This grocery chain just opened a first store in Florida. How it’s different from Publix
David Kronstat, a second-generation American from an Eastern European family, remembers the five different kinds of lox his mom served at the dining table. The herring. The 12 different kinds of caviar. Fresh borscht. German and Polish meats and spreads.
“For me, it’s a trip back to Brooklyn,” said Kronstat, 58. “The foods of my childhood.”
His family, primarily of Ukranian, Russian and Polish descent, first settled in New York and kept their traditions alive. Kronstat later went to J.P. Taravella High School in Coral Springs and moved to the Hollywood area near Oakwood Plaza. He moved back to his Brooklyn hometown in 2005.
Now, with a family of his own and a home and brokerage business in Clifton, New Jersey, since 2008, the traditional tastes remain. For Kronstat, that means a trip to one of the two NetCost supermarkets in Jersey.
The chain of 13 grocery stores caters to a multi-ethnic populace but leans into its vast selection of Eastern European offerings such as Ukranian, Russian, Georgian, Belarusian, Slovenian, Moldovan and Uzbekistan.
Borscht in shades of army-green (schav) and hot pink (chlodnik). Tsarskaya Sunflower Halva. Mazto ball mix and flanken — visualize short ribs, a tough cut of meat often stewed to flavor borscht soups and popular in Jewish cooking. Pickled prepared foods and fruits and veggies.
Kronstat can’t readily find these in abundance at ShopRite or Wegman’s up North or on trips to his stomping grounds here, like Publix, Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s.
Until now.
Where is NetCost in Florida?
On Dec. 15, NetCost Market opened its first store in Florida, in Hollywood, a 27,000-square-foot supermarket at Oakwood Plaza at 3791 Oakwood Blvd.
“I’d have been over the moon had that market opened when I lived there,” Kronstat said. “I lived just around the corner of Oakwood. It’s a truly great Eastern European market.”
NetCost, which has eight stores in New York and two in Philadelphia, in addition to the pair of Jersey stores, is looking to expand and strategically selected the Hollywood location for its Florida debut.
“We are thrilled to expand our footprint in Florida with the opening of our newest store in Hollywood, located by Interstate 95, which is the main artery of Florida’s Atlantic Coast,” Eduard Shnayder, CEO and president of NetCost, said in a statement.
NetCost was no doubt mindful that there is also a sizable population of Russian and Ukranian immigrants, and others from Belarus, Moldova and Georgia, in nearby Sunny Isles Beach in North Miami-Dade to tap into their grocery budget. That’s where the greatest concentration of Eastern Europeans live in South Florida, according to U.S. Census data.
“Our team has worked diligently to curate an extensive selection of products that cater to the diverse tastes and preferences of our customers,” Shnayder said. “We look forward to welcoming the community and becoming a valued member of the neighborhood.”
Rediscovering hometown foods
Biana Litvak, a fourth-grade teacher who lives in Boca Raton, discovered NetCost when she lived in Brooklyn about seven years ago. Born in Brooklyn to a mother from Odessa, Ukraine, she grew up on Ukranian delicacies.
“NetCost has a ton of European foods from my childhood,” she said, listing some favorites. Herring. Sour veggies. Caviar. Pierogis. Cheeses and cold cuts. Borscht.
Two of her three children aren’t as fond of the “real Ukranian foods,” Litvak, 45, said, “but I still buy them and enjoy them.”
She just hasn’t had the selection at traditional grocers in her neighborhood that NetCost offered back in Brooklyn — which also has a sizable Ukranian population.
“It’s an all-in-one shopping experience,” Litvak said of NetCost, which originated as Royal Seafood Baza, a wholesale food import and export family business in New York by Sam and Eduard Shnayder in 1997. The first two NetCost supermarkets opened on East 16th Street and 65th Street in Brooklyn in 2000 to cater to the immigrant population with foods from their homelands.
“They have produce, meats, fish, etc. They also bake on premises,” Litvak said. “They have fresh breads and cakes. I like to buy things that I wouldn’t normally find in a supermarket. They also have my favorite red caviar and smoked sturgeon. All foods from my childhood. The other stores in Boca are limited. So I’m open to driving 45 minutes and stock up on my favorite foods.
“I’m only talking about the experience I had in their several Brooklyn stores,” she said. “I’m hoping this one is just as good. Hoping to go next week.”
Holiday hours and groceries you’ll find
The new Hollywood store is open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.
The store will be open its regular hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which is also the first night of Hannukah this year. The Oakwood Plaza NetCost will have altered holiday season hours Dec 28-30 when it has extended hours from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.
On New Year’s Eve, the store will be open 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on New Year’s Day it opens later at noon with a 9 p.m. close.
In addition to its international foods, the new NetCost offers a department called the Gourmanoff Corner that sells freshly baked goods. The Hollywood store also has a deli counter with prepared foods and charcuteries, a fresh seafood department, signature caviar and smoked fish selections, and a dedicated section for organic and health-conscious products.
A soup station at a NetCost Market may be where you’ll find rivers of green and red borcsht.
Borscht, for the uninitiated who may not have had a bubbe of Romanian descent who had jars of the sour soup in her Miami Beach kitchen cabinets in the 1970s, is made with meat stock, vegetables like red beetroots or the leafy green sorrel or cabbage and seasonings. The soup is common in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia.
Also, there’s solyanka, which is a combination of sausage, cured meats, rich broth, olives, capers that is popular in Russia and Ukraine. And kharcho, a traditional Georgian soup containing beef, rice, cherry plum purée and chopped walnuts.
Customer opinions
In 2016, a columnist for Epicurious, a food newsletter, called NetCost “the best grocery store in America.” The headline teased, “It’s not grim Communist bread lines. It’s not Putin-era luxury. It’s a wonderland of salt, smoke, and fat.”
Writer Adina Steiman wrote of a fantasy she enjoyed as she plucked items off a NetCost shelf up North, like frozen pelmeni (a type of dumpling often stuffed with minced meats, mushrooms or fish and dolloped with sour cream) and as she perused the smoked fish counter: “NetCost lets me slip on my Russian identity, just like pulling on the sheepskin coat from Misha of Siberia that my father bought me as a kid. I’m a James Bond spy, blending in amongst the locals in Cold War-era Leningrad.”
Kronstat, the former Florida kid, is a fan of supermarkets for what they reveal of a community.
“When I travel I go into supermarkets and watch the people who shop there,” he said. “You can tell a lot about what a population is like by who lives there.”
Future expansion plans
More NetCosts may be on the way to the Sunshine State.
“Our goal is to continue expanding our store chain,” Yuliya Khasdan, NetCost’s director of public relations and advertising, said in an email to the Miami Herald. “While we don’t have specific dates or locations to announce yet, we look forward to sharing updates with our customers as our plans progress.”
This story was originally published December 18, 2024 at 12:22 PM.
