Within a half-mile radius of North Street in Burlington, a cluster of small shops sells everything from boxed mac and cheese to homemade macaroni salad, toothpaste to candy, fresh bok choy to frozen camel meat.
But beyond the goods on their shelves, these small markets deliver another, less tangible good.
At Dot’s Market & Deli on the corner of Archibald and Walnut streets, clerks help kids count out precious savings for carefully selected afterschool treats.
Amid chest freezers filled with halal meat and frozen cassava leaves at 128 North Street, Halal Champlain Market’s customers inscribe a notebook with details of money the store will wire back to their families in Africa.
In front of Momo’s Market at the intersection of North Willard and North streets, a chalkboard offers a daily note of humor, political commentary or reminder of an upcoming block party.
Such family-owned, “walk-up” markets have been beloved and necessary fixtures of Burlington’s working-class neighborhoods for more than two centuries. Before people had cars or refrigerators, everyone shopped at their corner store. Nowadays, they are primarily a convenience — a place to grab milk, eggs, a sandwich — but in the right hands they become much more: an anchor for a neighborhood or a community.
From stores run by German, French Canadian, Italian and Lithuanian immigrants in the late 1800s to the current roster, which includes Vietnamese, Nepali and African markets, such businesses also provide economic opportunity and a touchstone of familiarity for recent arrivals to Vermont.
Markets past and present “serve to ground people, whether they’re new to the country or part of a neighborhood,” said Charlotte Barrett, who directed Historic New England’s “More Than a Market” ethnographic project. The 2022 exhibit documented 15 historic and contemporary markets in Burlington and Winooski. It was inspired, Barrett said, by relationships forged at the stores — “the rapport between owners and customers … You don’t find that at Cumberland Farms.”
“You had these deep roots in these neighborhoods, and the corner stores were a big part of that.” Bob Blanchard
Just as the current crop of schoolkids swarms Dot’s on weekday afternoons, Bob Blanchard, 72, remembers taking saved pennies to buy his favorite black licorice pipes at Godin’s Market, a “one-minute walk away” from the family home on Hayward Street.
It was the 1950s, his parents didn’t own a car, and Blanchard’s mother often sent him or one of his seven siblings over to Godin’s to pick up milk or other essentials. Tina Godin was always at the register, Blanchard recalled, “looking rather sternly, I might say, at you if you were at the penny candy.” Her husband, Floyd, “was always in the back. He was the butcher.”
Blanchard, an avid amateur historian, believes the number of corner stores in Burlington peaked in the late 1920s and ’30s. “You had these deep roots in these neighborhoods, and the corner stores were a big part of that,” Blanchard recalled of his South End childhood.
In the century since their heyday, Burlington’s small markets have dwindled to about 15 in number. They have lost customers to supermarkets and suburbia; urban real estate has been gobbled up by more lucrative enterprises. The stores that remain are concentrated in the densely settled, walkable Old North End. They survive by doubling down on service to the neighborhood, or by offering specialties that attract customers from afar.
Seven Days reporters spent time at a sampling of Burlington’s corner markets. While not all literally on a corner, all seven are family-owned shops selling groceries along with a smattering of other goods and services. The oldest has been a market for more than a century, the youngest just shy of 30. All sell candy — though no longer for a penny.
Each market has a different story to tell about how it knits itself into the neighborhood and how it stays afloat in a world where the big tend to gobble up the small.
— Melissa Pasanen
Snack Attack
Few things spark joy in a fifth-grade heart like a dismissal bell when there’s money in your backpack for a trip to Dot’s.
For Henry Kranichfeld and four of his friends, that magic moment was 2:50 p.m. on a December Thursday when, sprung from the rigors of school, they filed out of Integrated Arts Academy and across Walnut street to Dot’s Market & Deli.
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They tumbled in like turtles, backpacks strapped on like canvas shells. Energy inside the Old North End market instantly ratcheted up.
“Excuse me, how much are the two of these together?” Tai Fujioka asked clerk Natasha Chastenay as he held up an AriZona lemon tea and a Nerds Rope.
