Saneun is from South Korea.

Text and Photos by Nancy A. Ruhling

Saneun Hwang rummages through her tote bag until she finds a thick white book.

She places it on the coffee table and begins flipping through its image-heavy pages, which she likens to birds’ wings flying freely through the sky.

There is a story – her story – behind the tome she has titled Zip; in fact, it will tell you pretty much everything you want and need to know about who she is.

Saneun, who is from Seoul, South Korea, made the so-called artist book while she was a student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

She graduated in 2017 and since then has been trying to figure out the next chapter in her life.

Her progress has been stymied through no fault of her own: She can’t really make any decisions until she finds out whether the U.S. government will extend her visa and allow her to stay here.

Saneun’s artist book, Zip.

The waiting, which led to her giving up her apartment and taking up temporary quarters, is frightening and stressful.

So it is to art that she turns to make the time pass quicker and calmer.

Zip, an artful arrangement of archival photos from the files of the New York Public Library, MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt, is about Saneun’s personal past in Seoul.

Saneun came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts.

It also is about a universal present that critiques the kind of urban development that Saneun, who was raised in a 32-story building, is a product of.

“Zip can mean many things,” she says. “It can be a U.S. ZIP Code or a zip file that signifies the compression of data, or in the case of a big city, people. It’s also the Korean word for house or home, and in Chinese it means a collection of things.”

Saneun’s a patient person – it took her a year to create Zip and nearly all her life to finally admit to herself that she wanted to become an artist.

Zip‘s introduction hits personal and universal themes.

“I was always drawing and painting,” she says. “My mother told me that when I was in grade school I declared that I wanted to be an artist.”

Although she took after-school art classes in elementary school, she didn’t pursue them.

“My parents and older brother were not into art,” she says. “And there’s a conservative culture in South Korea. When I was in middle school, I told the teacher, ‘I don’t want to make art; I want to make money.’”

College in Korea didn’t work out for her.

Her focus declared, she studied English and math, subjects that she figured would get her jobs.

“I went for mediocrity like my friends,” she says, a touch of disappointment in her voice.

Even so, when it came time to choose SAT subjects, Saneun went with world geography, world history and Korean history.

“Nobody else in my school was studying those subjects,” she says. “I just couldn’t do the popular ones like finance. If there’s something I don’t like, I can’t do it. I have to follow my heart.”

Zip‘s pages are like birds’ wings.

Saneun aced the tests, a feat that won her admission to the type of colleges she had no interest in attending.

Enroll she did, and with good intentions. But after two years, she decided to take a break.

“I took all my savings — $6,000 – and went to Europe for two months,” she says. “I came back with zero money.”

She’s waiting to find out whether her visa will be extended.

And, she adds, a new outlook on her career.

“It was the first time I had been exposed to real art,” she says. “I was mesmerized by the rich culture of the museum and art gallery worlds. And it was the first time that I realized that everyday objects – even ones as simple as London’s maps of the Tube – could be beautiful.”

So she set her sights on art school.

She’d like to stay in New York, her city of inspiration.

“I really wanted to study in New York City,” she says, “because it’s the mecca of the art world.”

At the School of Visual Arts, she started out as a graphic design/advertising major, which she considered a practical choice.

“I knew it would get me a job,” she says.

But after a year, she indulged herself and switched to fine art, which is where she was introduced to the concept of the artist book.

Saneun’s working on volume two of Zip.

She found the genre appealing because “it’s not designed to hang on a wall where only select people can see it. It’s tactile and tangible and connects with the viewer, who can see and feel its beauty. It is art that can be widely spread around.”

Saneun recently had Zip published and is working on a second volume that will incorporate street photography and is designed to encourage the viewer to interact with it.

While she’s working on that, she’s doing shifts in an art gallery and a burger restaurant and creating graphic design projects for a small roster of clients.

If not New York, Saneun will try London or even Amsterdam.

What’s she’s doing mostly, though, is nervously awaiting word on her visa.

Saneun doesn’t want to leave New York City, where she gets her ideas and inspiration.

“I don’t see myself living in Korea,” she says. “I could see myself in London.”

Or, she adds, in Amsterdam.

Astoria Characters Day: The 10th Anniversary is Sept. 22, 2019. Sponsored by Bareburger, it’s a free, public event.

