Brother's Supermarket
Welcome to our next Brother's Supermarket! The small chain has three locations in Dorchester (this one and two others we'll see shortly), along with one in Roslindale. Here at Upham's Corner, Brother's Supermarket opened around 2008 with a small store of just 4800 square feet -- this was their second location -- which was just the right side of this store, where the Supermarket sign is now. The store was expanded into a former clothing store next door in late 2016, bringing it to its current size of just under 10,000 square feet.
You can see clearly in the above picture that today's Brother's Supermarket is actually in three separate buildings, the clothing store where the Brother's sign is, the original market where the Supermarket sign is, and then a tiny sliver of the building at 980 Dudley St with the lighter brick color. That 980 Dudley building, a larger space of about 12,000 square feet, was an America's Food Basket from 1992 until about 2005. Most of the space is now a CVS.
Brother's isn't large -- and the multiple buildings make the layout a bit awkward -- but they certainly make the most of the space. You enter now to the expansion, which is home to the produce department and dairy, along with a few grocery aisles. The original grocery store is now all grocery aisles, with dairy at the back, I believe. And in the tiny sliver of the 980 Dudley building, Brother's has what's barely more than a hallway at the back that has a service butcher packed in, with packaged meats facing. Frozen foods line the last aisle, with a tiny deli and hot food counter in the front-right corner.
As we can see, the expansion is rather new and spiffy looking, as it was only opened about three years before I visited. When I visited, I didn't realize the store was expanded after it opened because the whole store felt fairly new.
Looking up towards the front of the produce department.
There's a couple grocery aisles in this expansion area, too, I believe the first three aisles.
Aisle 4 is the first in the original supermarket building, and the produce department is to the right in the picture below. You can catch a glimpse of the customer service counter straight ahead in the below picture, with the registers to the right of that.
Brother's isn't a member of any cooperative, but uses Best Yet products from C&S.
The former America's Food Basket building is deeper than the Brother's building, so that tiny sliver on the far right side of the store goes back farther than the rest of Brother's back wall. Service butcher lines the right and back of that alcove, with packaged meats on the left side (under a Fresh Dairy sign, which I have to assume is a relic from before the expansion, when dairy was here and not on the far left side of the store). I don't totally recognize these department signs, but it's possible they're secondhand from AFB. I don't know how much time there was between AFB's closure and Brother's opening.
Frozen foods in the last aisle. Notice a matching department sign at the front of the aisle.
And the deli (which doubles as a juice and smoothie bar), along with the very popular hot food bar, in the front-right corner. Registers and customer service are to the right on the other side of that wall.
Opened: ca. 2008
Owner: Ambiris Fernandez
Previous Tenants: non-grocery tenants
Cooperative: none
Location: 776 Dudley St, Dorchester, MA
Photographed: June 15, 2019
That's all for this Brother's but we'll be seeing the other two shortly enough! In the meantime, the next few days will be stores on Savin Hill, just to the southeast of here. That area has a large Vietnamese community, so tomorrow we'll be checking out a Vietnamese supermarket. Stay tuned!
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