“Do the math!” one of his friends chided.
Schoolkids may constitute the store’s most energetic and appreciative traffic.
Set on the corner across from Dewey Park, Dot’s is many things: the regular source of morning coffee for Integrated Arts administrative assistant Jarret Greene; purveyor of Pick 3 tickets for an eightysomething man named Charlie, who tucks them neatly in a clear plastic sleeve; and the place where upstairs tenant Eric Trepanier collects his mail along with ribbing from the staff.
But schoolkids may constitute the store’s most energetic and appreciative traffic. For Integrated Arts’ elementary students — as well as middle school kids whose bus drops them off across the street — Dot’s is a treat. It’s the place they grab a snack on their way to the Boys & Girls Club of Burlington; where they spend money they earn vacuuming, walking the dog and getting good grades; where some conduct a transaction on their own for the very first time.
When those kids move away, they miss it — customer Jean Wolfe once freeze-dried a Dot’s turkey-bacon sandwich and shipped it to her son when he was in college in Ohio — and when they’re back in town, they visit. Wolfe, who now works at the store, recalled one man who reminisced about trading baseball cards on the store’s front steps.
A market has occupied this corner for more than a century. Part of Burlington’s historic Little Jerusalem neighborhood, the building housed Miller Cigar company and Burlington Paint and Wallpaper for a few years, but for most of its history it has been a grocery. Lori Jarvis, 58, has run it since 1987, when she and her brother Paul bought it from Greg Chioffi. They kept the name, which comes from owners Tony and Dorothy Merola — proprietors before Chioffi — who established Dot’s Market in 1976.
Despite changes, children have always been part of the customer stream, though Jarvis phased out penny candy when it didn’t pencil out anymore. Lots of kids pay with cards now, but some still present crumpled bills and fistfuls of change, and Wolfe will say, “Let’s count this out together.” She speaks up if kids get too rambunctious, though they likely know it’s the kind of place you shouldn’t act up because the news will get home before you do. Jarvis’ three employees have all worked here at least five years. Chances are one of them knows your mom.
Christina Pixley, 29, knows all about that mom-Dot’s line of communication. She has worked at Dot’s for 10 years now, but when she was a regular customer as a child, her mother called Jarvis to cut off her access to penny candy. Another mother, Jarvis said, brought in her son and said, “Please don’t sell him Mountain Dew.”
The store offers housemade pasta salad, deviled eggs, cookies and brownies along with sandwiches stacked with meat and vegetables sliced right in the store. But most kids opt for foods with eternal shelf life. One was chewing a gob of Laffy Taffy as he paid for it last month. Most stash their loot in their backpacks and scoot out the door.
Fifth grader Muntaz Ahmed bought Milk Duds, AriZona sweet tea and Doritos on her way to school one recent morning. The snacks would supplement her school lunch, she said. When she was in kindergarten, she said, she bought an ice cream treat to save for later. Rookie mistake. “I had to get a new backpack,” she said.
On that December afternoon, Henry Kranichfeld’s eyes widened when he considered buying a made-to-order sandwich, but his friends were eager to get to afterschool camp and checked out ahead of him. So he selected mini doughnuts, Nerds Gummy Clusters and an AriZona tea. One day, Dot’s may evoke warm memories for Henry. But on this Thursday, he had to get to camp. “Thank you!” he called to the clerks, and he was out the door.
“Guys, wait!”
— Mary Ann Lickteig
Home Plate
Kerry’s Kwik Stop is stationed in a brackish zone between urban grit and hip wealth. It’s across St. Paul Street from Decker Towers, the subsidized apartment complex for seniors and people with disabilities that is the tallest building in Vermont. Behind the store, on Pine Street, sits the Soda Plant, with its art galleries, organic juice bar and artisanal coffee shop.
