Look Inside: Barth's Market - New Providence, NJ

Barth's Market
Owner: James Barth
Opened: 1940 in Irvington; 1960 in New Providence; 1996 under current ownership; 2017 in current location
Cooperative: none
Location: 41 South St, New Providence, NJ
Photographed: June 2021

Just across the street from the ACME in New Providence is this longtime butcher shop. I'd recommend reading all about the history of this store here, but the highlights in its history are this: Otto Barth opened his first butcher shop in Irvington in 1940, 20 years later moving to New Providence. The business was sold a little after that, and the Barths went into meatpacking, making sausage for Foodtown stores. That business went under in 1988, and the family then bought Barth's Pork Store in New Providence back from the other owners. In 2016, construction started on the existing building to expand from 4300 square feet to 9300 on the first floor and adding a second floor over part of the original building.

At some point probably around 2000, the store was renamed from Barth's Pork Store to Barth's Market, the name it has kept since. But it's always been a butcher shop at its core (and a very good one at that; when my parents lived in nearby Summit, they'd always get their meat for holidays here). Today, the store is about 25% deli, 25% butcher, 25% produce, and 25% seafood/dairy/frozen/grocery. Let's head in! You enter in the middle of the store and turn right to find the deli, separated into separate meat and cheese counters.

And baked goods are on the front wall. The wall we're looking at here is the right-side wall of the store, with the cheese island in the middle. A sandwich counter is just behind the cheese counter, with a huge prepared foods counter on the back wall.

I assume this was originally the meat department when the store only took up this part of the building. In the front part of the original space is the produce department, small but beautiful...

Here we can also see the general division between the old and new spaces, which I believe is more or less where that wall is on the left. The entrance/exit is behind these produce cases.

The butcher and seafood area is located in the expansion area, which extends farther back behind the original sales floor (since I think both parts of the building go as far back, but I assume there is backroom/prep space behind where the prepared foods counter is now.

And as we see, meat is still the centerpiece of the store, although there are also small grocery, dairy, and frozen departments in the front. This is a great store and it certainly has an interesting history! And it seems to hold up well despite the ACME directly across the street. Tomorrow, we are moving west to Berkeley Heights for one store on Grocery Archaeology and a tour on The Market Report!