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Special Report: Fine Fare Supermarkets - Staten Island, NY (Dongan Hills)

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By Zachary
Fine Fare Supermarkets
Opened: December 2024
Owner: Bejad Musleh
Previous Tenants: none
Cooperative: Retail Grocers Group
Location: 1689 Richmond Rd, Staten Island, NY
Photographed: April 14, 2025
Two small new supermarkets opened on Staten Island last December -- a CTown on Castleton Avenue on the north shore, occupying a building previously housing a sign shop, and a Fine Fare in Dongan Hills in a new-build building. This Fine Fare development, which includes the 9000 square foot supermarket and a Starbucks across the parking lot, started as far back as 2017. The structure was constructed by 2021, but it wasn't fully finished and outfitted as a supermarket until late 2024.
As you can see in a street view, the property backs up to a hillside, with a retaining wall running behind the supermarket (and limiting its size). The parking lot is on the side, but the store is oriented to face the street. Produce lines the first aisle on the left side of the store, with deli, meat, and the butcher counter on the back wall. Dairy and frozen are on the right side with additional frozen foods on the front wall in the right corner.
The store is quite nice, but just a couple months after its opening (grand opening signage was still up when I visited), it already feels like it's preparing to go out of business. They're no longer running a weekly circular, and it's no longer listed on the Fine Fare website. So it's possible the store is preparing to switch to another cooperative and change the brand, or it's possible it just hasn't taken off the way they'd hoped and are winding it down.
The produce department is attractive and small but complete. But you can also see some empty spaces on the shelves. Stock in the aisles was also light, although most were well-faced so that you couldn't tell there were empty spaces behind the items.
That said, the store does seem to be taken care of rather well.
It couldn't have been cheap to build a new supermarket from the ground up and outfit it with all-new fixtures, so it's always a shame to see a store struggling like this one clearly is. It's certainly possible, though, that it's just going through a transition to a new brand or something like that, but it felt like a store preparing to go out of business.
The grocery aisles looked great, but if you compare the store overall to what it looked like when it opened (and the selections it initially offered...) it's a big difference.
The most obvious sign something was wrong was that the meat department was completely empty (and, well, that's rarely a good sign for a store's health). There was also a smaller refrigerator next to the deli that was empty. These all had their covers pulled down over them. I suppose it's possible it's due to something like a mechanical failure in the fixtures themselves, but since this is a brand-new, ground-up built store, that seems extremely unlikely.
The service meat counter in the back-right corner was still stocked, though, and there was a butcher in the store. Meat is now displayed in this service case and at the back of the dairy department in the last aisle.
The store's owners appear to be Muslim, so there's no pork in the meat department. Some (or all?) of the meat department is halal.
Frozen is in the second-to-last aisle. Looking good with all-new freezers, but again, the stock was very thin in some areas.
And obviously the dairy department was having issues. It had been reduced to accommodate the packaged meat moving into this area, but even the remaining smaller area wasn't full.
Several Google reviews mention high prices. It's possible the store simply was too expensive when it opened and people just never started shopping here. It's also possible, again, that what we're seeing is some kind of temporary transition, but that seems unlikely.
We'll have to see what happens to this store in the future. For now, it's a beautiful facility but as you can see it's only running at maybe 75% capacity.
That's all for this Fine Fare, but see this weekend's other posts here!
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