Silk Road NYC at 166-30 Jamaica Ave is owned and run by one person: its founder, Sohan Bashar. No investor group, no multi-state operator, no silent partners. It opened on February 23, 2024 as the 75th licensed adult-use dispensary in New York State and the first owned by a Bengali-American, a few blocks from Little Bangladesh on Hillside Ave.
🛒 Shop Menu How Delivery WorksOCM-CAURD-24-000062, social equity
100% founder-owned
Feb 23, 2024 · 75th in NY
16 and counting
New York's CAURD program was written to put licenses in the hands of people from the communities most affected by cannabis enforcement. Silk Road holds one of those licenses, OCM-CAURD-24-000062, and the person on the license is the person on the floor. Every decision about what goes on the shelf, what it costs, who gets hired and which events run in the lounge is made in this building.
Many of the licensed stores that opened in Queens after us are financed by outside investor groups, multi-store partnerships or operators based in other states. That is legal and it is their business model. It is not ours. When you shop here, the money stays with a Jamaica small business.
Hillside Ave between roughly 169th and 179th Streets is known as Little Bangladesh, one of the largest Bengali communities in the United States. Silk Road opened a few blocks south of it, staffed by people who speak Bangla, and became the first licensed cannabis dispensary in the state with a Bengali-American owner. Our Bangla page was one of the first things we published.
Jamaica, Queens is one of the most multilingual places in America, and we serve it in its own languages rather than expecting the neighborhood to adapt to us. The site reads in Español, বাংলা, Kreyòl, 中文, 한국어, 日本語, اردو, हिन्दी, ਪੰਜਾਬੀ, Русский, Tagalog, Polski, العربية, Français, Ελληνικά and नेपाली.
We were the original licensed dispensary on Jamaica Ave and we built the only real consumption lounge in the neighborhood, with a running calendar of community events, before any chain arrived. Read the full story and the press coverage since 2023.
Founder Sohan Bashar owns 100% of Silk Road NYC. There are no outside investors or partners.
No. It is a single independently owned dispensary at 166-30 Jamaica Ave in Jamaica, Queens.
Yes. It opened in February 2024 as the first licensed cannabis dispensary in New York State with a Bengali-American owner.