Nancy A. Ruhling may be reached at Nruhling@gmail.com,

@nancyruhling, nruhling on Instagram, nancyruhling.com,

astoriacharacters.com.

Copyright 2018 by Nancy A. Ruhling

Andrea created Chip NYC’s signature crunchy-gooey cookies.

Text and Photos by Nancy A. Ruhling

Wearing silver mitts that stretch to her elbows, Andrea Prunella pulls a tray of peppermint chocolate cookies out of the oven and brings them to the front counter, where they warm themselves under heating lamps like newborn chicks.

“It’s the crushed candy canes in the dough that make them so special,” she says.

Their sweet scent fills the air, bringing a bit of home-for-the-holidays cheer to Chip NYC’s Ditmars shop — the bite-size place on 33^rd Street near where The Souvlaki Lady parks her cart.

Andrea, a partner in Chip NYC, is the company’s pastry chef.

It was she who created the recipes for the delicious cookies (OGM, you must try the blueberry cheesecake and the s’mores and the pecan pie and the pumpkin spice latte) that have kept people lining up around the block since the first store opened in the summer of 2017.

Chip NYC’s store on 33rd Street at Ditmars Boulevard.

“The owners asked me to create huge, five-ounce cookies that were crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside,” she says. “They also wanted flavors that evoke memories of childhood.”

Andrea’s 24; remembering her childhood, which is when she got the baking bug, was as simple as her oatmeal apple pie cookies.

Born and raised in Douglaston, Andrea, who has cascading curls and an infectious smile, started working in the food industry when she was 16.

Andrea began working in the food industry when she was 16.

“My older brother’s best friend was the owner of M. Wells Diner in Long Island City,” she says. “I worked there after school for free for about a year doing food and pastry prep.”

She found the fast pace exciting.

“I fell in love with it,” she says. “The creativity was the draw. It allowed me to exercise that part of my brain, and it was a challenge to move to the fullest every day.”

She spent two years at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park earning an associate’s degree in baking. For about a year, she worked in a Manhattan specialty cake shop.

Freshly baked funfetti cookies.

“Cake decorating was my weakest skill coming out of school, so I wanted to perfect my technique,” she says.

Around the time she got it down butter-pat, she moved to San Diego, where she was an executive pastry chef at a bakery café.

“At the time, my boyfriend was in the Marines,” she says. “We came back to Astoria about a year and a half ago, around the same time Chip NYC opened.”

Andrea runs the company’s kitchen, which is where the cookie dough is prepared.

Andrea joined the company a month after the first shop, which is on 34th Street at 30^th Avenue, opened.

“This is my dream job,” she says. “We’re all kind of like a family, and as we grow, we want to bring this model of happiness to the entire company.”

She devoted weeks to creating the recipe for success.

Andrea has a degree in baking from the Culinary Institute of America.

“I did a lot of studying and baking and testing, and I spent thousands of dollars,” she says. “We even closed down for a couple of weeks while I was getting it right.”

So far, she’s created 25 kinds of cookies. Each shop sells four rotating flavors a day.

“All the flavors are purposeful creations that people love,” she says.

Frozen chocolate chip walnut cookies ready for baking.

Andrea, who also is the creator of the fun flavors for Chip NYC’s seasonal ice cream shop on 31^st Avenue, spends most of her 10- to 12-hour shifts running the company’s wholesale kitchen, where she supervises 10 people.

The cookie dough is produced there and divided into balls that look like scoops of ice cream. The cookies are frozen to lock in the fresh flavor and transported by truck or car to each store for daily baking.

When Andrea isn’t mixing sugar and flour with nostalgia, she’s watching movies, crocheting and reading.

Between cookies, she reads, watches movies and crochets.

“I read way too much,” she says. “I go through three or four novels a week. I don’t sleep all that much – maybe five or six hours a night.”

In the coming months, she’s likely to be spending a lot less time in bed: Chip NYC is opening a shop in Long Island City and one in the Village.

With her busy schedule, Andrea doesn’t have much time to think about what tomorrow will bring.

Andrea says everyone at Chip NYC is like family.

But between cookies, she has considered opening a bed and breakfast upstate. She hastens to add that this is her idea of a relaxing retirement plan.

Then again, it could just be a sweet dream – she has decades to decide.