At 8,000 square feet, Kerry’s is far larger than most corner markets, but it functions like one. Open 365 days a year, usually until midnight, Kerry’s occupies many niches. It’s both a walkable source of staples and vices for the neighborhood as well as a pit stop for city commuters thanks to its generous parking lot along a major thoroughfare.
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The alcohol section at Kerry’s stretches across 17 cooler doors, plus a “Beer Closet” and a separate wall of wine. Other inventory spans rock salt, gift wrap, Spam, pet food, Tongue Bomb Inferno candy, homemade cookies and bird feeders. A made-to-order deli/grill and eight dining booths transform one side of the store into a worker’s cafeteria.
On any given day at Kerry’s, you might overhear guys from Vermont Gas talk through problems at a job site or you might leave with a list of Christmas movies recommended by store clerk Taylor Rockwood. If you’re a regular, manager Melissa Kochan, 53, will learn your dog’s name and might even adopt your pooch after you die, as she once did for a customer.
Kerry’s has been around since the 1940s, first as a two-bay gas station and then as a grocery store and sub shop owned by Anne and Kerry Karkos — hence, Kerry’s. A teen named “Rocky” Rockwood started working there in 1969, then took over the business and ran it until his retirement in 2013. Rocky’s nephew Todd Rockwood, 53, and his wife, Carrie, 51 — who also own Kerry’s Old North End Variety — bought the property and installed the grill and fryer. Taylor, who works the register with cheer and sarcasm, is their 25-year-old daughter.
Kerry’s is the closest thing the occupants of the 160-unit Decker Towers have to a walkable grocery store, though a supermarket is one thing Kerry’s is not. There’s no produce section, and food sells at convenience store prices.
Treena Sadlier walked over from Decker Towers on a recent Wednesday morning and left with bottles of Mountain Dew, a can of Monster energy drink and a pack of Newports. She’s been going to Kerry’s for years. The employees are “very polite,” she said, and the prices are “decent.”
Kerry’s has also cultivated a dedicated following for its kitchen, which serves weekday breakfast and lunch in portions that cater to a construction worker’s appetite. Behind the long counter, Thea Lewis and Alex Work make almost everything from scratch, including the house-cut fries and freshly mixed meatloaf.
Each morning, Lewis, 27, bakes cookies, banana bread and carrot cake. There’s no sign advertising that Lewis herself grinds the carrots and whips up the thick cream cheese frosting, but word gets out. One man who lives in Hinesburg comes almost daily for a slice of carrot cake.
The huge menu includes foot-long subs, burgers, salads and creations such as the Mailman. The stack of fried chicken, maple bacon and honey mustard on a maple waffle for $12.99 is named for one of many postal service workers who are kitchen regulars.
“You’re so late!” Lewis told Scott Baker as he walked up around 11 a.m. to put in his usual breakfast order.
Baker became a Kerry’s regular during the pandemic when he began working from home. Four times a week, he orders a $6.99 bacon, egg and cheese bagel. On Fridays, he treats himself to a hash brown on the sandwich.
“Here you are, honey,” Lewis said as she handed over his bagel.
Prices have increased a bit since Baker made Kerry’s part of his daily routine. “I don’t care,” Baker said. “It’s kind of my spot.”
The past few years have been difficult, Carrie Rockwood said, with the trickle-down effects of urban poverty and addiction that surged during the pandemic. As shoplifting and belligerent behavior increased, the employee team decided to post security-camera images of banned customers above the register. The shaming strategy seemed to work, Carrie said, but it was discouraging to look at.
During the fall, a regular suggested that Kerry’s employees hang photos of their favorite customers, too.
Several weeks ago, the wall of shame disappeared. Now, below the register, a much larger collage of beloved patrons has taken its place.
— Derek Brouwer
Prime Cuts
Kevin Scully began shopping at Bessery’s Quality Market in the early 1970s, not too long after Peter Bessery opened the small New North End grocery in 1963. Back in the ’70s, Bessery’s was the place to pick up fresh-cut meat and pantry provisions or to congregate over the Sunday paper. Scully recalled that it became a gathering spot in the relatively new suburban neighborhood.
