The Lucky Grocery Store my mom and I used to shop at in the Montclaire hills of Oakland, CA was like our little home away from home. She’d plop my 3-year-old butt into the newly-invented kid seat of the giant metal cart and we’d trolly up and down the aisles. Looking back, it feels like we did that just about every day.
There was a small mysterious toolshed just outside of the store that Mom claimed the Easter Bunny lived in - which I believed unquestioningly until I was about 7 years old – the same year the barcode was invented (1974). I was sitting in our big blue Chevy station wagon directly across the street from the Lucky store when I figured out that all my childhood fantasies (Easter Bunny, Santa, Tooth Fairy, etc.) were just a bunch of fanciful bullshit. Sad.
Between then and today, grocery stores just kept getting bigger and bigger. Between 1916, when grocery stores were first invented in Memphis, Tennessee, and today, the number of products that the average grocery store carries has ballooned from 4,000 to 45,000, the square footage has gone from 15,000 square feet to about 38,000, and the petite little wooden grocery baskets have transformed into giant metal carts on wheels.
Along the way, grocery stores branched out into all kinds of related businesses like toys, housewares, floral, sporting equipment and so on. They even put soda fountains in during the late 1950’s. It was right about the time Mom was forced to admit she lied about the Easter Bunny that the meat sections of our local Lucky store spawned a brand new deli counter.
The deli was a no-brainer for grocery chains. The average American lives just 2 short miles from their nearest grocery store and already visits 1.6 times a week for an average of 43 minutes. Grocers could take advantage of their primo locations, existing store traffic, and easy parking while using their massive purchasing power to undercut true delicatessens (while still raking in a tidy profit). Plus they could salvage older foods that were approaching their “best-by” dates and process them into salads and other pre-made food items. In 2019, grocery stores did just under $40B in their delis alone – or about 10% of their overall business.
If you own and operate a delicatessen in America today, it’s not enough to merely be better than your local grocery store’s deli counter. To overcome inertia and outshine the obvious convenience of the grocery deli, you have to have a powerful hook that people will crave. You have to offer something that people will pine for when they’re hungry.
This isn’t easy, because the sandwiches from the grocery deli are generally fine and made exactly the way you want them. If you want a salami and roast beef sando with mustard, lettuce and tomato on pumpernickel, then by golly that’s exactly what you’ll get. And it will taste precisely how you imagined. And since you basically created the thing using their little paper order form, you can’t really complain about it. In fact, you might find yourself giving yourself a little pat on the back.
Yeah, built-in traffic, superior economics, customization… pretty tough to beat.
But grocery delis are consistently “meh”
Let’s instead focus on what grocery delis DON’T have going for them. They don’t have inspired recipes. They don’t have the magnetism of a gregarious owner-personality (who knows their grocery deli counter person by name?). They don’t have special house-made meats or salads worth writing home about. They don’t have a charming, local, small-shop vibe. And they sure as shit don’t have a hook. They are as exciting as the color beige – the “hold music” of the culinary world. Unoffensive at best.
Nevertheless, we live in a time-starved, convenience-obsessed culture. So to beat the unbeatable convenience of the grocery deli, mom-and-pop delicatessens need a hook. A memorable specialness. Unfuckingbelievable food, an unexpectedly delightful experience, truly rare delicacies and a location with good parking. And it has to be less than 15 minutes away. For example, Troubadour in the tourist magnet of Healdsburg has unfuckingbelievable house-made bread. Deli Board in SF has an inspired pastrami sandwich (and they hollow out the rolls for a better bread to ingredients ratio). Davey Jones in Sausalito prepares their own meats. Bruno’s in San Rafael has an award-winning porchetta sandwich.
But what if the grocery deli gets a tantalizing hook?
My good buddy Carlos (also a subscriber) sent me an article last week entitled, “How Arguello Market's 'world-famous turkey sandwich' became a cult favorite in San Francisco.” It’s the story of grocery store owner Sal Qaqundah, a Palestinian immigrant who bought the market in 1984. Some time before buying Arguello Market, Sal visited Victor’s market on Chestnut and noticed that they were selling fresh roasted whole turkeys. He was intrigued. So when he finally did buy Arguello, with its pre-existing deli counter, he decided to buy a roasting machine and offer the same thing. Today there’s a perpetual line out their door for those delicious, fresh-roasted turkey sandwiches and they sell somewhere between 100 and 150 of those suckers every single day.
The smell smacked me in the nose the instant we walked inside. Remember the cartoons we watched as kids when a character smelled something delicious and instantly start floating in the air toward the source of the intoxicating scent? You could also think of it as a time machine taking you to Mom’s kitchen on Thanksgiving at about 3 pm.
Then we had to stand in line for 20 minutes being teased by the aroma on empty bellies. But we finally did get up to the front and ordered two roast turkey sandwiches on dutch crunch (how they recommend it) with everything. We also grabbed two tall boys, paid for our food and wandered over to the aluminum bleachers at the local little league baseball field to eat our lunch in the early Spring sun.
The sandwich
It’s basically your basic turkey sandwich with tomato, red onion, lettuce, pickles and mayo. The only thing special going on in this “World Famous” sandwich is the perfectly roasted turkey – a bit o’ breast meat and a bit o’ dark meat mixed together. Carlos commented first that it was missing something in the vicinity of acid - like the jalapeno-garlic aioli that’s on most of the sandwiches at Lou’s. I tend to agree and personally would have liked little pepperoncini. The turkey itself is fabulous and I admire the idea of having both light and dark meats. The dark meat helps to ensure it doesn’t get too dry. The pickles offer a tangy punch but it’s not quite enough to make up for the lack of acid. Overall, I’d say it was a darn good sandwich for a highly reasonable price.
Not quite a symphony of flavors but a damn fine string quartet. If you adore that day-after-Thanksgiving sandwich you get once a year (and who doesn’t?), then you will love this grocery-store-made sandwich. Maybe pick up a few sundry necessities while you’re there.