Update: Food Bazaar Supermarket!

It's not too often that I do updates of Food Bazaars, since most of the ones I visit regularly are fairly new. But we have a couple of changes at Elizabeth and Red Hook that are worth checking out...

Elizabeth

The above picture of the Elizabeth Food Bazaar isn't a recent one (you can see the snow), but it's a very nice sunset shot and I think it's my only picture showing the whole store from across the street. The Elizabeth Food Bazaar opened in 2016 in a former Pathmark, which actually opened in 1967 as a ShopRite and was converted the following year. You can see my extensive past coverage here, here, and here. While the store was extensively remodeled before its reopening, most of the supermarket retained its Pathmark tile (just with the signature blue Path to Savings-era portions removed). Only the grand aisle was switched to polished concrete. This month, a lot of work has been going on at the store, including refinishing all of the flooring to polished concrete. Other, less exciting work has happened too, which seems to be mostly things like repairing refrigerators and so on.

Here we see the flooring in the meat department scraped back to its concrete. The concrete (being a subfloor previously, and not designed to be used as the top layer) had to be patched, stained, and sealed from what I could see. Above we see the patching complete, but no staining and sealing yet.

And it's obvious where the dividing line is. The tile had overstayed its welcome, I think, and was looking pretty rough. The new concrete flooring looks sleek and shiny (except for where it looks appropriately rustic, in the more rustic-looking grand aisle).

As we see here, a few registers were removed on the front end (truthfully, they were never open anyway) and replaced with general merchandise shelving. The first two or three registers across the front-end were also removed, and replaced with self-checkouts.

As we see, the grocery aisles look really sharp with exposed concrete. They look more like the newer Food Bazaars. The signage on the perimeter gives away the fact that this store is six years old (so it's not brand new, but Food Bazaar as a chain is only 34 years old), plus the fact that the grocery shelving is white and not black. Some new shelving has been installed around the store, and it's the newer black varieties.

Here's a look at the dairy department with newly sealed concrete. When I say the department signage is older, you can compare this dairy signage to Red Hook. This store's signage is definitely attractive, but not quite as shiny and new.

A look down the last aisle, with dairy on the outside and frozen facing. I don't believe they'll be changing any decor here (there's no good reason to), although some older stores have gotten those latest signs, or the next-newer variation seen in BTM and others.

And one final shot of the main display in the first aisle, following the completion of the flooring redo. You can also see the aforementioned newer black shelving in the middle of this aisle. Previously, there were large pallets of product in the middle of this aisle, which is why it is so much wider than the other aisles. As readers of this blog will know, the Elizabeth Food Bazaar is the place I go (usually at least once a week) for a lot of my groceries, but one weekend I ventured out to Red Hook, Brooklyn with a friend to check out their Food Bazaar two years after it first opened...

Red Hook

We saw the extensive renovation at this former Fairway in January, after first seeing it in the summer of 2020. When I returned this month, I wasn't so much focused on the supermarket (which is mostly great, except for a few odd things I mentioned in my January post -- though some of those complaints have been fixed, such as the bakery and produce departments). Instead, I was focused on the newly-reopened Red Hook Cafe, Food Bazaar's take on the Fairway staple in the back of the store. While Fairway had a nice little spot to sit and have a sandwich, Food Bazaar has taken it to the next level.

Here in the back, we have a look at some of the menus. Sharp eyes will notice that the chopped salads sign is left over from Fairway. The craft beer growler bar we saw in the remodel post is just to the right, with some very cool custom large beer bottles...

The cafe consists of a standard hot food bar, a salad bar to-order, a grill to-order, pizza (which actually looked really good, and my standards are high), premade or to-order sandwiches, and sushi. That's pretty much what Fairway had, although Food Bazaar has changed the selections slightly. But where they really have brought things to the next level is outside. Out on the patio, where we'll head shortly, Food Bazaar has added a seasonal outdoor barbecue with traditional cookout and barbecue food cooked to order on the patio. The Red Hook BBQ operates over the summer on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 11am to 7pm. And judging by my visit on a Sunday, it's quite the popular feature. Let's take an overview of the whole cafe, which again Fairway had but Food Bazaar has improved drastically.

