Update: Food Bazaar Supermarket - Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY

Food Bazaar Supermarket
Owner: Spencer An

Opened: August 2020

Previous Tenants: Fairway Market

Cooperative: none

Location: 480 Van Brunt St, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY

Photographed: December 2021

Buckle up, folks, this is gonna be a long one. It's time that we return to the Red Hook Food Bazaar, which we last saw way back in August 2020 with pictures I took on their first day of operation. The Food Bazaar team had just a few hours to turn the roughly 55,000 square foot store over from Fairway to Food Bazaar and like Douglaston, completed a renovation over the course of approximately the next year.

As we tour this store, you'll see it looks a lot like a Food Bazaar and a lot less like a Fairway, although it maintains a distinct Fairway sensibility and quite a bit of signage and fixtures. But I'll say what I said in my first post here, I found myself wanting a lot less Fairway and a lot more Food Bazaar here. You'll see what I mean shortly.

The layout has been left approximately the same, with just a few small changes here. We still enter to produce, although the usual Welcome to Food Bazaar signage has been scaled down for the store's lower ceiling.

And once again, we have an enormous selection of organic produce, bigger than I see at almost anywhere else other than places like Whole Foods.

And we have Fairway signage remaining across the top of the cases, which unfortunately makes very little sense now that the produce department has been reset.

And the cases in the middle of the sales floor have been replaced, along with scraping the flooring down to the concrete and painting the ceiling black.

NUTZ and fresh flowers are in an island in the middle of the produce department.

Beautiful produce department, but I wasn't quite as impressed with the quality here as I usually am at Elizabeth. Maybe I was just here on a bad day.

Beautiful, and enormous, NUTZ selection (with conventional and certified organic in different sections -- notice the green and yellow labels).

As we move through the maze, which unlike Douglaston was not removed here, up next we find deli, butcher/seafood, and their assorted packaged items in this room behind produce. The enormous Fairway deli has been completely kept, which is a really nice touch. Another thing that remains completely original from Fairway is the signature smoked fish counter...

This, of course, is a centerpiece of any New York City Jewish deli. And I suppose of any New York City Korean-via-Argentina-owned supermarket...? But as I mentioned in Douglaston, Food Bazaar adding their touches to the Fairway stores makes a more distinctly New York-y store.

Sorry for the bad picture, but I wanted to illustrate that most of the product signage has been replaced with new custom-printed Food Bazaar signs but a few of them are still left from Fairway with Bogopa stickers over the Fairway logo.

And for serious service, the smoked salmon is actually cut from the salmon side to order at the smoked salmon counter! Again, this is very much something left over from Fairway. I must say that this (nearly $50/lb) smoked salmon was some of the best I've ever had.

Olive bar facing the deli department.

Packaged deli and meat line the left side of this wall, with meat and deli islands in the middle. Previously, the meat and seafood counters were in an island in the middle. Meat has been moved over to the right side wall of the store while seafood has been moved to the back wall.

Kosher cheeses, something we don't see too much, are here in the front of the deli room.

And my answer is that Food Bazaar is committing to keeping Fairway's cheese program entirely intact! I was wondering because many Food Bazaars have very small cheese departments, but they just left this department exactly as it was, just like in Douglaston. Worth noting that since we toured Long Island City, they've added a coffee department and an expanded cheese counter -- definitely something they learned from Fairway. Manhattan Ave also now has a coffee department, but I'm not sure about cheese.

Just like in all the other Food Bazaars we've seen lately, the reclaimed wood is just gorgeous in all the departments. I love the signage below it too, depicting the various cuts of meat and where they actually come from. Some higher-end touches in this department too...

Both the fixture and the signage, I believe, are left over from Fairway. You can recognize that bold black-on-white lettering anywhere in the Fairway signage.

What used to be the meat/seafood island is now aisles of packaged meat, with service seafood moved to the back of the store.

Here's a look at cold cuts and vegetarian/vegan items, with seafood behind that.

Once again, like Douglaston, we see that seafood has been switched over to packaged fillets with whole fish on ice to the right, and of course the service counter offers fish cut to order. Moving into the room to the left of this...

This is a strange room. We have about two aisles of international foods with the usual enormous selection condensed down to just that small area, cereal, coffee/tea, the specialty oil department, and bulk foods.

So as we see, this store offers just a little bit of a lot of different interntional foods, and not the ones we usually see. British, Greek, Italian, and kosher here in the first aisle in this section which is numbered aisle 10.

Admittedly, I have seen British and French products, like what we see here, in other stores -- but only ever in Food Bazaars, Long Island City and Fairview.

And then we have a rather average selection of granola and such on the outside wall.

The second international aisle, aisle 11, has Asian on one side and Latin/Caribbean on another. Now of course, I'm used to seeing two aisles for Latin/Caribbean/African in Elizabeth plus about half an aisle of Asian, so this is a much smaller selection. Emphasis here, like Fairway, is on the perishables.