Scully, now 81, retired as Burlington’s police chief. He befriended Bessery early in his career while working his beat. The cop would stop by to check on Bessery, who kept his small market open until 9 or 9:30 p.m. “because he wanted to be available if even for only one person,” Scully said.
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These days, Scully still heads to the shop to chat, but he also picks up the shop’s “famous, all-purpose salad,” steaks or other meat to grill. Much has changed over the decades, including a period when Bessery’s was not owned by Besserys. It’s back in the family and has been owned by Peter’s grandson Bryan, 48, and his wife, Kelly, 46, for more than 20 years.
“They have an amazing meat department here.” Jason Boyd
During Bryan’s grandfather’s day, the meat counter was less prominent and the grocery selection was much larger. But as supermarket competition increased, the latest generation decided to try a different tack. In 2016, they rebranded as Bessery’s Butcher Shoppe & Delicatessen, cut back on packaged products and doubled down on high-quality meat.
“I just said, ‘Forget it. We’re just going to go with a better product,'” Bryan said.
Today, Bessery’s shelves still boast spice rubs, pastas, sauces and several racks of wine. Coolers hold tortillas, cheese, ice cream and an extensive local beer selection. However, the shop’s focus is on delivering the meaty centerpiece of a meal — either cooked on the store’s grill in the form of mouthwatering burgers and grinders, or as freshly cut meat to cook at home.
The gleaming glass butcher case holds filet mignon, Delmonico steaks, short ribs and chicken cordon bleu alongside everyday fare such as ground beef and chuck roasts. Bryan said he sources only USDA prime and upper-tier choice Black Angus beef from Nebraska with a high fat marbling content. Customers can order custom cuts if a standard one-inch-thick steak won’t suffice.
For meat aficionados, the shop dry-ages steaks and other cuts, such as holiday rib roasts. “Usually 30 days is kind of like the magic spot,” Bryan said. All the meat is wrapped to order in brown butcher paper.
“They have an amazing meat department here,” said Jason Boyd, a regular customer who had stopped by on a recent evening for some burger patties to cook at home. “The best around.”
Those patties are made from high-end muscle meat that Bessery’s butchers cut in-house and grind fresh. Bryan said he’ll sometimes add an end cut of rib eye, strip or sirloin to the blend. The same beef is used in the shop’s cooked burgers.
The shop sees a lot of regulars. When Boyd stopped in late December, Bryan’s 25-year-old daughter, Alex LauQuan, was working the register, as she often does, greeting customers with a smile. Behind the butcher counter, her dad prepped chuck steak for grinding as online dinner orders piled up. Paper snowflakes swayed from the ceiling as local news babbled softly from a TV on the back wall.
Firefighter Mike LaBombard, who works out of Burlington’s Fire Station No. 4 across the street, was moonlighting on the grill. A family friend, he used to visit just for fun. “It’s nice having that small-town market to go to,” he said.
Before long, LaBombard was cutting meat and cooking. His 9-year-old daughter — the snowflake artist — was at the shop, too, rearranging packages of local marshmallows at the cashier counter.
Under that glass countertop, the Besserys display an old black-and-white photo of Bryan as a teen employee. Another snapshot reveals how cars used to park in front of the old single-story building so drivers could run in for milk and bread.
Those parking spots have been replaced by outdoor picnic tables to accommodate the lunch rush. Students from nearby Lyman C. Hunt Middle School use them, too, waiting their turn in the crowded store after classes to grab snacks and drinks, as they have for decades.
That combination of old and new keeps Bessery’s going. Old-timers, prompted by the historic photos, often share memories about visiting the store as kids.
“On a bad day, it just makes you happy,” LauQuan said.
— Rachel Mullis
Connecting a Community
Momo’s Market owner Erin Malone claims to host “the only Valentine’s Day card-making party in the history of the world at a convenience store.”
