Inside the NYC Grocery Store Behind the Viral $2.90 Burger — The Experts

Jubilee Marketplace is a local grocery store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We're trying to bridge the gap between the culinary world and the grocery store. In a week, we have about 8,000 to 9,000 customers coming to our store. We're known for a couple things. Our cheaper-than-a-subway-swipe cheeseburger, a five-buck clock, and our sushi program. Internally, we joke like, oh, the burger is cheaper than a subway swipe, the omakase sampler is cheaper than the fairbie. I don't want to say, like, we're the most affordable, but instead of affordability, I want to say more transparency is the key theme of our store. When you're in Jubilee, I want your grocery visit not to be a chore. I want it to be a special experience, but also, I want our store, for the community, to be the one that you can count on. We are, to my knowledge, the only supermarket that still does some sort of whole animal butchery. So Matt is, right now, breaking down a part of the cow for our burgers upstairs. For the grinding, I'm going to be using some short ribs and also some of the brisket off the chuck. These are the same cows or beef that you could get from one of the more famous butcher shops in Brooklyn, but because we're a grocery store, we're able to lower the price point. If you do do whole animal, there's a lot of trim that comes with it. We took that, we sourced upstairs for the burgers. When our burgers became very popular, we weren't able to supply everything upstairs anymore, so we give upstairs whatever we can from our whole animal program, and we source the rest that we need from a distributor that's also doing grass-fed, grass-finished, local ground beef. I grew up eating White Manor burgers. Middle school, I had, like, a couple dollars in my pocket, and I was able to go get two burgers. I was like, The burger was, like, the first step towards redemption. We're in the cafe that's located on the upstairs or the ground floor of our grocery store. We are here cooking our famous cheaper-than-a-subway-swipe burgers. From the meat department, we would get the ground beef, roll it up, weigh it, and then it gets onto the pancha. We smash it, salt it. For $2.90, you get the 2.7 ounces of beef. There's onions, cheese, local pickles from Jersey on a Martin's potato slider roll. So there's a lot of controversy revolving around the weight of our burger. We got crazy Reddit posts. Like, some people called it the John Cena burger because you can't see the burger from the picture. Some people also called it the B-I-O-B burger, where you have to bring your own burger. Someone called it the McPickle. But yeah, it's 2.75 ounces. The meat's here. Reddit, there's meat in here. I promise. At our busiest point, we did 2,200 burgers a day. That was literally just nonstop cooking. When people taste our burger, I want them to taste nostalgia. I want it to taste like the burger I had as a middle school kid at Waimana. Welcome to our shoebox of a kitchen. This is where all our preparations for our rotisserie chicken happens for the day. This is Natalia and Lupita. They're the ones who make everything happen within the downstairs market. They're going to remove the chicken from the brine. So our brining process is 48 hours. It's a simple mixture of just water, salt, sugar. Remove it, we dry it, and then we start seasoning the chicken. This is the chicken seasoning that we put on top of the rotisserie chicken. We have garlic powder, fennel powder, fennel seeds, rosemary, salt, onion powder, paprika, and citric acid. It comes out very orange, so it almost looks like Cheeto dust. So sometimes while we're working, it gets on our clothing and stuff, so it looks like we just had a bunch of Cheetos and just kind of like rubbed our fingers on our clothing. So right now, the total cook time is about three hours. We got this oven. It's specifically only for rotisserie chicken. Because we're doing hundreds of chickens a day, we need something that just holds that amount of chicken, which is about 160 birds. The Five Buck Club, our quote-unquote second redemption, it's one of our more popular items. For the longest time, people wanted rotisserie chicken in our store. At the time, I felt Costco had the best quality for the price. So when I go to Costco, when I do get the $5 rotisserie chicken that they do have, I could easily get three meals out of it. So I thought for $5, that's just affordable for everyone. So the chicken finally came out. We just package it, price it, and we're gonna just put it out there for customers to purchase. My goal was, it should be juicy, not dry. And I think that's the number one complaint with a lot of bad rotisserie chicken. It's just, oh my god, it is so dry. Because cooking a whole chicken is so difficult, it doesn't have to be the best, but if you enjoyed it and didn't feel like you wasted your money on it, I think that's a win. So some of our other programs that's very popular is our prepared food section. We make salad dressing in-house. We make the guacamole in-house. We also make our own kimchi. I think by default, we do offer a lot of Korean offerings. Because I'm a Korean, I think it comes more naturally to me. And luckily, people have been very receptive to it in this neighborhood where there isn't a big Korean demographic here. So this is Louis. Louis right now is breaking down the tuna that we're gonna use for our sushi program. This is the loin. After Louis fillets it, he would actually salt cure it. So our tuna has been like the most popular out of all the sushi. We went through a hundred pounds a week. And if you think about it right, per nigiri, you're using about 1.5 to 2 ounces. So a hundred pounds a week, that's just like a huge amount. So this salmon is sashimi grain. And I think in my opinion, we use incredible ingredients. We use a lot of the same seafood that like most omakase places use. We receive the seafood from Lobster Place and Greenpoint Fish and Lobster. With those two distributors and wholesalers, we actually know exactly where the seafood is from and we can pinpoint into what region it came from. We get it from the North Atlantic region. Those are where the best salmon farms are. Barrow Island, Lac du Rat. The fish has been salted and we're gonna keep it in the fridge for about a day. And then it'll be ready to go for our sushi team. Sushi, I think, it's so hard to nail. Like as a supermarket, everything's