“Chip is the only future I can see now,” she says as she packs up a box of cookies. “I want to see where it goes.”

Astoria Characters Day: The 10th Anniversary is Sept. 22, 2019. It’s a free, public event.

Nancy A. Ruhling may be reached at Nruhling@gmail.com;

@nancyruhling; nruhling on Instagram, nancyruhling.com,

astoriacharacters.com.

Copyright 2018 by Nancy A. Ruhling

Chick-N-Soup is at 30-12 Astoria Blvd.

Text and Photos by Nancy A. Ruhling

When Lou Romano Trujillo looks out over the tables at Chick-N-Soup, all he can think of is his good fortune.

“I’m a lucky guy,” he says, “because of the people – family and friends – who helped me open it.”

He mentions his mother (“an extraordinary woman who raised me by herself”), his landlord (who encouraged him to take on the renovation and gave him a really good deal on the rent), his uncle the electrician and his uncle the carpenter (who plied their trades on the place) and the two noted chefs (who took him and the menu under their marinated wings).

“I’m just so grateful,” he says. “I get emotional just talking about it.”

Lou, a sometime boxer who owns Popeye arms and a shiny, shaved head, starts to choke up.

Lou didn’t discover cooking until he was about 30.

“We just celebrated our first anniversary,” he says. “I put everything I have into it – nearly all my savings — and then borrowed money and borrowed on top of that.”

Lou, who is 46, has done a lot of different things in his life – he started working at 17, and like his mother, has held multiple jobs simultaneously — but Chick-N-Soup is his most ambitious and adventurous project.

Lou, who was born in Astoria, has spent most of his life in the neighborhood. His mother gave birth to him right after her 18^th birthday and quit school to take care of him.

“My parents were high school sweethearts,” he says. “They met when they were 15.”

Chick-N-Soup’s official greeter.

His father, a native of Cuba, joined the army.

“He got in some kind of trouble – I think he was trying to sells guns to make money – and he was incarcerated,” Lou says. “He was a good dude, he just made a lot of mistakes trying to support us. When he got out, I was about 12, and he did come back into my life, but my parents never got back together.”

Lou and his mother moved to Connecticut, where she worked night and day while earning a college degree.

“My mother used to take me to her classes,” he says. “We were there for five or six years, but we always came back to Astoria for Sunday dinner and holidays at grandma’s.”

His first restaurant, The Lunch Box, was three blocks away from Chick-N-Soup.

While Lou was at St. John’s Prep, he started working for Anheuser-Busch, a job he kept when he enrolled at LIU Post on Long Island.

“I didn’t get a degree in any subject,” he says, “but I got a degree in life. Some of the people I met there are still my friends.”

By the time he started taking courses at Hunter College – “I never worked toward a degree, I only took classes like psychology that interested me” — he was working not only for Anheuser-Busch but also selling real estate and DJing at a chic Manhattan club.

Chick-N-Soup shows off its neighborhood vibe.

Given his varied and numerous pursuits and the fact that he didn’t know the difference between a spoon and a spatula, Lou seemed an unlikely candidate to open a restaurant.

But he was friends with Jason Bunin, who, at the time, was the Knickerbocker hotel’s executive chef.

“He took me into the kitchen,” Lou says. “It was intoxicating.”

A detail of the mural, which features Astoria Park.

In his free time from his full schedule, Lou volunteered to “trail” Jason and started prepping food and whipping up batch recipes.

In 2009, he opened his first restaurant, The Lunch Box, an 18-seat spot that was on Astoria Boulevard at Crescent Street just west of Chick-N-Soup; he still lives upstairs.

“Jason helped me out two to three times a week,” he says. “I quit Anheuser-Busch, but I still did real estate.”

Lou’s family and friends and two chefs helped him get the restaurant up and cooking.

By the time he sold it, in 2012, he had lightened his workload considerably – his “easy schedule” consisted of DJing four nights a week and playing professional poker.

“I got pretty good at poker,” he says, “and I won a couple of big tournaments. I used my knowledge of psychology to win.”

He was pretty happy with his life and probably wouldn’t have opened Chick-N-Soup if the landlord of his apartment hadn’t bought the building at 30-12 Astoria Blvd. and persuaded him to do so.

The menu — American and Latin comfort food.