The claim is unverifiable — but seems very possible. The market at the intersection of North Willard and North streets does more than sell snacks, alcohol and household items. It sponsors an annual September block party that hosts several hundred people and a Thanksgiving Day 5K “turkey trot” that drew two dozen runners last year. Last February, 75 people came to Momo’s to sip free coffee and craft homemade cards for Valentine’s Day.
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“Someone can buy a bag of Deep River chips anywhere they want. Why do they come here?” Malone asked. Her answer: She has made Momo’s a place where residents of the neighborhood can connect with one another.
Malone, 42, bought the former Willard Street Market in 2015, hoping to create the kind of family-friendly store where she would feel comfortable sending her 9- and 11-year-old kids to pick up milk. She had decided to leave her career in marketing after running a half-marathon landed her in the hospital with exercise-induced hyperthermia.
Malone remembers thinking that, if she died, she would have spent her final week of life selling T-shirts. She asked herself, “Is there something bigger I can do that has a little bit more meaning and substance?”
Seven months later, family and friends helped her buy the 1890s storefront from owners Muhammed and Aicha Faour. Malone, a native of Essex with an MBA from the University of Oregon, named the business for her late mother, affectionately known as Momo, who died of ovarian cancer in 2012.
Since then, Momo’s has grown to employ 12 people, all of whom live within half a mile of the store. Malone makes a point of selling local products, from Cabot mac and cheese to frozen American Flatbread pizzas. During the pandemic, Momo’s introduced Veggie Connect, a weekly box of fresh produce aimed at reducing the need to visit grocery stores.
Customers are invited to suggest additional products on a piece of paper by the register. On a recent Friday, the scrawled requests ranged from the highly specific “Albanese gummies” to the more practical “dog poop bags.”
A chalkboard outside the store adds another personal touch, in the form of a daily message: a song of the day, a drawing of a “Simpsons” character or a political note. “It’s cool to stand up for Roe v. Wade,” the board read after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark abortion decision in June 2022.
Employee Lio Woodall, a recent University of Vermont graduate, has noticed a stark difference between Momo’s and an earlier job at a Chipotle Mexican Grill in Washington, D.C. At Momo’s, Woodall has gotten to know a set of regular customers, many of whom are UVM students. The relationships go both ways. One customer who stopped by regularly for a Hershey’s chocolate almond bar brought cookies to celebrate Woodall’s graduation.
“It’s a different feeling than going to a big grocery store.” Dario Guizler
Old North End resident Dario Guizler is another regular, coming in almost every morning for a vegetarian burrito. He said the store feels brighter and more inviting since Malone took over. But the main draw, he said, is the friendly employees who know his name and order by heart.
“It’s a different feeling than going to a big grocery store where you don’t know anybody,” he said.
Colin Butler lives around the corner and comes in almost daily to buy his dog a treat. He said he prefers to buy local products like those the market offers, but more than that, the store is “like a little family,” Butler said. “They know my name. They wish me a happy birthday.”
Malone says that’s just the kind of personal interaction she wants Momo’s to offer. Corner stores “bring so much to the community because they create a space for us to connect with our neighbors,” she said. “Burlington is so lucky there are all these micro communities.”
— Hannah Feuer
Fresh Take
Open the door of Thai Phat, and you’re greeted with a riot of color. Spiky rambutan, baby bananas, fresh coconuts, flame-like dragon fruit and jackfruit the size of dinosaur eggs spill out of a stack of cardboard boxes, glowing in a sliver of natural light that sneaks in. The fruity aromas follow shoppers through the aisles, where the scents mingle with those of spices and dried shrimp.
“Looks like you just picked it, it’s so fresh,” a customer said one December day as owner Hà Nguyễn, 44, packed his selection of papayas and perfectly ripe mangoes. Nguyễn smiled as she stuffed bunches of cilantro and watercress into the black plastic bag, their tops sticking out like bouquets on the way home from the florist.
