Shop Local: Barking Broadway

Dog groomer Natasha Briskin had a very good reason for moving here from her
beloved New York City in 1999, five years after emigrating from the Ukraine. Her son, 7-year-old Alex, “needed a place to grow up,” she said. As it happened, she and her husband Robert found they liked Cleveland when they first visited relatives here.

Briskin quickly put her experience to work, and seven years later opened her own dog grooming salon, Barking Broadway. The name is a tribute to her love of New York City.

“I was a little afraid to open the business, but I thought I’d try,” she said.
Her effort paid off. She quickly outgrew her first location on Mayfield Road – “It was a tiny place” – and moved to her current location, 5199 Mayfield Road, Lyndhurst.

“We can take more dogs to groom here,” Briskin said. The easiest to groom is the
Yorkie, she said, and the toughest is the chow chow.

But her favorite to groom is the toy poodle, the breed that ousted the German
shepherd as her favorite dog when she saw her first one in a U.S. pet shop. She now has two toy poodles of her own who sometimes accompany her to work and graciously put up with her extra-special creative styling, a specialty at the salon.

“Poodles can have 32 types of haircut,” she said. And her two have had them all.
She employs two additional groomers, three bathers, and ropes her son, now 20 and a student at Notre Dame College, into bathing dogs on weekends.

Barking Broadway also carries a very extensive selection of dog collars and leashes,
as well as toys and grooming tools.