New York Magazine

(Photo: Brad Paris)

Anna Dunn
Marlow & Sons
81 Broadway, nr. Berry St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn; 718-384-1441

What are you going to buy as a gift from the store?
I buy my best friend olive oil a lot. We sell a blood-orange oil [Stella Cadente Olive Oil Company, $22] and a Meyer-lemon olive oil [Stella Cadente, $18], and she uses it on salads and fish. It comes in little Mason jars, like jam.

What gift would you consider “not obvious”?
We just started carrying these Japanese knives [$70 to $200] from a family who has been making them for 700 years. They used to manufacture samurai swords. The knives are hand-hammered, so each one is different. You use them for basic chopping and preparing. They are supersharp.

What’s a great cheap gift—under $10 or $15?
Bronx Bee Honey. I can tell you about the guy that makes it. He’s in the South Bronx, and he’s based at the St. Augustine’s Catholic Church there. He started keeping bees so that the community gardens would become more fruitful [$10 a jar].

How does it taste?
It’s not creamy. It’s a little bit rich, not too sweet, pretty smooth. But it’s better than regular supermarket honey because it comes from the Bronx.

What about a gift for a teacher?
Teachers are kind of dorky, so some tea. Keemun Mao Feng loose-leaf black tea [In Pursuit of Tea, $5.75].

Which tea do you drink?
I drink the wild mint. Because it tastes the least like tea. It tastes as if you were chewing on a mint leaf—not like peppermint.

What’s sexy?
Would it be too goofy to say the Cream-Nut peanut butter? [Koeze Company, $5].

What’s sexy about it?
It’s silky. And it’s called cream nut.