A couple was sitting on a blanket in McCarren Park in Brooklyn with a small, placid infant last Thursday when a wandering salesman approached carrying a tray of Turkish pastries.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m going to try to sell baklava to you and your baby.”
“Hell yeah,” the baby’s mother said, as if she’d been waiting for this all afternoon. Moments later, she had two triangles of stacked phyllo sheets divided by a thick seam of spring-green pistachios. In exchange, $5 had been lobbed toward a Venmo account registered to Good Baklava.
By the time the money landed, the salesman had another picnic blanket in his sights.
Good Baklava is a nomadic, seat-of-the-pants business started by a 30-year-old man known in legal records as Jacob Komarow. He goes by Roy Donk these days, but to many customers he is simply the Baklava Guy.
Most weekday afternoons, the Baklava Guy makes a circuit of Brooklyn parks, from Greenpoint to Fort Greene, in a Dodge Ram ProMaster known as the Baklavan. His weekend territory extends to stands outside the Greenmarkets at Fort Greene Park and Grand Army Plaza. On a busy day in the city, he said, he and as many as eight freelance pastry slingers will unload 500 wedges of baklava.
“It started as a joke, and it’s turned into a very serious joke,” he said.
On the comedic side of the ledger, consider that he used to peddle baklava while dressed as a hot dog.
On the serious side are the numbers, like $1,500 for a good day’s haul in the parks, and hundreds of thousands of views for paid collaborations on social media. In Instagram reels that collectively racked up more than five million views, he was seen giving away baklava outside Madison Square Garden on the night the Knicks clinched their trip to the N.B.A. finals. He enjoyed doing this so much that he plans to return to the Garden bearing baklava for the finals, starting Wednesday in San Antonio.
On the heels of that and other campaigns, including a cross-country Baklavan trip to the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in April and a giveaway at the New York City Marathon last fall, the Baklava Guy has watched orders pour in to his website. From his apartment in Bushwick, he packs and ships hexagonal boxes of Turkish delight and purple cartons of baklava. Each package contains wet wipes in packages designed to look like individually wrapped condoms and a temporary baklava tattoo modeled on a permanent one inked on his left arm.
“This here completely helps sell baklava to the extreme,” he said. “If people are on the fence, I show them this, and they’re like, ‘All right, fine.’”
Why baklava? The short version of the story is that in 2021 he decided to follow the band Phish around the country. One consequence of this was that his employer, a company making licensed Phish apparel, fired him. Outside the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, Calif., he realized that he was on track to empty his bank account before the tour ended.
Walking around a nearby store, he scanned the aisles for something he could sell to stand out from the scrum of people in the parking lot hawking bottled water, grilled cheese sandwiches and balloons filled with nitrous oxide.
He looked up and saw a display of baklava. Although his childhood in an Orthodox Jewish household in Passaic, N.J., had not been particularly baklava-centric, he knew he was on to something when he noticed the vivid green stripe of pistachios.
“People are going to think there’s drugs in it,” he remembers saying to a companion.
This insight touches on a longer version of the story he tells that involves selling actual drugs to finance earlier travels along the Phish trail, an arrest on drug charges in Connecticut in 2019, a plea bargain that required him to check into an addiction-treatment center, a 30-day stay at “the coolest rehab on the planet,” a relapse, another job he was fired from, and a second and more sustained effort at cleaning up. He said he recently marked his fifth year of sobriety.
Around the time baklava entered his life, he took to calling himself Roy Donk, the name of a fictional jazz musician in a sketch in the comedy show “I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson.” He will not utter his original name, although he knows it is easily unearthed online.
“I’m just feeling the Roy,” he said. “I’m going forward.”
Many of the sales techniques he honed as a dealer in controlled substances have been put to use by the Baklava Guy. He is easygoing, chatty and able to keep up a stream of patter without sounding rehearsed. He tells customers that the baklava is layered and frozen in Turkey and baked “in the kingdom of New Jersey.”
He also tells them that his product contains “no drugs,” a motto emblazoned on some Good Baklava hats, T-shirts, hoodies and other merchandise. In Brooklyn, this is an icebreaker and a laugh line.
“They don’t ask,” he said. “When I’m selling it at Phish concerts, they ask.”
Before he left McCarren Park last week, he stopped at an espresso cart to talk with the owner, Omer Kabasoglu, about developing a baklava latte.
Back in the Baklavan, he named a few of the things he has traded his product for: pizza, sushi, four V.I.P. wristbands at the Peach Music Festival, a free checked piece of luggage and a first-class seat on a flight.
“The best thing to walk through an airport with is baklava,” he said.
In Fort Greene Park, he met a dancer who had worked in a Michael Jackson tribute show in Turkey. Baklava changed hands.
Across the lawn, he spoke with Camila Vilá about her eyebrows, which she had recently bleached. Baklava did not change hands because Ms. Vilá is allergic to pistachios. She said she had gradually desensitized herself to other nuts by eating them in small amounts after taking Benadryl.
They talked about collaborating on a video series in which she would do the same thing with the help of Good Baklava. During the conversation, Ms. Vilá eyed the stray green bits of pistachio on the tray. Then she popped one into her mouth.
The Baklava Guy watched her closely. “How do you feel?” he asked.
“I feel good,” she said. “I feel OK!”
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