On Wednesday morning inside Circle Food Market, the butcher was prepping boudin, the fish cutter was readying an ice bin and market co-owner Sidney Torres IV, the high-profile local developer, was giving an impromptu tour of the soon-to-open grocery to his buddy Alvin Kamara, the Saints running back.

A few aisles away, Torres’ business partner Rick El-Jaouhari had an elbow perched on a pallet of canned peas while talking through the nitty gritty of price margins and supply chains.

“This building has history, it’s iconic, but in retail you can’t live on history and looks,” said El-Jaouhari, founder of the local Magnolia Discount grocery and convenience store chain.

“Products, service, price — that’s what gets people coming back,” he said. “If we bring all those components together, with history and community, we can really do something here.”

Things are indeed starting to come together at Circle Food Market, the new name for what was long known as Circle Food Store at St. Bernard and North Claiborne avenues.

The partners plan to reopen the store next week as a full-fledged grocery, one with plenty of hot food and an assortment of other services.

The precise opening date remains in flux, though Torres’ aim for the store is fixed.

“I truly believe it will be better than the way it was,” he said.

That’s a tall order, given the memories the old Circle Food Store built over generations. The grocery, dating back to 1938, was once a hub of neighborhood life between Treme and the 7th Ward before closing in disarray in 2018.

Torres’ current goal is also a striking change from the future of the grocery that New Orleans heard about last spring, when he sketched out a vision for a food hall.

Circle Food Store had once been among the city’s longest-running black-owned businesses. The prospect of it pivoting under new ownership to a more upscale concept drew criticism and seemed primed to become another flashpoint in the city’s gentrification debates.

Instead, Circle Food Market will reopen with a familiar layout of grocery aisles and departments, with produce up front, a deli and butcher shop in back and a long, cafeteria-style food court holding down one corner.

The partners have leased space within the store to independent operators for a pharmacy, a cellphone sales and repair booth, an ice cream counter and a food court. They plan to add an urgent care clinic sometime after opening.

The pharmacy will be an outpost of H&W Drug Store, run by Ruston Henry. Henry’s father, the late Sterling Henry, was the first African-American pharmacist at the Circle Food Store, starting in the 1960s.

At the food court, called New Orleans Connection, customers will find steam tables for hot plates and Louisiana comfort food from Otis Wafer. His company New Orleans Seafood Connection provides food service and consulting to corporate and government clients. At Circle Food Market, he said, he’s out to provide “a collage of the foods that we eat in Louisiana,” the regional heritage dishes "that are getting harder to find.”

“We’ve had some intense conversations about how the Circle Food Store is so much bigger than we are,” Wafer said. “It’s not just selling food. We have to bring people together here because of how this project was first perceived. As I see it, we are curators of a valuable piece of art that is also an economic engine”

Historic roots

With stucco walls, a tower topped with Spanish tile and a shaded colonnade outside, the Circle Food Store was built on the spot that was previously home to the St. Bernard Market.

That was part of a network of open-air public food markets that once dotted the city. Precursors to supermarkets, these were multiple-vendor markets where independent operators worked their own stands and had their own specialties.

One of the St. Bernard Market produce vendors was Herbert Gabriel, who eventually bought out his fellow vendors and consolidated the market as a full-service grocery. The store took its name from the circular turnaround point for North Claiborne Avenue streetcars at the intersection.

That stretch of Claiborne Avenue was a hub for black-owned businesses in those days, though the area was radically changed when Interstate 10 was built above the avenue in the 1960s.

Over the years, Circle Food Store evolved into a one-stop shop for a wide range of products and services. It stocked school uniforms and also had other amenities, including a pharmacy, a doctor and a dentist for check-ups, and a chiropractor.

By 1995, the Boudreaux family bought the business and continued to run it along the same lines.

Inundated by flooding from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — pictures of the building sitting in floodwaters became familiar nationwide — the store finally reopened in 2014 after a renovation funded largely through loans from the now-defunct First NBC Bank, city-provided grants and more than $4.4 million in tax credits. Its return was hailed as an important post-Katrina comeback for the community it had long served.

By the end of 2018, however, the store had closed, mired in debt and a tangle of lawsuits between members of the family that owned it. In April, the property landed in an Orleans Parish sheriff’s sale after defaulting on loans of more than $8 million.

Torres and El-Jaouhari bought it for $1.7 million. The only other bidder was the financial institution that held the property’s debt.

The two men are unlikely partners. The son of a prominent local attorney, Torres gained acclaim after Katrina for his trash hauling business and rock star stylings and he later appeared in a reality TV series. He’s since become a major real estate developer in the city. El-Jaouhari has kept much more behind the scenes. Working in the grocery business since age 17, he went on to build the Magnolia Discount chain of groceries and convenience stores, opening 22 of them.

When the shuttered Circle Food Store hit the auction list, and the two men found themselves interested in the same property, they decided to team up on the project.

High expectations

Immediately after the auction at City Hall, Torres told reporters he envisioned turning it into a food hall, comparing it to the St. Roch Market. El-Jaouhari said those remarks gave the wrong impression from the start.

“I wouldn’t have gotten into it if we were going to do a food hall. I know groceries, and I wanted this to be a grocery,” he said.

He’s confident the new Circle Food Market will succeed where the former Circle Food Store did not because of the new financial structure underlying it. The partners spent about $1.2 million to reopen the store. Combined with what they paid at auction to acquire it, the $3 million project rings in at a fraction of the cost of opening a new grocery.

By comparison, the Robért Fresh Market that reopened nearby on Elysian Fields Avenue in 2017 cost a reported $9.5 million.

“We can be competitive because we can sell groceries for less than the old (Circle Food Store) could by the end, and because we are right here in the neighborhood for our customers,” El-Jaouhari said.

One test for the new grocery may come from the weather and the city’s troubled drainage infrastructure. Besides the catastrophic flooding after Katrina, the store was repeatedly inundated in recent years by street flooding, which damaged equipment and kept it out of business for extended periods.

To combat it, the partners say they’re spent more than $600,000, or roughly half their development expenses, to essentially build their own flood prevention system. That includes pumping foam into the floors to fill gaps that allowed water seepage, fixing plumbing systems that used to back up in heavy weather, procuring customized, removable flood gates for the doors and building up concrete walls around windows.

“If it floods up to 5 feet, we are good,” El-Jaouhari said. “If it floods 5 feet, 1 inch, we have problems.”

'Old school methods'

As the story’s opening nears, the various departments are shaping up.

Arthur White, the store’s fish cutter, showed off his counter, where a variety of local fish and other seafood will be arrayed. He predicts catfish and drum will be the big sellers, because of familiarity and value, but he wants to bring in more varieties that sold well at his previous job at Langenstein’s grocery store.

Weber Fontenot will run the butcher counter. Fontenot owns Roy’s Meat Market in Iowa, the small town outside Lake Charles, and he’s bringing a mix of Cajun and New Orleans butcher shop styles to Circle Food Market.

“It’s old recipes and old school methods,” Fontenot said.

Across the store, aisles are named for New Orleans streets, with rice and pastas on the one dubbed Claiborne Avenue, cereals on Canal Street and liquor under the sign for Bourbon Street.

School uniform sales might return to the new Circle Food Market, if demand is there and the right partnership develops, Torres said.

“Hopefully, people will look at this and see that Sidney and his partner really listened to the community,” said Torres. “They’ll say, ‘They did it. They didn’t just talk about it, they did it.’”

Circle Food Market

1522 St. Bernard Ave.

Projected opening: third week of February (date t.b.a.)

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