Foodireland Foodireland.com On a sunny morning in the Woodlawn section ...

On a sunny morning in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx, Pat Coleman, the 33-year-old owner of Irish food wholesaler and mail order company foodireland.com, meets me during Sunday brunch peak time. Here on Katonah Ave., Celtic lettering and kelly-green awnings adorn every other storefront, announcing one Irish establishment after another.

"If you walk up and down the street here knocking on doors, anyone that opens the door is going to be Irish," he assures me. "You heard of Chinatown and Little Italy. This place should be called Little Ireland."

Of all of the area hangouts?Rory Dolan's, Colleen's, Rambling House?Coleman and I settle for coffee and scones at the Traditional Irish Bakery, which also peddles in brown bread, soda bread and a mean Irish breakfast. Incidentally, a few years back, Coleman owned this very bakery, but now sells their goods on his website and furnishes them with products that are sought out by homesick locals: chocolate bars, Kerry Gold Irish butter, beverages.

Coleman himself emigrated to New York over 10 years ago from a small town in the Irish Midlands, so small that he sheepishly describes it as "just a store, really." He first imported Irish food and sold it on the internet as part of the Traditional Irish Bakery's website?"If you typed in black pudding in '98, my picture came up," he quips in a lilting brogue?but eventually sold the bakery to focus exclusively on foodireland.com, which he runs with his wife, Caroline, from a fully stocked, 10,000-square-foot warehouse just a few blocks away.

Coleman concentrates on selling to the "ethnic Irish," a designation that he defines as "Irish people who would recognize an Irish product," rather than attempting to sell Irish products to mainstream America. To illustrate the point, Coleman lifts a creamer from the table. "If I was selling this jug of milk on the internet, one third of the reason why you're buying it is because it's Irish." It also doesn't hurt sales, which soar during St. Patrick's Day, that there are 34.3 million Americans who claim Irish ancestry, almost nine times the population of Ireland itself.

After we pay the bill, Coleman gives me a guided tour of Dominick's C Town, a supermarket across the street that he furnishes with an alarming array of Irish foods. Foodireland.com carries nearly 40 brands of Irish food products, including such universally appealing items as Cadbury chocolates, Jacob's biscuits and the number-one seller, Barry's Tea, as well as more obscure food stuffs, like salad cream, Uncle Ben's Tikka Masala and Yorkshire relish. As a wholesaler, foodireland.com supplies several businesses in Woodlawn and across the country, including states like New York, New Jersey, Florida, California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, with high concentrations of Irish residents.

With the assured swagger of a man on his own turf, Coleman struts through an entire aisle dedicated to Irish crisps, custards, jams, coffees, cookies, teas and other everyday foods.

"Right now," says Coleman, "You're looking at a shelf of specialty foods. In Ireland, you're looking at plain-Jane food."

[gabi@nypress.com](mailto:gabi@nypress.com)