Snapshot: Cather's Food Mart - Phillipsburg, NJ

Cather's Food Mart
Owner: Antoinette Boutros

Opened: 1998 under current ownership

Cooperative: none
Location: 159 Hudson St, Phillipsburg, NJ

Photographed: January 2022

Our second store here in Phillipsburg is a very old grocery store at the top of the hill above Towne Market, and like many of these stores has been cut back to basically a convenience store over the years. (The store once had a butcher in-store, as evidenced by this obituary.) Online records suggest that the owner since 1998 has been Antoinette Boutros, and that might be true but at the time of my first visit in January 2021, the person who I assumed was the owner was almost definitely not named Antoinette Boutros, but who knows. My January 2021 attempt at photography was thoroughly unsuccessful due to a confrontation with said assumed owner, so unfortunately I have no interior pictures but I did get these exterior shots when driving by in January 2022. The interior is definitely well-preserved from its earlier days, but not in a good way; the interior is in very bad shape and downright dirty. So it's not exactly a great loss to not return here.

It's worth documenting the exterior, though, since that is a great sign! And while it looks like the house surrounding the grocery store has been redone, the storefront itself is fairly original I'd assume. And apologies for the slightly wonky colors, these were taken through a somewhat dirty and foggy windshield, so I had to color-correct them later. Well folks, if you need to stop in Phillipsburg at a small corner store, may I recommend skipping Cather's and heading a mile and a half southeast to Gino's! Also check out our update at the former Ahart's in town here.