Defaria Deli Store
Owner: Jim Defaria
Opened: 2019
Cooperative: none
Location: 624 Broadway, Long Branch, NJ
Photographed: January 2021
Cooperative: none
Location: 624 Broadway, Long Branch, NJ
Photographed: January 2021
Our last Long Branch store is here at Defaria Deli Store! This store is quite interesting to me although I don't entirely understand it. Within a block or two there are several Defaria businesses, which all seem to be owned by different family members (I listed Jim Defaria as the owner here, although I don't know that he actually is -- he owns the building supplies store next door according to Manta). I don't entirely understand the idea of owning a building supplies store, a flooring business, a garage, and a grocery store together, but hey, it works I guess.
The 9,000 square foot store also has a parking lot, shared with the other assorted businesses, in the back. The deli lines the right wall of the store, although it wasn't really set up at the time of my visit. There are a few grocery aisles with an incredibly random selection of goods that take up the rest of the space.
If nothing else, the store is in an extremely cool building. The exposed brick and pitched roof make for a very cool feeling inside. As we see, the interior is fairly modern, owing to its opening recently in 2019 in a former auto parts store (unclear whether that was also owned by the Defaria family).
One of the strangest things about this extremely strange place is that the aisles are all dead ends. There's barely any stock on the shelves as it is, so would they have lost a lot by shortening the aisles slightly to allow for a full walkway across the whole back of the store?
I believe there are four grocery aisles, with the first two being food, and the last two being nonfoods. In fact, one whole side of the third aisle is this, which I'm pretty sure is just a specialty bottled water.
Health and beauty and other nonfoods items in the last aisle. This store has the potential to be an excellent grocery store, but it's just bizarre. I don't even know why anyone would come here -- so if we have any Long Branch residents who enjoy shopping here, please do chime in, I'm genuinely curious. Next we're going just to the west of Long Branch, to -- you guessed it -- West Long Branch. We have a chain supermarket on The Market Report along with a former store just across the street on Grocery Archaeology tomorrow!
A weird store, at the shore, screams mob front to me, but what do I know?
ReplyDeleteHmm. Who knows.
DeleteNot quite the same as something we have up this way, but another unusual storefront to compare it to.
ReplyDeleteThis one is a small space (basically two small storefronts with a large warehouse space behind - I believe it was once a cleaners/laundry). The right hand storefront has a pretty standard deli setup and you can have them slice stuff for you.
The other half is basically a counter space, and you can order items (mostly frozen foods, some refrigerated, and some dry items) and they bring out to you whatever you ordered.
The items are purchased from a variety of sources, including most of the larger restaurant supply chains, then they break them up and sell them (for instance, they may buy a case of 12 bags of frozen green beans, then sell them to the public by the bag, or a case of 100 single serve snacks and bag them for sale in dozens or 25 count).
It has existed long enough that now the son of the original owner is basically running it (though his father is still involved). In addition to sales at the storefront, they also offer a sheet of these bulk items (and selected deli items) to many local businesses and schools where people place their orders and they deliver to the business/school location once a month for the customers to pick up.
Oh interesting, thank you for the info!
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