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Fresh produce of any kind is unusual among Burlington’s corner stores, which largely deal in shelf-stable products. But customers of Thai Phat, a North Street market owned by Vietnamese immigrants, can count on finding fresh Asian fruits and vegetables that are rare even in the area’s conventional supermarkets. So, too, they will find spices, sauces and shrimp paste stacked nearly to the ceiling; tubs of fresh tofu; 10-pound bags of rice; steamers, rice cookers and chopsticks; made-to-order sugarcane juice; and freezers full of chicken feet and pork bung (a cut of intestine), tail and tongue.
The fruity aromas follow shoppers through the aisles, where the scents mingle with those of spices and dried shrimp.
The biggest overlap with other corner markets might be cigarettes, a bit of shampoo and instant ramen — though Thai Phat has at least a dozen feet of shelf space dedicated to just-add-water noodle soups.
When Andy Thai originally opened the market in 1996, it was the first in what’s now a robust scene of Chittenden County stores devoted to Asian and other international foods. The novelty of new ingredients drew chefs and curious home cooks of all backgrounds. But for the area’s Vietnamese residents — and for its new owners, now the market’s third — it’s as much a community center as a grocery store.
Nguyễn and her husband, Đức Trần, 48, were customers before they purchased Thai Phat from Chau Nguyễn a year ago. Their daughter Hân Trần attends college in Burlington, Nguyễn said through an interpreter, and the couple “bought the store so they could have work” shortly after moving to Vermont from Iowa, where they’d lived for four years after leaving Vietnam.
About half of their regulars are Vietnamese or Southeast Asian, Nguyễn said. Many customers live in the neighborhood, but some travel from afar.
“I have friends from Plattsburgh who come here and shop,” Hà Huỳnh, the interpreter, confirmed. “I myself come here and shop, too.”
Huỳnh frequents several of the area’s Asian markets to find the best prices and variety, she said, and Thai Phat has the best selection of Vietnamese ingredients, including spices; bột bánh bò, a sweet rice cake flour; and offal, including chicken hearts and gizzards, pork stomach and kidneys, and beef tendon. Those offcuts — which co-owners Nguyễn and Trần take extra steps to prepare, repackage and freeze — are a staple of Vietnamese dishes such as phá lấu, a slow-braised coconut milk stew.
The store is busiest on the weekends, Trần said, so he and Nguyễn do most of their large prep projects during the week. On a recent Thursday afternoon, the couple were carefully weighing and wrapping 50 pounds of giò heo — pork hock — three pieces per Styrofoam tray. The thick cuts are most often used to make bánh canh, a thick noodle soup, Huỳnh said.
The front of the store was unmanned while Trần and Nguyễn worked side by side behind the back counter. The shop was quiet, aside from the hum of the many freezers lining its tight aisles. As customers filtered in, most would stop to chat in Vietnamese over the ice chest filled with whole fish — golden pompano for $4.99 per pound.
Nguyễn enthusiastically greeted an English-speaking customer who had picked up a gallon jug of soy sauce on his way down the aisle, remarking that it had been four or five months since she’d seen him.
“This much soy sauce lasts a long time,” he joked.
The language barrier got in the way of his next question. Before Nguyễn could figure out why the customer was hopping up and down, somebody rang the bell by the checkout counter. She took off her gloves and headed to the front. His request for rabbit would have to wait.
— Jordan Barry
In the Bag
Mondays are pretty quiet at the Shopping Bag. Pre-pandemic, the flattop grill in the modest, brick-fronted corner store sizzled daily with its signature Sizzler hamburger. For now, the persistent labor crunch has forced a one-day-a-week hiatus.
Long before the burger was anointed Vermont’s best in a 2009 Food Network Magazine survey, the loaded half-pounder was firmly established as a local favorite. Shopping Bag employees often sport black T-shirts that advertise the national accolade and state unabashedly, “Size Matters.”
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The Shopping Bag on the corner of North and Lafountain streets celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2024. For at least the past 15 years, a hefty, ground-to-order burger has overshadowed the Old North End market’s stock of Fruity Pebbles, instant ramen and mashed potato flakes. It’s almost as if the Sizzler swallowed the store.