stacked up against you. The rice gets cold, hard. I think that's why grocery store sushi gets such a bad rep because the right cartons. And for me, I still want it to make it special. The most important factor for me when starting the sushi program was I wanted to know where this particular seafood came from. I want it to be dope. We use super dope ingredients, like a single origin soy sauce. We're getting seafood from Japan, Korea. We're using toro, which you probably won't find in a supermarket. We're in our sushi room. This is where all the assembly happens for our sushi program. So this is Gabino. He is in charge of preparing all the sushi for Jubilee. Right now, he's going to make the omakase sampler and the chirashi bowl, which is a scattered fish bowl. Two of our most popular items. Gabino right now is making our omakase sampler. So it's six pieces and it has four nigiris. One is salmon, fuk, scallop, and toro. And then the other two pieces, which is very unique, we make using mentaiko, which is fermented bolacro, that's cave-aged. And ojingeo-jeotgal, which is basically cuttlefish fermented in salt, also cave-aged from Korea. Everything in the sampler is everything I love, all the favorite cuts. And the other two Korean ones that are unique and no one's really doing right now, those two happen to be my favorite banchan or side dishes in Korean food. So these are four dollars. Internally, like with our staff, we joke like, oh the burger is cheaper than a Subway Swipe, the omakase sampler is cheaper than the Ferry. When we were beginning our sushi program, I realized that not a lot of people tried omakase. It is such a big commitment to spend that much money for something you may or may not like. So that got me thinking like, what's the least possible amount that we could charge for this? And that was how this was born. This will be for the jirachi bowl. So jirachi bowl, I feel like a lot of people love it just because it's a variety of fish that goes into it. For the bowl, we kind of don't want it to seep into the rice, so I thought it was a cool way to kind of separate it, decorate it, all the above. There's fuk, there's tuna, there's toro, salmon, and then there's also on top, we top it with uni, ginger, salmon roe, and masago, and ebi, which is the sweet shrimp. And then we decorate it with a little bit of wasabi. These are done now. The only thing that's left is to price them and set it up in our sushi counter. Most grocery stores, they only release it once a day. We purposely release it twice a day, one at 11 and one at 4.30. I think right off the gate, we got very lucky because a content creator did cover it. Julian Mu, or Muber Eats, was the one who covered it, and luckily the reaction was like incredible. At one point, it was so popular, we couldn't keep count because people lined up through the aisle, which was wild. Super grateful for, like I almost cried when that happened, because I was just like, I've never seen this before at a grocery store. So why is affordability important to me? I think it's like a spider web of reasons. I'm a child of immigrants, didn't have much. I was a stock person, and living paycheck to paycheck, but then if you really dig deep into business, I was given this gigantic opportunity that I don't deserve. I've been told to my face, behind my back, I'm a terrible business person, which I kind of agree, because I actually do care. I care when customers say like, you're too expensive. I think still to this day, I struggle a lot with, because ethically, I owe something to my boss, or the president of the company, to present some sort of profit. I have my team that I want to generate enough revenue to take care of, and because my decision, we close, how about their family? I think the most important thing is, when we do go viral for these things, their workload just went from 30 chickens a day to 200. No one complains. I think I want to do more for my team, customers, and people who've supported me personally. I'm in debt to basically all these people, my team especially, customers, because they could have easily not given us a second chance, and we would have closed. I think that's the struggle. So right now, we're in the deli station. This is eventually going to be like a Korean street food corner, where we're going to sell items like tteokbokki, and the main will be kimbap. I want to say kimbap is like the Korean variation of sushi rolls. We're going to offer traditional, but we're also going to do something special. We're going to try to recreate Korean barbecue within the kimbap. Kimbap, you season the rice with some sesame oil and some sesame seeds. So after they mix the rice, they're going to set the base. So it's going to be nori sheet, and on top, they're going to place the rice and kind of spread it apart. Traditionally, it doesn't have red leaf lettuce, but I thought it would work well. It doesn't get pork belly. This salted cuttlefish is called jeotgal, which is traditionally eaten raw, but we just cooked it upstairs. Nothing in this kimbap is traditional, but in my mind, I feel like it works. For the kimbap, I don't plan on charging more than $10. We're thinking $9. Right now, the average kimbap price in New York City is about anywhere from $12 to $15. A lot of customers have been asking for kimbap. So kimbap, it's a bunch of ingredients. The whole concept is to make the perfect bite. Imagine you're at a Korean barbecue and you're making a lettuce wrap. Essentially, that's the perfect bite, right? Now imagine that in a form of a hand roll. The hardest aspect of kimbap is when they're rolling it, you kind of don't want the seaweed to burst. So from my experience, people that have done both sushi hand rolls and kimbap, they say kimbap is a bit harder to roll because of that. It has to be this like really tight roll and one wrong move, that's it. Like you can't use it. So this is like the finished kimbap. There's nothing else to do but taste it. I think that's ready to go. Yeah, very excited. They nailed it. I hate those like quote-unquote buzzwords, right? Gourmet market or fresh market, all-natural. It's just one of those things and I feel like affordability has become that too, where it's like best prices in town. But are we? We strive to be, but doesn't mean we are. I feel like grocery store in the hospitality group or the sector, it's on the like bottom of the totem pole. My goal always was to bridge that gap, like grocery stores can be cool.