Lou and the friends and family he’s so lucky to have spent 18 months renovating the former funeral parlor.

Jason created the comfort-food recipes for Chick-N-Soup, which sells burgers, wings, mac and cheese, milkshakes, and of course, soups.

“I’ve tweaked them since, so now they’re mostly my recipes,” Lou says.

Soup’s on! It’s broccoli.

Celebrity chef Frank Maldonado, whom Lou recently befriended, created the Latin fare on the menu.

Lou says he’s thankful that he has the opportunity to own Chick-N-Soup, even though that means he’s on the premises from 8 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. every day.

“The time goes by quick,” he says, adding that he’s installed weights and a punching bag in the basement so he can keep in shape. “Besides, I like to stay busy.”

Lou says he owes his success not only to his friends and family but also to the best vendors, customers and employees on the planet.

Saying thanks, all the time.

“I can’t thank everybody enough,” he says.

A cook just called in sick; this means Lou will have to fill in.

“I’ll be doing every order,” he says.

It will be a lot of extra work. He smiles because he is, indeed, a very lucky guy.

“I count my blessings,” he says.

Astoria Characters Day: The 10th Anniversary is Sept. 22, 2019. It’s a free, public event.

Nancy A. Ruhling may be reached at Nruhing@gmail.com; @nancyruhling, nruhling on Instagram, nancyruhling.com, astoriacharacters.com.

Copyright 2018 by Nancy A. Ruhling

K.Y. is from Hong Kong.

Text and Photos by Nancy A. Ruhling

The first thing you notice about K.Y. Chow is his apron. It’s green, the color of a forest in deep shade.

He points to the large red and white medallion in the center of its top.

“It’s Chinese calligraphy,” he says, standing in front of a wall of awards in the lobby at Grand Meridian Printing in Long Island City. “It means ‘best of the best.’”

K.Y., a tall, pen-thin man who is angular and animated, wears it when he’s in the office, and since he’s on site at least 16 hours a day seven days a week, he’s happy to note that that’s pretty much all of his waking time.

“This business is my baby,” he says, adding that he feels lucky to put in so many hours because “working for myself means liberty, freedom.”

K.Y.’s parents were Chinese, and his first name reflects their heritage. The K stands for Country and the Y stands for Royalty, or “royalty to the 3,000 years of Chinese culture.”

Grand Meridian Printing is at 31-16 Hunters Point Ave.

“K.Y. also is the abbreviation for the State of Kentucky,” he notes.

Diligence is embedded in K.Y.’s DNA.

“We are from China’s Hakka tribe – we are a small race with our own language and by tradition are hard-working people because we always had nothing,” he says.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, which is where his parents fled after the Communists won China’s civil war in 1950, K.Y. grew up on a vegetable farm.

K.Y. grew up on a vegetable farm and lived in a house without electricity and plumbing.

“My dad had made money, and the Communists took it away,” he says. “They left overnight with nothing.”

The family, which included K.Y.’s older brother and sister, lived in what K.Y. calls a wooden “hutch” that had no electricity or plumbing.

“When I was in high school, I studied by the light of a kerosene lamp,” he says. “The land was not ours. Our bathroom was a hole in the middle of the vegetable field; our vegetables were 100 percent organic, if you know what I mean.”

Scraps from printing jobs.

K.Y. was the only person in his family to go to school. But getting an education was challenging.

“My father died after my graduation from high school,” K.Y. says. “I had to take care of my mother and work while I went to college.”

After graduating from Hong Kong Baptist University with a major in accounting and a minor in finance, subjects K.Y. considered practical enough to land him a steady job, he earned a master’s degree in finance with a minor in marketing from the Asian Institute of Management in Manila, the Philippines.

For several years, he lived at home with his mother while holding down a job in merchant banking and teaching college-level continuing-education classes.

Grand Meridian operates in an 18,000-square-foot space.

“I had a very good life,” he says.

In 1987, a job as a project manager for a private investment company brought him to New York City.

“Before I left Hong Kong, I knew so many people that I had farewell dinners every night for three months,” he says. “The company said they would help me get a green card. People were jealous because I was coming here.”

The staffers set up an aquarium in the factory.

In the beginning, it was rough. The company that hired him had promised him a rent-free apartment.

“It turned out that that was a mattress on the floor,” he says. “I lived there three months.”