On Mondays, when the grill sits clean and quiet, customers trickle through for standard corner store purchases. The clerk greets many shoppers by name, reaching for their brand of smokes as they approach the counter.
The rest of the week, a different energy bounces off the store’s cinder-block walls. Heavy patties hit the flattop with a slap, a hiss and a waft of beefy steam. Fries and onion rings spit from the fryers. A steady stream of customers — firefighters, teachers, senior citizens, college students — flows through the door to grab heavy brown bags of hot food.
Don Clayton opened the store with his father-in-law, John Vincent, in 1974, according to Don’s brother, Gary Clayton, who thinks the grill was added about a decade later. Gary eats two to three Sizzlers a week. “I tell them they should hand out a free Lipitor with every one,” he joked.
Gary, 63, was hanging around the register on a December morning, sipping from a paper cup of coffee pumped from an urn at the back of the store. He now works elsewhere but started stocking shelves at the Shopping Bag when he was 17.
Back then, Gary said, the store offered more groceries and produce, along with the butcher counter, which still anchors the back of the space. (That glass case is temporarily empty, awaiting an expensive repair.)
Gary’s nephews Josh Clayton and Howard Moody now co-own the Shopping Bag. “I worked here when Josh was sleeping on the shelves,” Gary said.
Josh, 44, is a big guy with a dark beard and tattoos on his beefy arms. He can be found working the grill or manning the antique wooden front counter.
Above the counter, a bumper sticker warns, “Don’t New York My Vermont Gun Rights.” Below, little glass windows hold a rainbow of global paper currencies donated by regular customers.
Josh and Howard declined to be interviewed about their store. Sometime between Don’s last talk with Seven Days in 2011 and his death in 2022, he became, in Josh’s words, “adamant” about not speaking with the paper. Although Josh said he didn’t know why, he was equally adamant about respecting his father’s wishes.
Don originally created the Sizzler to rib a favorite local cop, who liked his burgers big with all the fixings.
It’s a lot of burger for $10.49, said Zach White, who remembers his first Sizzler from when he was in college. It was a hot summer day, and friends planned a river swim followed by burgers; the two stops held equal weight. White lives nearby and when he’s busy with work and forgets to eat, “It’s a Shopping Bag day,” he said.
“The fact that it’s from a convenience store is definitely part of the allure,” he added.
On nice summer days, cook Ben Bissonnette said, the Shopping Bag sells as many as 100 burgers. But even on a winter Tuesday afternoon, the wiry 38-year-old was ricocheting around the kitchen like a pinball, throwing buns like little frisbees onto the grill.
The fries are no longer hand-cut, but the burger is still ground fresh in-house, twice, from a specific cut of chuck. “When someone orders, we grind it a second time to even out the fat,” Bissonnette said.
For each order, the grill cook tongs parcooked bacon onto the flattop, sprinkles patties with a secret seasoning based on the mildly spicy Montréal steak mix, and then tops them with slices of provolone and American. A second cook layers buns with red onion, freshly shredded lettuce, tomato and pickles, then adorns hot burgers with swirls of mayo, ketchup and mustard.
Bissonnette paused to say hi to regular Jocelyn Hunt and Odie, her low-slung rescue mix. “Can he have some bacon?” the cook asked.
A couple of days later, Everett Renderer and three friends were hanging out in the grocery aisles waiting for their order. It was just past 10 a.m., but that didn’t strike the twentysomethings as too early for a burger. They were driving from Upper Jay, N.Y., to Maine. Renderer used to live in Burlington and returns whenever he can.
“I heard tell of a great cheeseburger from a place called the Shopping Bag,” he recalled. “Now, I’m hooked.”
— M.P.
Talking Shop
Rose Ruane had onions on the stove and needed olive oil, so she walked to J & M Groceries, the corner store near her house in the Old North End. Owner Judy McLaurin set two choices on the counter. “Can I get two of these?” Ruane asked, pointing to the Filippo Berio oil.
