You have to look for it. At 111 Water Street in Catskill, down on the waterfront side of the Foreland building and slightly below grade, Grains of Paradise is a bit hidden. The new spice shop by McKenzie Raley feels like a discovery—part pantry, part curiosity cabinet, and part personal archive—rewarding those who make the effort to find it.
Raley opened the shop on April 2 and, a few weeks in, is still taking the measure of her audience. The early signs are encouraging. “People are really excited I’m there,” she says. “I’m happy that I’m filling some kind of niche for them.”
That niche comes into focus quickly once inside. While the region has no shortage of provision shops, Grains of Paradise trades less in staples than in the idea of the “secret ingredient”—those elusive flavors encountered once, somewhere, and never quite tracked down again. Whole tamarind pods. Tiny tapioca pearls. House-blended garam masala threaded with rose petals. These are not just pantry items; they’re prompts, invitations to recreate a memory or invent a new one.
Raley describes the shop as “a little candy store for cooks,” a phrase that captures both its sense of play and its quiet seriousness. The shelves are stocked not only with hard-to-find spices and imported foods, but also with kitchen tools, vintage cookware, and the occasional antique oddity—a Japanese fish scaler, a 1970s cookbook, handwritten recipe cards collected from flea markets and offered up for free. The effect is immersive and intimate. “It’s sort of like a little scrapbook,” she says.
Before opening the shop, Raley spent two decades working as a model, a career that took her around the world at a relentless pace. In the in-between moments—solo dinners, market visits in unfamiliar cities—food became both anchor and revelation. “You have these moments with these meals where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,’” she says. Those memories now echo through the shop’s inventory, which she curates as much by feeling as by any formal sourcing strategy.
That instinct extends to how the store is organized. Rather than grouping items by geography—no tidy sections labeled Japanese, Persian, or Mexican—Raley arranges them by flavor profile: umami, floral, sweet, smoky. It’s a subtle but telling choice, one that prioritizes sensory experience over culinary orthodoxy. “I hate when things are alphabetical,” she says. “I don’t go into a store and think, I want an ‘A spice.’”
The shop is compact—around 500 square feet—and intentionally dense, every shelf carrying some small surprise. You might come in for a jar of something familiar and leave with Turkish cotton candy, ume, or a blend you didn’t know you needed. Raley balances those more esoteric finds with practical staples—pasta, sauces, ingredients that make dinner possible—while she figures out what resonates with her clientele. It’s part intuition, part data collection in real time.
Some early favorites have already emerged. Flavored sesame seeds—soy, plum—move quickly. Tomato and mushroom powders, which can be used to add instant depth to soups or sprinkled over vegetables, have found an audience. A rare Turkish honey, harvested from hives built inside a hollowed log and infused with the jasmine-heavy flora of its region, sold out almost immediately.
Raley runs the shop on her own, a one-woman operation with ambitions she’s careful not to overextend. For now, the focus is on building a rhythm and letting the store evolve. Seasonal house-made vinegars—melon, perhaps, or strawberry with peppercorn—are on the horizon, along with small grab-and-go offerings timed to the nearby farmers’ market.
If there’s a throughline here, it’s not trend-driven or even strictly culinary. It’s about access—bringing flavors and ingredients typically encountered in restaurants or far-flung markets into a small-town context, and doing so in a way that feels both approachable and personal. Raley describes it as building a “secret ingredient shop” for Catskill, a place where cooks can find the thing they didn’t know they were missing until they saw it on the shelf.
In a storefront you could easily walk past, that sense of discovery is the point.
Grains of Paradise is currently open Wednesday to Saturday from 11am-4pm. Once the Catskill Farmers’ Market opens on May 24, the shop will be open on Sundays from 12-4pm.