Four years later, K.Y. became the project manager for a wealthy Chinese woman from Hong Kong who was a major shareholder in a hotel-construction project in New York City.

K.Y. is a detail guy and a man of action.

One of the minor investors in the hotel decided to liquidate assets, and there was a printing shop among the businesses. Although K.Y. spent a year negotiating to buy it, the deal fell through, and he ended up owning a different printing shop in Chinatown and renaming it Grand Meridian.

“It was $175,000, which was all of my savings and not a small amount of money in 1993,” he says.

His wife, Ivy Lung, who has an MBA and is the controller at Grand Meridian, thought the purchase was a good – although risky – idea.

Factory light makes a pretty pattern.

“With her job covering our mortgage, we could take the chance,” he says.

K.Y. didn’t know anything about the printing business so he became an unpaid apprentice in Chinatown for three months.

The original printing shop, which was in an 850-square-foot space, focused on Chinese takeout menus. In 1997, K.Y. moved Grand Meridian to a 9,400-square-foot location in Chinatown.

By 2004, he was certified as a minority- or women-owned business enterprise (MWBE) and was focusing on high-profile clientele that now include CUNY, SUNY, the New York Philharmonic, the MTA, Metro-North Railroad and the New York Mets.

K.Y. works 16-hour shifts.

He moved the business to Long Island City in 2009, buying the 13,000-square-foot building on Hunters Point Avenue and immediately expanding it by 5,000 square feet.

“I had looked in some other areas, but they weren’t right,” he says. “This was the first property I saw here, and I fell in love with it.”

Although Ivy and K.Y. live in Rego Park, they spend nearly all of their time at Grand Meridian. Their offices are next to each other, and they cook quick meals in its kitchen and occasionally stay overnight.

“I didn’t leave during Hurricane Sandy,” he says. “I wanted to make sure nothing happened.”

Onward and upward.

Although K.Y. and Ivy have no children, they do have two dozen employees and no thoughts of retiring.

K.Y., who is 66, concedes that the printing industry is facing challenging times in the digital age.

“The pie is getting smaller and smaller,” he says. “I’m in crisis management, but I don’t believe print will ever go away entirely.”

All the same, he’s keeping his options – and his eyes — open.

“I’m always looking ahead for opportunities,” he says.

Astoria Characters Day: The 10th Anniversary is Sept. 22, 2019.

Sponsored by Bareburger, it’s a free, public event.

Nancy A. Ruhling may be reached at Nruhing@gmail.com; @nancyruhling, nruhling on Instagram, nancyruhling.com, astoriacharacters.com.

Copyright 2018 by Nancy A. Ruhling

Sonbobs is at 34-15 28th Ave.

Text and Photos by Nancy A. Ruhling

After she takes a tray of pineapple coconut muffins out of the oven, Sonnie Brown concentrates on the frosting for her chocolate peanut butter layer cake.

She stands smiling over the small stainless steel mixing bowl at her coffee/cake/conversation café Sonbobs, swiftly stirring, stirring, stirring.

When the icing is creamy and thick, she paints it onto the cake with a spatula, crowning the confection with miniature Reese’s peanut butter cups.

The decorative design is not perfectly symmetrical, she concedes, adding that “it’s about how it tastes, not how it looks.”

It looks good enough to eat.

Sonnie with a fresh batch of pineapple coconut muffins.

So at home does Sonnie seem in Sonbobs’ kitchen, where she works 14-hour shifts seven days a week, that one would think she’s been baking ever since she was born.

But she didn’t start mixing flour and eggs with sugar and spice until about a decade ago.

“I’m in a karate club, and a couple of times a year, there’s a party,” she says. “I thought it was insane that they were spending $30 to $50 for cakes, so I started making them.”

Seeing stars, fairy lights and lavender-lace curtains.

Even then, she was a back-burner baker: She had a full-time career as an actress.

In addition to dozens of commercials, she’s made appearances in TV’s Person of Interest, Blindspot, Blue Bloods and Law and Order: SVU and in the films Believe, The Bourne Legacy, The Nanny Diaries and Don Jon.

Baking is a precise art: Everything is measured and mixed in order.

Yes, you’ve seen her on TV and in movies.

Sonnie’s transition from roles to rolls wasn’t so straightforward.

