Jefferson Market

[NYadgal]

Posted: 11/14/08 at 11:19pm

Looks like Jefferson Market may be a victim of the failing economy...

Lou Montuori is a friend of mine, and I'm heartbroken at the thought of it...

A New York institution. I hope it survives. I will have to pay it a visit and do some shopping there to do my small part in keeping it open. If it's not too late.

Love the Market.

Updated On: 11/14/08 at 11:19 PM

[NYadgal]

Posted: 11/14/08 at 11:24pm

Jefferson Market, a gourmet grocery on Avenue of the Americas, just north of 10th Street, opened in 1929, the year of the first great crash. It may not survive a second one.

Louis Montuori, one of the market’s current owners and the son of the man who took it over in the 1960s, has been explaining, sometimes to 20 or 30 concerned customers a day, why he has not had the cash flow necessary to fully stock the store. To start, he has suffered from a huge uptick in competition, from Citarella, which opened one block south in 2003; Whole Foods, which opened in Union Square in 2005; and from Trader Joe’s, which opened there in 2006.

So it’s a story of the big-fish markets eating the little-fish market. It’s also a story about real estate, and how the West Village has changed. “A lot of these new families, with all this money, they don’t cook,” said Mr. Montuori. “People don’t cook.” And if they do, they already know how to shop at Whole Foods — they don’t have the decades of history with Jefferson Market that their predecessors in the neighborhood had.

And it’s a story, Mr. Montuori will acknowledge, of some bad management choices, like letting the staff get too big, and not wanting to let anyone go. “We were running it like a mom-and-pop when we shouldn’t have been,” Mr. Montuori said.

For a long time, Jefferson Market felt like a throwback to another era, the kind of place where a kindly, rosy-cheeked butcher asked after your kids and taught you how to cook a roast. “I used to place big orders, when I threw a lot of dinner parties,” said Claudette Fink, who’s lived on 12th Street since 1973. “But I could also call at 6 o’clock and say ‘Roger, Roger, Roger, I love you, you know what I need? Just a bit of parsley.’ And he’d say, ‘It’s out the door as we speak, Mrs. Fink.’ It was like living in a small village in Tuscany.”

It is still the kind of mom-and-pop where the family runs the place — not from afar, but up close and personal. When business was hopping, Mr. Montuori himself used to work behind the butcher counter (his father, legendary for his beef and poultry, trained him in the meat business). His uncle, Angelo Montuori, 82, still manages the inventory. And another uncle, Anthony Montuori, who’s 87, still rises at 4:30 a.m. to come to the store from his home in New Jersey and deliver groceries, sometimes to customers he’s been serving for 30 or 40 years. When there is nothing to deliver, he keeps busy squeezing oranges for juice.

“He never learned to read or write,” Angelo said of Anthony. “He’s crazy about the store.”

Back when the store opened (right across the street), it took its name from the original, 19th-century Jefferson Market, a cluster of individual proprietors selling ice, meat, dairy and vegetables that had been named for the country’s third president.

Now the store is one of the last of its kind in New York, a market with name recognition that isn’t a chain, a place whose location is grounded in its specific history, not in a focus group or a financial analysis of the block’s demographic and median income. It’s not that the economy has not had an impact on business. That’s part of it, Mr. Montuori said. Food costs have jumped, but he cannot raise his prices any more. And people are ordering less. “We used to get consistent orders for $200 rib roasts, for parties,” he said. “Now that’s very rare. That’s just a holiday thing.”

Mr. Montuori hasn’t given up hope of reviving the store, but he knows it will take an infusion of cash, which he has started actively seeking. There has been some interest, he was relieved to report, but until a deal is sealed, he’ll be waiting to see how the times treat him.

“I picked the worst week in history,” he said, “to be looking for an investor.”

[Jane2]

Posted: 11/15/08 at 12:02pm

Oh no! What a shame. I shop there on occasion for my fresh turdeys and chickens. I'm sorry to hear this news.

[SNAFU]

Posted: 11/15/08 at 1:47pm

heheheheh Jane typed Turdeys!

[Jane2]

Posted: 11/15/08 at 1:59pm

Hey, they have delicious turdeys. LOL!

[NYadgal]

Posted: 11/16/08 at 12:40am

It's harder and harder to compete with the chain stores.

[Jane2]

Posted: 11/16/08 at 10:34am

Jefferson Market's two blocks from me. I have noticed lately that the store is nearly empty whenever I go in. Sad. I guess a lot of their clientele is shopping at Citarella, one block away in the old Balducci space. But even Citarella is never really crowded.

On my corner on seventh avenue, we have Gourmet Garage, which does a lively business, but they only carry a fraction of what Jefferson and Citarella have.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 11/16/08 at 10:43am

This is sad. Another piece of what made New York distinctive is slipping away.

[SNAFU]

Posted: 11/16/08 at 12:03pm

I do believe Fresh Direct is taking it's toll on these places. More and more people are just ordering on line and having it delivered.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 11/16/08 at 1:17pm

I don't think it's so much failing economy or competition as the fact that the rents in the Village have gone through the roof. In the past year or two, the West Village has seen several stores close that had been around for years.