App users (who have their "home store" set to Red Hook -- I was wondering why it wasn't working and then realized my home store was set to Elizabeth still) get these specials daily. Oh, and by the way, I didn't mention that the cafe also includes a coffee bar and breakfasts made to order (like egg sandwiches, the famous smoked salmon sandwiches, and omelets).

Here's a look at the indoor seating, on the patio out behind the supermarket. I believe most if not all of the fixtures and furniture we see here were brought in by Food Bazaar, but clearly the green awning overhang was not. By the way, I have to assume the cafe does a booming business not just because of the number of customers I observed (and the lines, which moved really fast), but because of the staffing. In this era of everybody being short staffed, I think I counted no fewer than 12 employees dedicated to just working the cafe and food court, including three cooking out at the BBQ, and at least two (one seen here, in the Chilling & Grilling @ Food Bazaar shirt) who appear to have the sole function of directing traffic. For that reason, the whole operation ran incredibly smoothly, and it's complicated enough that it has the potential to be a total disaster. When I sat down to eat, the line for the cafe register stretched well into the supermarket but was moving very fast, and everyone knew exactly where they should be. I mean, I'm not surprised, since I generally observe excellent management at Food Bazaars, but again I don't know what else to say other than it was truly on a new level.

Oh yeah -- and the cafe delivers on Grubhub! Here's a look at the menu, which encompasses all of the options I mentioned above.

And there it is, folks, the Red Hook Cafe's gorgeous seating patio! You can see the supermarket (and indoor seating) off to the right above. Between the genuinely comfortable seating choices and excellent landscaping, I was blown away by this.

I've talked about the seasonal outdoor BBQ, so let's have a quick look at that. Here's the menu for the outdoor BBQ (which, of course, is only a fraction of the total menu). I was watching the cooks, and they are serious cooks. They know what they're doing and they do it all from scratch. (I may have mentioned this before, but in "real life," I work in college food service management -- not exactly the most glamorous culinary location, but we take pride in what we do and we do it all from scratch. I appreciate when culinary teams in other mundane locations do simple things really well.)

And another thing -- how about those prices? I don't know what readers from other parts of the country think about these prices, but let me assure you there's basically nowhere else in trendy, expensive Brooklyn that you can get a nice big fresh grilled burger with cole slaw and pickle for $10, much less with a waterfront view! (With my lunch, which we'll see shortly, I got a $0.99 bag of local Hal's potato chips and a $1.50 iced tea. You can't argue with those prices in such a beautiful location of Brooklyn.)

Here's the BBQ stand, where the cooking is actually done. Okay, enough talking about the facility. Let's check out the food!

Here's my supermarket visiting companion's Korean beef sandwich. It's a lot like a cheese steak on a hamburger roll, except it's made with Korean style bulgogi-type shaved beef. And served, of course, with homemade cole slaw and a pickle I suspect was also made in-house. As we see, the fillings were literally spilling out of the rather large roll -- again, you can't beat the value for $10. And for my show-stopper...

That's right, one of the famous lobster rolls! Let me tell you something, I was in Maine not long ago and I didn't get any lobster rolls -- partially because nothing I saw looked as good as this one. Quite a hefty portion size, too. While Food Bazaar has increased Fairway's lobster roll price to $18, are you kidding me? In any restaurant this lobster roll would be $25 at a minimum. Some of the lobster rolls that I saw in Maine (smaller than this one, too) were over $40. But this one was incredibly good, with just the right amount of mayonnaise and seasoning and leaving the lobster to speak for itself just enough. All in all, I had a great time checking out this awesome cafe at the Red Hook Food Bazaar, and while nothing will seem quite so exciting after this post, don't forget to see everything else today here!