Snootsville, ha! Fact is, most supermarkets below 96th St. either are or pretend to be snooty now. W-S and Whole Foods are the best at it, followed by Stew Leonard's (tries to hide it by appearing rural) and Fairway (depends, but largely trendy), and those followed by Gristedes, D'Agostino and Food Emporium (they try to disguise themselves as neighborhood-ish). Trader Joe is just too schizo to classify in my opinion.
Funny though, there's a Williams-Sonoma on the corner of East Kingsbridge and Jerome Ave in Da Bronx (and I do mean mean 'Da'). It used to be an Associated, now it looks like an Associated that went condo.
[3] You mean the one on Broadway, right? That's why I always thought Fairway was supposed to be like a superbodega or lost in time, but almost all the other ones I've seen are trendy. The one in Mount Vernon is basically Whole Foods' suburban cousin Tom. The Fairway up in Harlem under the Henry Hudson Pkwy might look like a warehouse (the last time I went in there, anyway), but honestly...
Forgot about Pioneer, which often hovers around superbodega status. Associated and Key Foods has tried to pick it up here and there. You might even see a Met Supermarket that's trying to go condo, but the truth is if they are in the city limits, it's very hard for them to lose the grittiness. Western Beef, fehgeddaboudit. Even a West End address does absolutely nothing for them.
In Yonkers on New Main Street, there's a tiny superbodega that absolutely has not changed since the sixties, from what I can imagine. It has the open floor freezers that they used to have in Pathmark in the seventies; I remember because I saw several Morton TV dinners that still had the brown 70's packaging. I'll take pics next time I go through there.
[7] The last time I saw a Waldbaums was in Long Island on a gig I was PAing for. They've stepped up their game if this one was any indication. We had a Waldmbaums where I grew up in Wappingers Falls; it was run down and full of rats. It was closed for a long time before I left the area, and when I came back to visit it had now become Hanniford's. I laugh when I go in there, thinking about what the place used to look like and what it could easily become again if they didn't clean up for a night.
Who remembers Grand Union? They were the Stop & Shop of their day, SON!
Snootsville, ha! Fact is, most supermarkets below 96th St. either are or pretend to be snooty now. W-S and Whole Foods are the best at it, followed by Stew Leonard's (tries to hide it by appearing rural) and Fairway (depends, but largely trendy), and those followed by Gristedes, D'Agostino and Food Emporium (they try to disguise themselves as neighborhood-ish). Trader Joe is just too schizo to classify in my opinion.
Funny though, there's a Williams-Sonoma on the corner of East Kingsbridge and Jerome Ave in Da Bronx (and I do mean mean 'Da'). It used to be an Associated, now it looks like an Associated that went condo.
I love the Pioneer on Columbus near 74th. Even with recent revisions, I feel like I'm walking into a circa 1975 upstate Loblaws.
Dude, Fairway has gone nuts with all the new locations. But the original store has been around since I was a kid, so it's no trendy spot.
Whole Foods. Good food, but you go poor in there in a minute.
Fairway is great, but dumpy. I've been going there since it opened in the '70s. The prices are creeping up to Whole Foods.
Revisions at Pioneer? Has the sky fallen? Always carried the most extensive beer selection. I wonder if that's still true.
[3] You mean the one on Broadway, right? That's why I always thought Fairway was supposed to be like a superbodega or lost in time, but almost all the other ones I've seen are trendy. The one in Mount Vernon is basically Whole Foods' suburban cousin Tom. The Fairway up in Harlem under the Henry Hudson Pkwy might look like a warehouse (the last time I went in there, anyway), but honestly...
Forgot about Pioneer, which often hovers around superbodega status. Associated and Key Foods has tried to pick it up here and there. You might even see a Met Supermarket that's trying to go condo, but the truth is if they are in the city limits, it's very hard for them to lose the grittiness. Western Beef, fehgeddaboudit. Even a West End address does absolutely nothing for them.
In Yonkers on New Main Street, there's a tiny superbodega that absolutely has not changed since the sixties, from what I can imagine. It has the open floor freezers that they used to have in Pathmark in the seventies; I remember because I saw several Morton TV dinners that still had the brown 70's packaging. I'll take pics next time I go through there.
5) Dude, you read my mind. Take some snaps, SON!
What are all these fancy-pantsy shops you mention? I grew up in BROOKLYN, it's Waldbaums or nothing SON! ;)
[7] The last time I saw a Waldbaums was in Long Island on a gig I was PAing for. They've stepped up their game if this one was any indication. We had a Waldmbaums where I grew up in Wappingers Falls; it was run down and full of rats. It was closed for a long time before I left the area, and when I came back to visit it had now become Hanniford's. I laugh when I go in there, thinking about what the place used to look like and what it could easily become again if they didn't clean up for a night.
Who remembers Grand Union? They were the Stop & Shop of their day, SON!
[8] Grand Union - they ruled Route 9, all the way to the Canadian border!