Errol’s Turns Off the Ovens: The Flatbush Bakery Its Neighbors Once Saved Closes on Its Own Terms

By Esme Varnum, Brooklyn Correspondent

The last hard dough bread left Errol’s Caribbean Delights on Saturday, Oct. 24. The bakery and steam-table restaurant at 661 Flatbush Avenue, on the corner of Hawthorne Street, closed after a quarter-century, and for once on an avenue that has lost a great many shops like it, nobody had to be evicted to make it happen.

Errol and Dorothy Miller, who opened the place in the fall of 2001 as Errol’s Bakery and Catering and renamed it Errol’s Caribbean Delights in 2018, are in their 80s. According to News 12 Brooklyn, they are retiring to spend time with their grandchildren; workers also told the station that a business partner had died a little more than a year ago. It is the ordinary end of an ordinary small business, which in Little Caribbean in 2026 makes it something close to remarkable.

The menu people measured their lives in

The case was bread and pastry first: hard dough bread, coco bread, meat and veggie patties, spice bread, and the dense fruit cake that people ordered for Christmas. The steam table came later, and with it the plates that made Errol’s a dinner stop as much as a bakery: curried goat, oxtail, jerk chicken and escovitch fish.

“My mom especially would always buy the escovitch fish,” Renee Rogers, a customer since high school, told News 12. Then came the question every neighborhood asks at a moment like this: “Where else are you gonna go now?”

Inga-Lee Black, Jamaican-born, put it in the terms the regulars kept returning to. “It feels like home,” she told reporters. “You can feel the country.” Another longtime customer, C.J. Mitchell, offered the most graceful benediction of the week: “Twenty-five years is a good number to say goodbye.”

How a corner got nine more years

What makes the closing worth more than a paragraph is how close Errol’s came to ending a decade ago, and how it didn’t. The history was reconstructed last week by New York Eats Here, drawing on the contemporaneous coverage.

The Millers’ lease, at $3,500 a month, ran out in May 2016. Renewal had been routine for fifteen years; this time it wasn’t. The matter went to court, and the shop was given a deadline to leave. In housing court, Errol Miller said at the time, a new rent of $5,000 a month was discussed but never put on paper. Looking for alternatives, he found that Flatbush Avenue had moved on without him. “You really can’t get a place up here under $6,000,” he told BK Reader.

Then the neighborhood moved. Equality for Flatbush, the anti-displacement group founded by the organizer Imani Henry, who had once lived in the apartment above the bakery, called a rally outside the shop on Dec. 17, 2016. A second followed on Jan. 7, 2017, on the corner of Flatbush and Hawthorne, in a snowstorm. An online petition asking for a new lease passed 1,500 signatures, and organizers mailed them to the landlord every week.

By March 2017 the Millers had signed a new five-year lease. The rent was never made public. A thank-you sign went up in the window, and the shop stayed open for the next nine years, through a pandemic, a rename and the arrival of the steam table.

It is worth being precise about what that fight was and was not. No court found anyone at fault, and a landlord seeking market rent on Flatbush Avenue in 2016 was doing what landlords up and down the avenue were doing. The point of the episode is narrower and more useful: in a city where a commercial tenant without a lease has almost no legal leverage, a bakery survived because its customers made the renewal a public matter and kept it public until it was signed.

An avenue that keeps losing its bakeries

The record on Flatbush Avenue is not kind to Caribbean bakeries. Christie’s Jamaican Patties announced in 2011, after 45 years on the avenue, that it was closing amid a rent fight. Lords Bakery, another neighborhood institution, closed abruptly in 2024. A 23-story rental tower rose at 626 Flatbush, two blocks from Errol’s, around the time of the Millers’ fight. And the neighborhood itself now carries the city’s name for it, Little Caribbean, a designation meant to celebrate and, its champions hoped, to help protect the West Indian commercial culture of Flatbush Avenue.

“Flatbush is a West Indian-built community,” a customer identified only as Kay told News 12, which is both a statement of history and, on this avenue, a statement of anxiety.

That anxiety is real, but Errol’s is the wrong story to hang it on. The Millers chose their own last day. They closed in their 80s, after a 25-year run that began with bread and ended with a line out the door, and they leave behind an argument about what a neighborhood can do when it decides that a corner bakery is worth defending. Nothing on the public record yet names a successor tenant at 661 Flatbush.

C.J. Mitchell told Time Out she was bringing flowers and a handwritten card on the last Saturday. It is a better send-off than most small businesses in this city get, and it was paid for, in part, nine years ago, by a few dozen people standing on a corner in the snow.

Featured image: The West Indian Day Parade on Eastern Parkway, Labor Day 2026. Photo: Sashimi-b via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.