they don’t buy in the same bulk, or with the same regularity, as their forbears did, a thesis he defended by emptying the bag of a customer who happened to be handy, having just paid at the register. “This gentleman, he got chocolate for his wife, he got juice for his kids, and he got pasta — this is it, you see?”
Customers, speaking Greek or English or switching between both, balanced their bags and stepped gingerly past the cookies, the honeys and fragrant herbs dried on their stems. “There are so few of these really authentic shops,” said Denise Miller, of Glen Head. “We need it, and I’m not joking.”
Nick Sarandis, of Hicksville, Nassau’s former deputy county attorney, said he’d been coming for 33 years for Greek bread, cheese, pies and cookies. “My grandmother used to cook all of this stuff,” he said.
Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.