At last, a long-awaited kosher supermarket opens on the Upper West Side

For the last six years, some Jews on the Upper West Side have practiced an unusual tradition: peering into a storefront where a kosher grocery store used to be.

The tradition took on new intensity a year and a half ago, when rumors swept through the neighborhood’s kosher-keeping Jews that a new kosher grocery store was planned for the space vacated when Seasons Kosher closed in December 2018. But month after month, even as signage and shelves slowly went up, the storefront remained stubbornly closed for business.

That changed this week, when Six60One opened its doors. Named for its address on Amsterdam Avenue, the supermarket was flooded in the hours after its midweek opening with excited customers marveling at the aisles of sometimes hard-to-find kosher goods, ranging from Heinz ketchup to pre-checked, bug-free leafy vegetables and herbs.

“Turn your camera on!” one man instructed the recipient of his FaceTime call as he broadcast from the meat aisle, where selections labeled as “Yossi’s Cuts” were low for kosher meat in Manhattan; some of the specials included assorted marinated chicken kebab for about $8 per pound, and beef neck bones at under $5 per pound.

“Everybody’s very excited to have them in their neighborhood,” said Judith Falk, a lawyer and the creator of the Upper West Side Shtetl Facebook group. “It’s not the only kosher store in the neighborhood, but it looks like it’ll be the biggest one, with the most new kosher products and the most available to us — ‘us’ meaning people who only buy kosher products.”

Falk’s Facebook group has been abuzz for months with updates — both real and rumored — about the grocery store’s development. On Tuesday, members volunteered whether they had stopped by — many had, some more than once — and their impressions of the new store, where they reported buying full pizza pies, shredded mozzarella at a steep discount, and arayes, a Middle Eastern meat-stuffed pita.

One person breathlessly posted that the anticipated opening is a sign that “Moshiach is on his way,” using the Hebrew word for “messiah.” Another hoked that he came all the way from the United Kingdom to buy kosher chicken, while a third person helpfully told potential customers exactly where to find Wacky Mac — the brand of kosher macaroni and cheese. An entire thread was devoted to waxing ecstatic over the supermarket’s free plastic grocery bags, something of a rarity given the city’s official ban.

The excitement in some ways seemed outsized to the addition to the neighborhood. Other local standbys such as Key Foods, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods sell plenty of kosher products alongside products that aren’t kosher. And another store few blocks away on Broadway, Kosher Marketplace, also sells exclusively kosher products.

But some customers on Tuesday said they could already see a big difference.

“The prices are really competitive relative to other places in the area,” said Julia, a 20-something who popped into Six60One on Tuesday afternoon with a friend. She declined to share her last name but said she’d arrived with nothing in particular on her shopping list and was leaving with sushi for lunch.

“Their fresh meat — it reminds me a lot of suburban Maryland grocery stores where they have a lot of fresh meat options that are not exorbitantly priced,” said Micah Cowan, a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Eli Klein, general manager of the store, said the customers were having the experience he intended.

Six60One is meant to be “upscale, nice, but priced like Brooklyn prices, and not like, ‘Oh you’re in the city, everything’s expensive,’” Klein said while working one of the cash registers, in between troubleshooting some opening-day barcode glitches. “So we’re trying to keep things for the people, manageable, [so] that people can shop and get a good deal.”

The store is owned by Itzik Benabou, a kosher grocery magnate who also owns The Market Place, Kol Tuv Grocery and House of Glatt in Crown Heights — a neighborhood that, like the Upper West Side, has many kosher-keeping Jews but somehow has managed to sustain a diversity of grocery options for them.

After Seasons closed, Falk observed that many kosher-observant West Siders would just do their shopping at regular grocery stores.

“A lot of the supermarkets started to carry a lot more [kosher] stuff,” she said. “You can get away with not going as much as we used to to kosher markets. Because I think — this is only my assessment — that there’s a lot more that’s offered. And I think people go to Brooklyn once in a while, you can pick up; you can go to New Jersey, you could pick up stuff.”

But some items remained elusive. For Cowan, the missing ingredient was kosher-certified balsamic vinegar, which he found in the store on Tuesday. He left with that — and unplanned purchases of sausages and cheeses, saying he was pleasantly surprised by the store’s assortment of items.

“I’m excited to just make traditional Italian dishes with real Italian things, and have other ingredients that are kosher that are hard to find,” said Cowan, a longtime Upper West Side resident.

He added, “This is definitely going to be my go-to place. I assume I’ll have to get here early on Fridays to make sure they don’t sell out before Shabbat.”