And here's the bulk selection in the back of this room. Next to that is the coffee/tea department...

As I've probably mentioned before, I'm a big tea drinker. Food Bazaar is my favorite source for tea because they have the best selection of the good stuff, which inludes an exciting variety of tea bags in Elizabeth, but here in Red Hook that also means a whole lot of loose leaf teas...

Again, the loose teas and coffee are something that Village Super Market significantly downsized or cut altogether when they bought the five core Fairway stores. Here at Food Bazaar, the beverage program is alive and well, even including a machine to roast the coffee in-store...

Moving back out into the meat/seafood/deli room...

You can see here there are two doorways into that side room, with the first labeled "kosher" and the second labeled "coffee". Well it's true that these doorways take you in to those two departments, but there's a lot more in that random room.

Now we move into the main supermarket area...

Once again, I'll say that I was sorely disappointed in this bakery department. Not nearly as exciting a selection as Elizabeth, and missing even the most basic things like store-baked chocolate chip cookies. The baguettes are brought in from a bakery in the Bronx (they're not good, I bought one at Douglaston) and as for the store-made baguettes, they looked nowhere near as appealing as Elizabeth's and they were much more expensive. And they were stale! I've talked to the baker at the Elizabeth Food Bazaar and she's great, they need to send here over here to get this place into shape. Matter of fact, maybe they may as well send Elizabeth's whole team over here for a week or two to really bring this store up to par.

Moving into the grocery aisles...

Nice spice department, taking up the back of the first aisle. I'll complain again for a moment here... when Food Bazaar acquired these three Fairways, they also took on Fairway's contract with UNFI. So as for private label items, on top of Food Bazaar's own Bogopa brand; Bozutto's Hy-Top, Seven Farms (natural/organic), and Life Goods (nonfoods); and some IGA products from Bozutto's, they started bringing in Field Day from UNFI along with the occasional Wild Harvest product. All those brands make for a wide selection of high-quality private label items. Well here, I observed a somewhat limited selection of Bogopa, almost no Hy-Top, a nice selection of Seven Farms, some Life Goods, no IGA, no Field Day, and a few random Wild Harvest things. I don't exactly miss the Hy-Top or IGA products, but why was Field Day so noticeably absent from this store when Food Bazaar only sells that brand because it was the brand Fairway sold?! In other words, why did they discountinue Field Day here while bringing it in to the other stores?

Anyway, here we are at the HABA department, predictably moved out of the grocery aisles and into the front corner of the store, extending across the front wall beyond the registers.

Food Bazaar installed a few self-checkouts in the front here (which they also recently did at Elizabeth), which is a nice feature.

Heading back to the grocery aisles, we find that again, they are predictably packed with merchandise. Why have less stuff when you can have more?

In the back corner, we have the cafe, which is left over from Fairway. There's indoor and outdoor seating, which looks out on the waterfront and to the Statue of Liberty. Forgot to get a picture of the view from the back cafe.

Sushi, sandwiches/salads, and pizza (which didn't look half bad), all of which are left over from Fairway. So are the menus for the various prepared foods counters. Something that definitely isn't left over from Fairway is the craft beer growler bar added to the front of the cafe...

Here in the dairy aisle, we see that although it's been reset, much of it is left over from Fairway, especially the category markers on the tops of the cases. Doesn't matter, though, because it looks really good.

Beer has been restored in the grocery aisle towards the end of the store. All new fixtures here and they look fantastic. Signage is, as it always is in Food Bazaars, really great.

And then the last few aisles are half the length of the rest of the store, with refrigerated beer on the back of that section and frozen foods in the aisles.

Looks like Food Bazaar managed to fix Fairway's leaking case problem.

New category markers in this section, too. But again, constrained a bit by space, the selection is abbreviated compared to Elizabeth, or at least it felt like that.

A look across the middle dividing aisle back towards the grand aisle.

And here we see the front end! Again, the wooden structure over the registers has been simplified for the lower ceiling here. All my complaints aside, the Red Hook Food Bazaar is a beautiful and one-of-a-kind store that couldn't be anywhere other than New York City, and that's the best part. (Forgot to mention this, but Food Bazaar has an incredible selection in this store and others of local brands. It's not hard, admittedly, to find local producers in the NY-NJ metro area, but still a nice touch.) To my out-of-state readers, stop by here if you are ever in New York City -- enjoy a slice of Food Bazaar pizza while looking out at the Statue of Liberty! Wait, no, if you're visiting NYC from far away, don't get your pizza at Food Bazaar -- nothing against Food Bazaar's pizza, of course. Get their sandwich (or lobster roll!), those are usually great here. But anyhow, give Red Hook a visit! And don't forget to check out what else we have today here.