Sonnie, who was born in Seoul, South Korea, lost her family before she even knew she had one.

“My parents, who were too young when they married, got a divorce when I was about one and a half,” she says. “My father told my mother that if she left him, he would put me and my older brother in an orphanage.”

Sonbobs sells jewelry made by Sonnie.

She did and he did.

Sonnie was adopted by an older couple in Miami, Florida, who had grown children. She lived with her maternal grandmother for several years until the paperwork was completed.

“I was about 5 when I arrived in the United States,” she says. “Part of the deal was that they would sponsor my mother’s immigration, so she came, too, and lived close by.”

After high school, Sonnie enrolled at the University of Florida.

“My father died two days after Christmas during my freshman year,” she says. “And I went from being pampered to fending for myself financially.”

To support herself, she took up waitressing and bartending. In 1987, she came to New York City.

Sonnie is writing a children’s book featuring Sonbob, the shop mascot.

“I figured that I could bartend anywhere,” she says. “I didn’t like New York, and I was thinking of going to Hawaii. But before I left, I decided to do something that I could only do in New York – take acting classes.”

It turned out she was an on-screen natural, so she stayed, had a son, got married and after 9/11 finally finished her bachelor’s degree in broadcast production.

Then, at the end of 2017, when her acting career seemed to stall, Sonnie noticed the empty space on 28^th Avenue around the corner from her apartment. She wondered what she could turn it into.

Sonnie, who was born in South Korea, grew up in Miami, Florida.

Sonbobs, which is next to a music store and a party shop, announces itself with shiny stars, lavender-lace curtains and purple fairy lights.

The size of a studio apartment, it has a living/dining room and a kitchen and sells everything from cookies and candles to china teacups and costume jewelry, much of it made by Sonnie.

“The name is short for ‘Sonnie’s bits and bobs,’” she says, adding that bits and bobs is the British version of odds and ends.

Sparkles and scarves.

Some of those ends are indeed odd for a conventional coffeehouse.

There is, for instance, a Magic 8-Ball on the coffee table. Sonnie pulls out a magic wand and some quills and inks that are to be used for recording blessings.

Sonbobs has a homey atmosphere.

“I embrace celebrations of good energy,” she says. “I want people to hang out here and make friends.”

She’s made her own connections: One of her regular customers is a graphic designer, and they are collaborating on a children’s book that will feature the Sonbob character as its heroine.

The decor is quirky and comforting.

Just as in her bartending days, Sonnie likes to play mom. “People tell me their problems, and I give them advice,” she says, “whether it’s to quit a job or get out of a bad relationship.”

As for the food, the menu varies according to what Sonnie feels like making. She’s partial to fruit flavors, so there are mango, peach and plum cakes and key lime meringue pies. She serves sandwiches on toasted garlic bread; today’s special, she has decided, will be curry chicken salad.

Sonnie presents her chocolate peanut butter cake.

In the past couple of months, Sonnie has been picking up acting parts again and has hired a substitute baker to cover for her during shoots.

She’s appearing in the new NBC drama Manifest and plays an art teacher in the AMC supernatural horror-drama series NOS4A2 that debuts next year.

“Sonbobs and acting – I never want to give up either,” she says as she turns a pineapple/coconut upside-down cake right-side up.

Astoria Characters Day: The 10th Anniversary is Sept. 22, 2019.

Sponsored by Bareburger, it’s a free, public event.

Nancy A. Ruhling may be reached at Nruhling@gmail.com;

@nancyruhling; nruhling on Instagram, nancyruhling.com,

astoriacharacters.com.

Copyright 2018 by Nancy A. Ruhling

Alex is a co-owner of HandCraft Kitchen & Cocktails in Manhattan.

Text and Photos by Nancy A. Ruhling

When you’ve just finished an overnight shift, 9 in the morning feels like an exceedingly unseemly hour.

Which is why Alex Mouzakitis keeps apologizing; he got off at 5:30 a.m. after working 15 hours and hasn’t had much sleep.

He has his Mets cap pulled down over his somnolent eyes and worries when he takes it off that he has hat hair. (He doesn’t; his tresses looked professionally tousled.)

He’s not going to lie, he’s more worried about his mouth than his head. He’s not sure he can string a sentence together. (He easily finds his nouns and verbs.)

