The new grocery store at 695 Grand Street finally opened last week.

Signage advertising the store went up more than a year ago in the summer of 2023. In recent weeks there was more activity in the store, but it did seem a bit like Waiting for Godot.

The 10,000-square foot store has something of a mixed personality. There are upmarket products and plenty of organics, fancy cheese, and meats. But many of the package products are cheaper, downmarket goods.

It wouldn’t be a Williamsburg supermarket if there wasn’t both local made pierogi and Italian cheese. The store has both, plus lots of South American brand snacks.

The eggs were overpriced. Even Beyond Natural on Montrose Avenue has cheaper styrofoam eggs than what was on sale in Foodtown. The amazing thing is even as East Williamsburg has gained more grocery stores, some products are still wildly priced, sometimes too high and sometimes magically low.

There were some products on special, which requires the Foodtown or Brooklyn Harvest reward card to unlock. Overall, the store is still very new. While there was a bakery section, there wasn’t any bakery items yet.

The freezer section wasn’t particularly big either — Ozzie’s Market or Food Bazaar on Broadway lead in that category — but it was large enough for ice cream cakes.

There is a whole section in the back of the store that has discount 99-cent-store vibes. There are still discount stores on the block though, so these goods are probably appealing to the very laziest of the discount shopper.

The store does have party staples like tissue paper and an emergency beer pong kit consisting of solo cups and ping pong balls. Joking aside, these are critical supplies in this part of Brooklyn. There’s a decent beer selection, although C-Town and Metropolitan Ave Foodtown (formerly Brooklyn Harvest) have larger cold cases.

The store also has stocked the blue barrels used for shipping goods abroad. It’s probably not the first grocery store in Brooklyn to stock these, but it is unusual for the gentrified parts of Williamsburg.

Grand Street has been down a grocery store since Key Foods closed in 2021 to make way for a new development. The residential units in that multi-story development now have some residents, but the retail space is still brown-papered. Ozzie’s Fresh market at 639 Grand is between the former Keyfoods and Foodtown.

695 Grand Street is a large-mid block building of 51 low-income units developed in 2018 by the St. Nick’s Alliance. A total of 80,000 square feet, 10,000 square feet were reserved for retail on the ground floor keeping the building in line with the retail district.

One more thing about this building is that it has a rooftop terrace, a secret hidden garden. This terrace includes spaces for the residents to plant items as well as seating areas.

The project was delayed in opening in 2019 because National Grid was using its monopoly power to bully the state into granting permits for unnecessary gas mains from the Williams Company.