Just as Karen Lillis put out a book of Pittsburgh restaurant interiors, one of her favorite fast-casual dining spots, Salim’s Market on Centre Avenue, announced its closure. Lillis visited the small grocery and dining room, run by a Lebanese married couple, on one of its final days in business. She gave owner Salim El-Tahch a hug and a copy of her book, Pittsburgh When I’m Hungry.
“He said, ‘It’s too bad I’m not in this book,’ and that’s when I knew I had to do another one,” Lillis tells Pittsburgh City Paper. The result? Keep an Eye on the Figs, a self-published photo book celebrating international grocery stores, both large and small, across Pittsburgh.
“I realized I was taking [Salim’s] for granted,” Lillis remembers. “I’m a haphazard grocery shopper, and near my house in North Oakland, there isn’t a big grocery store. I just realized how special it is that we have such an abundance of these stores in Pittsburgh.”
In a time of rising food prices, the grocery store is often a place of stress. Even in the best of circumstances, long lines and needlessly complex parking lots turn shopping for a basic necessity into a multi-step project. Keep an Eye on the Figs shows the grocery store not as a den of malaise, but as a hospitable space where food serves as a point of connection.
The images in Keep an Eye on the Figs celebrate abundance. Shelves of multi-colored soda bottles shine like jewels. A crowded lineup of sausages from every corner of Eastern Europe somehow feels tender and alive. A produce fridge teems with lush, green bok choy, glowing from incandescent lighting. Where the book shines most is in these interiors, these intimate corners where what might be unfamiliar to some is a comforting reminder of home for others.
Some of the photos are visually striking — one image of a bright orange wall with teal landline phones for collect calls to Central America could be out of a Wes Anderson film. The oldest photo in the book is a tiled floor from Salvador’s Dairy in Homestead, a now-abandoned store Lillis walked past during her early days in Pittsburgh. This still is paired with an exterior wall with graffiti reading “I miss you / I love you,” a poignant tag often seen in Bloomfield that speaks to the longing for far-off places implicit in the space of the international grocery store.
Lillis learned that, just as Pittsburgh is made up of 90 neighborhoods with unique identities, it’s also comprised of small but mighty immigrant communities. “People in Pittsburgh really celebrate their heritage,” she says. “These places are a form of passive education, demystifying other cultures in a sideways, subconscious way for people. It makes something that could otherwise be a big question mark happy and enticing.”
For many Americans, immigrants are an abstraction — food becomes a way to make that abstraction real. In Lillis’s upbringing in small-town Virginia, the only immigrant-owned businesses she was aware of were a Chinese restaurant and an Italian restaurant with “a revolving cast of teenage clerks from Italy” at its counter. (“In high school, we would hang out there and swoon at the Italian boys,” she recalls).
When Lillis moved to New York, she found new cuisines to explore, living in Greek and Polish enclaves of Astoria and Greenpoint. When she came to Pittsburgh in 2005, she spent a lot of time getting to know the small businesses in the area, and eventually started her own, Karen’s Book Row.
“I had one person say when I moved here that in Pittsburgh we’ll have one good thing of each kind of restaurant, that there isn’t the same redundancy you find in New York,” she says.
That means what the city does have has a bigger impact. “I think small businesses stabilize our society. The money you spend at them gets put back into our community. It made me think, ‘Why don’t I spend 100% of my own money at small businesses?’”
Something Lillis learned while producing the book was that local behemoth Giant Eagle was founded by five immigrants from Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian backgrounds.
Despite taking a humanistic lens, Keep an Eye on the Figs does not include any images of people. At a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiment, Lillis didn’t want to show anyone’s faces and put them at risk. The result implicitly asks readers what would be lost without the people behind these stores. “I wanted it to be celebratory and respectful, and I’ve also always been interested in the poetics of space,” Lillis says.
The title comes from something she overheard in Pitaland, a Mediterranean grocery and deli. Lillis believes it speaks to how the book highlights the care these grocers give to both their products and their customers. At the same time, it encourages readers to pay attention to the big and small ways immigrants contribute to Pittsburgh’s food landscape.
Further, in a city with numerous food deserts, including Oakland, where Lillis lives, businesses like Salim’s or Groceria Merante provide fresh produce and healthier meals. “Groceria Merante is the size of my bathroom and yet has the most objects in it I’ve seen in any space,” Lillis remarked. “That kind of density is beautiful!”
The beauty of these spaces comes in part from how they do a lot with a little, with rows and stacks of rice bags, cheese wedges, or cans of stuffed grape leaves rising from floor to ceiling.
Keep an Eye on the Figs also gave Lillis an excuse to snack. Some of her favorite dishes were red bean cakes from Panda Market in Squirrel Hill, pistachio paste from Labad’s in the Strip District, and a frozen Latvian cheesecake from Natalia’s in Greenfield.
Keep an Eye on the Figs is available at City Books, Karen’s Book Row, the Cozy Corner Bookstore, and Amazing Books and Records. But the best way to support the book is to continue Lillis’ project — in the work’s final essay, she implores readers to walk into one of these small, immigrant-owned businesses and inhale the smell of fresh food. You’ll never want to leave.
This article appears in Nov. 12-18, 2025.