Alex needs a drink. Not the kind of fancy cocktails he conjures up for his Gramercy Park bar, HandCraft Kitchen & Cocktails.

He needs coffee, please. He takes a gulp. OK, he’s ready to go.

Alex has been in the hospitality business since he was 16. Growing up in North Massapequa, Long Island, he started serving tables at Friendly’s while he was in high school.

“I was making a lot of money,” he says. “That was a motivating factor.”

Alex is from Long Island.

By the time he was at Stony Brook University working on a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Alex was bartending at TGI Friday’s. Again, to make money.

He found that he enjoyed talking to people so much that when he graduated, he decided to stay behind the bar.

Five years ago, he got a job at Astoria’s William Hallet on 30^th Avenue.

That’s when his life really changed.

Before long, he was managing the bar, which is where he met his wife (she was an occasional customer) and reconnected with a friend who became one of HandCraft’s partners.

He’s never been to bartending school.

Personally and professionally, things progressed, or as Alex says, “fell into my lap,” and the two sectors of his life dovetailed in 2015.

“We opened HandCraft, and I got married a week later,” he says. “For the honeymoon, I left for a month – we went to Las Vegas, California, Hawaii and Japan. We also made a stop in Amsterdam so we could shorten a 10-hour flight.”

The HandCraft idea, he says, was to create a bar that served high-quality cocktails in an unintimidating atmosphere.

“We wanted it to be approachable,” he says, “especially for those who have never ordered cocktails.”

The menu divides the cocktails into categories: Punches (like bourbon and rose sangria), Classics (remember the Old Fashioned and the Salty Dog?), Dad Drinks (think Grasshopper and Harvey Wallbanger) and Alex’s seasonal sets of witty wet-your-whistle creations.

Alex has a degree in psychology.

Alex, who disdains the word mixologist, considers himself a beverage curator. He developed a taste for cocktails and a knack for designing them while on the job.

“I never went to bartending school,” he says. “I was just instantly good at it. My process is really simple. It’s what I like.”

Take his Kiwi Strawberry Gimblet, which is made of vodka infused in house with the two fruits and lime juice.

“This was based on flavors that I remembered from when I was a kid,” he says. “I remembered drinking Snapple’s Strawberry Kiwi and thinking it was too sweet. So I made the Kiwi Strawberry Gimlet with that in mind.”

Sometimes Alex’s ideas bubble up in his brain and flow like Champagne. Sometimes, he has to keep trying and tweaking until he gets a taste worth toasting.

On his days off, he stops in for a drink at local bars.

“One of my favorite things to do is to use what’s on hand,” he says. “I go to the refrigerator and see what we have – it’s visual inspiration.”

His Harvest Moon — mezcal, ancho reyes, blood orange syrup, cayenne pepper, jalapeno, egg white and lime — is HandCraft’s signature staple.

It came into being when Alex got the idea to pair agave-based spirits like tequila and mezcal with blood-orange juice, which he happens to like a lot.

“The name came afterward,” he says. “It just seemed appropriate. They work well together.”

Berry Lemonade — Smirnoff vodka or tequila, blackberry/blueberry shrub and lemonade – takes a little more prep.

Goofing around on the street.

Alex ferments the shrub – apple cider vinegar, honey, blueberries and blackberries – for three weeks in the refrigerator.

It’s typical for Alex to put in 60- to 80-hour weeks at HandCraft; even when he’s not at the bar, he’s always thinking about the business.

“My wife and I like to travel and go out,” he says. “I’m always checking out cocktails at other bars.”

Contemplating his next cocktail.

When he’s in Astoria and not in bed, he stops in at local spots for a drink.

“I don’t have anything fancy,” he says. “Just a shot or a beer.”

Although Alex is far too busy to think about his future in anything other than general terms, he does intuitively know that HandCraft has enough legs to become a successful brand.

“We designed it to be a franchise,” he says. “My wife’s from California and wants to go back. Five years from now, maybe I’ll be running a West Coast branch.”

Astoria Characters Day: The 10th Anniversary is Sept. 22, 2019. It’s a free, public event.

Nancy A. Ruhling may be reached at Nruhing@gmail.com; @nancyruhling, nruhling on Instagram, nancyruhling.com, astoriacharacters.com.

Copyright 2018 by Nancy A. Ruhling