Kwasi Addo-Baffour, owner of Breakthrough African Market, works in the store at 309 Central Ave. in Albany.
ALBANY — In last weekend’s column about the struggles of Central Avenue, I noted the variety on the block between Quail and Lake streets, where the Masjid As Salam mosque, several Halal groceries and restaurants offering Vietnamese, Mexican, Jamaican and Dominican dining all sit.
Some of you noted that my description didn’t mention the Breakthrough African Market. So, I returned to Central Avenue this week and introduced myself to the store’s owner, Kwasi Addo-Baffour, originally from Ghana.
Kwasi and his wife, Nana Addo, came to the United States in the 1990s in search of, as you can probably guess, a better life. They found it, here in Albany.
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There were struggles and hardships, of course. Nobody makes so dramatic a shift without enduring shocks cultural, culinary and, given upstate’s weather, meteorological.
But Kwasi and Nana made a life here, buying a home in Menands and raising three children who all went from Shaker High School to college. They’ve succeeded here, showing why people the world over remain eager to make this country their home.
Kwasi, noting his Christian faith, said he initially planned to name the store something generic like “Capital Region African Market,” but as he drove his car down a highway, the name Breakthrough came to him like a message from God. (The family attends Hearts Ablaze Ministries, a non-denominational church in Albany.)
To him, the name represents breaking through the hurdles and difficulties of life. But he said it also evokes how the business represented a breakthrough for him, Nana and their family. It meant a brighter future. It signified hope.
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The market opened on Central Avenue in 2010 and moved five years later across the street to its current location, in a storefront between Van’s Vietnamese Restaurant and Salsa Latina.
In its early days, when Kwasi was still working for Sealy Mattress, Nana mostly tended to the store. (Some customers still call it “Nana’s store.”) But with time, Kwasi also was able to make Breakthrough his full-time job, a labor of love tended seven days a week.
The grocery is jammed with goods. Some brands and products — peanut butter, say, or mayonnaise — would be recognizable to most American shoppers. Many would not.
Taking me on a tour of Breakthrough’s aisles, Kwasi pointed out ijebu garri, which he described as a sort of African couscous. He showed me the store’s collection of palm oils, its agushie offerings, its stocks of banku and fufu. He noted the store’s cases of dried and smoked fish.
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All of it draws immigrants from Africa eager for the tastes and smells of home, some of whom drive hours to get to the store. But Breakthrough also pulls in foodies from suburbia and beyond.
“Central Avenue is a culinary gold mine,” said reader Melissa Davis, who told me she makes the trip from downstate Millerton once or twice a month to go to Breakthrough and other markets along the road in Albany and Colonie.
The pandemic throttled many of the small businesses along Central, while the city’s spike in violent crime scared away some customers. The change, as I said in the prior column, is obvious.
Though looters hit his store during the summer of 2020, Kwasi has no complaints about the neighborhood. The block between Quail and Lake, also home to radio broadcaster WAMC, has been a nurturing place for grocers and restaurateurs alike, as the double-parked cars out front attest.
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The nearby stretches dominated by vacant storefronts? The former CVS? The empty TrustCo Bank branch?
If there’s hope for those blocks and Central overall, it may require more people like Kwasi and Nana. It rests with the new waves of the immigrants who have long been drawn to these storefronts, with people willing to fight, scrap, save and struggle in the search for success.
“I always tell people that the American Dream is about hard work,” Kwasi said. “When you work hard and stay focused, you see the American Dream. Without that, it won’t come to you.”
Breakthrough is about to make another, well, breakthrough. Kwasi and Nana have purchased a building about a mile up Central, just beyond Manning Boulevard, and plan to move Breakthrough from its current rented storefront sometime next year.
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The new location at 640 Central offers more parking, less congestion and the security of ownership. But it means moving from the block where Breakthrough began, survived and thrived.
“We are the only place that carries the things our customers want,” Kwasi told me. “They will find us.”
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