Starting this week, downtown Louisville finally has a place to buy fresh produce and affordable groceries daily.

It's an area that's been hungry for a full-scale grocery store.

To be clear, that's not what this is. But when the 5,400-square-foot Superior Market and Deli opens at the corner of Third Street and Broadway this week, it will fill some of the community's needs — even if it's missing things like the butcher counter and bakery that come with a large grocery store.

Think of it as a New York-style bodega.

Just as the name suggests, it's part groceries and part prepared foods.

It's the kind of place where you can grab a last-minute ingredient or pick up everything you'd need to make a healthy meal for your family. You'll find most of the same snacks that you'd see at a filling station as well as ready-to-eat sandwiches, hot dogs, doughnuts and hot pretzels. There's also a salad bar, a soda fountain and a made-to-order pizza counter.

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The new business at 305 W. Broadway is an anomaly for downtown workers and dwellers who must leave the neighborhood to get to a full-scale store. They lost their closest grocery option in 2016 when NuLu's First Link supermarket closed after 70 years in business.

Many of them fill in the gaps with help from places like Walgreen's, the Fourth Street Live Farmers Market, CVS, Thorntons or the artisan Falls City Market inside the Omni Louisville Hotel, 400 S. 2nd St.

The hotel's market and its upscale products have been criticized in some circles for not meeting the needs of those who live downtown.

Superior Market and Deli, which is owned by local entrepreneur Abdul Alshawi, likely gets closer to what those circles were hoping for when the artisan market opened last year.

On the grocery side, Alshawi has fresh garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms and onions you'd need to make a red pasta sauce, and the flour, oil, and yeast you'd want if you're ambitious enough to make homemade bread. There are boxes of noodles and containers of Parmesan cheese to complete the picture.

If you want to finish with dessert, he's got a case full of ice cream, an aisle with cake mixes and icing, and even a pie crust and fresh fruit to fill it with.

There's also a freezer case filled with groceries like fish sticks, pizzas and microwavable meals if you don't feel like cooking.

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The store has a stash of paper products that you'd need if you were looking to pack up leftovers. There is laundry detergent if you spill some of that homemade red sauce on your shirt and there's a section of medicine cabinet staples if you need an anti-acid after a big meal.

Don't worry, Fido and Whisker get to eat, too. There's enough dog and cat food to go around.

Alshawi has a little bit of everything, and he's made the most of his space by offering fewer varieties and brands than you'd see at a full-scale store. So you'll certainly find pretzels, canned green beans, applesauce, sour cream, yogurt and crackers, even if he may not have your favorite brand.

The prices are reasonable, too. These aren't Aldi-style price points, but they're also not what you'd see at something like Whole Foods Market, either. Just to give you an idea, he had Yoplait yogurt marked at 95 cents, 8-ounce bags of shredded cheese at $2.79, 16-ounce boxes of Creamette spaghetti pasta for $2.19 and $5.29 for 11.2 ounces of Special K with red berries.

Alshawi will open up at 6 a.m. to serve the workweek breakfast crowd grab-and-go sandwiches and coffee, and he'll close up at 9 p.m. each night after the dinner crowd comes through. He'll still be open on weekends, he said, but he'll open later and run the store from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

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It's a small operation with about 15-20 employees, he told me when I stopped in on Friday morning. They'll operate five registers. Two on the deli side, two on the grocery side and one in the back at a Boost Mobile kiosk that's also part of the business.

He expects about half of his customers will be downtown dwellers and most of the others will commute into the area for work. A few visitors will probably trickle in from The Brown Hotel down the block, but tourists aren't his target market.

He's ready to serve the downtown community, he told me.

It's been nearly a year and a half since he first announced plans to open the market. The awnings baring the Superior Market name and brown paper hiding the construction inside have been drawing attention from foot traffic for months.

He'd hoped to open before the 2018 Kentucky Derby, he told me, but the electrical system inside the historic building had other plans.

On Friday his employees had 75% of the store stocked and ready to go, and he was hoping to open Monday. Maybe even sooner, he said.

It's time for that paper to come down. And it's finally time for downtown residents to have a place other than a convenience store to fill their pantries and refrigerators.

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Reach Maggie Menderski at 502-582-7137 or mmenderski@courier-journal.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @MaggieMenderski. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/maggiem.