“Those are $7.99,” McLaurin cautioned. The tiny bottles held just 8.4 ounces. “Do you want one of these?” she asked, gesturing to a bottle of Food Club olive oil that cost $3 less.
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Before checking out, Ruane dished that she was making French onion pasta and butternut squash soup for her new boyfriend. “Judy, this man is beautiful,” she said. He normally does the cooking. “Yesterday I got a tuna melt, with the most phenomenal cheeses ever on the best gluten-free bread I’ve ever had, and he hand-cut sweet potato fries for me.”
“That is so nice!” McLaurin said.
“And he does the dishes when I cook … and he does them well.”
“Keep him,” McLaurin said.
Ruane passed on the Food Club oil but limited herself to a single bottle of the more expensive Berio and headed home with McLaurin’s stamp of approval on her new relationship.
So goes business at “the Jem,” the tiny market at 68 Archibald Street, where second-generation owner McLaurin offers beer and wine, bread and eggs, cat food and kitty litter, candy and ice cream, along with a listening ear and respect. When McLaurin asks if you’re OK, she’d like an honest answer. And if you try to spend $50 or $60, she will discourage that. “I mean, I welcome it, but people who are on food stamps and stuff, I will tell them, ‘No, you need to go to a grocery store to get more because you’ve got kids to feed.'”
“They trust me enough to tell me what’s going on.” Judy McLaurin
J & M stands for John and Mildred, McLaurin’s parents, who bought the store in 1975. Its nickname, “Jem,” derives from the fact that the ampersand on the sign that used to hang above the front door looked like an “e.”
Judy worked there as a girl, which was fun until she hit junior high and preferred hanging out with friends. In adulthood she became an accountant and was living in Florida when her father died in 2010. Among the family’s four siblings, she said, “I’m the only one that had the knowledge to run the store.” Selling “wasn’t even an option,” she said. She hired her nephew to run it while she got her son, Nigel, through college. Then she moved back.
The once-reluctant storekeeper now runs the shop at least five days a week. “Yep,” Judy said, laughing at the irony. “Yeah.”
A time capsule with a pressed tin ceiling, J & M is a judgment-free zone where McLaurin serves people of all income levels. When she’s not at the cash register or stocking shelves, she can be found, hair wrapped in a colorful satiny scarf, perched on two milk crates stacked behind the counter.
The doctor is in.
If McLaurin senses a customer is having a particularly difficult day, she’ll encourage them to stay for a cup of coffee. “I won’t charge you,” she’ll say. “Just have a cup of coffee and just bite my ear off.” People need to talk, McLaurin said, “and they trust me enough to tell me what’s going on — and for me not to be blabbing it all over.”
McLaurin tries not to give advice. “But sometimes I do.” When people confide in her, she can’t be sure she’s hearing the whole story, she said, and offering advice under those circumstances could be harmful. “I try to just listen,” she said.
And she tries to encourage her customers to talk to each other. To that end, she brought back the ice cream window that’s been boarded up for years and is getting a creemee machine. People in the neighborhood need to know each other better, she said. As evidence, she cited a house that was robbed last summer in broad daylight, a crime that would not have occurred, she believes, if neighbors recognized that the thieves didn’t belong in the building. “So if you get the ice cream machine, everybody’s gonna come out. And you’re standing in line and you’re talking and socializing.”
Nigel is helping her get Judy’s Treats, a slate of confections, smoothies and coffee drinks, up and running, but she doesn’t want to see her only child take over the store, she said. “I did not bust my butt to send him to Syracuse University for five years to work in this store.” He’s 29, has degrees in biomedical engineering and biochemistry and, she said, he has the potential to truly help people.
Some would say that’s what she does.
“Yeah?” she said. “Talking?”
Does she have a hard time carrying the burdens that people lay at her feet?
“No,” she said. “Because at night I say a prayer for everybody and lay it at God’s feet, and that’s it … I did what I was supposed to do. I was a human being treating another human being with kindness and respect.”
— M.A.L.
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This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2024.
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