The Independent Edition

Tashkent Supermarket Owner: Odiljon Tursunov Opening:  2024 Cooperative:  none Location:  378 6th Ave, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, NY Photographed:  January 29, 2024 It was March 2023. I was out in Brooklyn on the subway around Crown Heights and an older man walks onto my subway car, which wasn't that crowded. Turns out another older guy on the subway was an old friend of his and they get to talking. Naturally, they are not sitting anywhere near each other and are all but yelling across the subway car to each other in the thickest New York accents you can picture. As a bonus, they both seem to be just a little bit hard of hearing. They're talking about someone's birthday, I think, and then talk about going out to dinner for the party. The conversation then switches to food, so naturally I start eavesdropping. They eventually get to the subject of food shopping, and are swapping supermarket recommendations. One talks about getting vegetables at Western Beef, I thin...

HL Supermarket Owner: John Lin Opened:  October 2022 Cooperative:  none Location:  2380 Hylan Blvd, New Dorp, Staten Island, NY Photographed:  January 13, 2023 While Asian Food Markets was working on building its new store in the northwestern corner of Staten Island, five miles southeast near the eastern coast of the island, it was announced that a Brooklyn-based Chinese supermarket would be taking over a 30,000 square foot vacant former banquet hall . After extensive renovation, HL Supermarket opened their New Dorp store in November 2022. All the grandeur of the Excelsior Grand may have been removed from the front wall, but the wall now displays murals of food items. A slightly strange layout, but it ends up working fine -- the main parking lot and entrance are in the rear of the store. But driving down busy Hylan Boulevard, you can't miss this massive signage. And as we head to the back, as usual, the rear entrance is less exciting than the front. For ease of navi...

Asian Food Markets Owner: Jon Chen Opened:  2022 Cooperative:  none Location:  2343 Forest Ave, Mariners Harbor, Staten Island, NY Photographed:  January 13, 2023 We'll be seeing two new Asian supermarkets on Staten Island today, which by the way are also the only two Asian supermarkets on the island. This is the smaller of the two, a 12,000 square foot store in a newly-built strip mall that opened in 2022. Asian Food Markets, whose stores we've seen in New Jersey, moved from an older but much larger 30,000 square foot store in a remote strip mall at 1801 South Avenue . That store actually closed way back in 2018 , so there was quite a gap between its closure and this store's opening. While the store is beautiful and has the same decor package as Plainsboro, we can feel how small it is. I was not expecting it to be this small, especially since the last one I visited was Plainsboro, and was shocked that this was all there was to it. Hot food is on the left side, wit...

Farm Country Supermarkets Owner: Jose Diaz Opened:  November 2022 Cooperative:  Key Food Stores Co-Operative Location:  37-15 31st Ave, Astoria, Queens, NY Photographed:  January 12, 2023 Today's third special report is not far from the first two in Long Island City (see here and here ). We're about 3/4 of a mile north in Astoria, Queens, for a store that was an Associated Supermarket since 1976. After closing in summer of 2022, it reopened in November as a Farm Country affiliated with Key Food. The Farm Country in East New York we toured a while back was sold shortly after I visited, around 2020, and changed its affiliation from Shop Fair to Key Food, and that store's owners have since opened two others -- this one and a former Waldbaum's-turned-Food Universe in Jackson Heights. The 13,000 square foot store was a very old supermarket , and Farm Country's owners clearly invested a lot of money to modernize the space and drastically increase selection, or at least...