Special Report: Food Bazaar Supermarket - Brooklyn, NY (Prospect Lefferts Gardens)

Food Bazaar Supermarket
Opened: October 18, 2026

Owner: Spencer An

Previous Tenants: Western Beef (1990s-2026)

Cooperative: none

Location: 44 Empire Blvd, Brooklyn, NY

Photographed: October 30, 2025

The only Western Beef location that Food Bazaar bought in Brooklyn is this one in Prospect Lefferts Gardens (the others being too small, apparently). At around 34,000 square feet, this one isn't enormous, but it's large enough that it can reasonably be converted to a Food Bazaar -- which tends to prefer larger locations. The others in Brooklyn are between 10,000 and 20,000 square feet.

One thing of note about this store is that it's extremely narrow but very deep, meaning that the departments are kind of stacked front-to-back instead of side to side. So the produce department takes up most of the front part of the store, with deli and bakery in the front-right corner. The grocery aisles are behind that, with beer on the left side and dairy/frozen on the right side. Then at the back are the seafood and meat departments.

This store underwent a pretty major renovation in 2022, so like several of the other Western Beef stores, it's pretty new and therefore likely doesn't have any immediate problems that Food Bazaar needs to address. This store dates back to the 1990s as a Western Beef, and I don't believe there was another supermarket here before this.

Some stocking and resetting was still happening when I visited, and these locations haven't yet gotten their permit to sell beer so in all the stores it's temporarily covered up.

This store most directly competes with a brand-new LIDL that's practically across the street, but they're hardly similar supermarkets -- that one being a no-nonsense, hard discount store and this one being pretty much a mainstream, full-service supermarket.

I imagine Western Beef originally had the walk-in cold room here, but appears to have removed it in the recent remodel. Above, you can still pretty clearly see where the divider used to be, though. Speaking of, here's a little look inside the Western Beef before its remodel.

Frozen foods are also back in this area and continue into the second-to-last grocery aisle. Some of these fixtures look older than others, and some might need to be replaced if Food Bazaar remodels this store. Exactly how much work Food Bazaar is going to do to these acquired stores still remains to be seen, but many won't need a whole lot.

Deli and bakery are up in the front-right corner of the store, opposite the produce department...

Interesting that here, Food Bazaar actually removed the deli sign to replace it with their temporary banner instead of simply either leaving it or hanging the banner in front of the existing sign, which they've done in other locations.

And a look at the front-end before we turn back the clock to the Western Beef days...

I took these pictures shortly after the remodel had finished.

You can see in comparing the pictures that Food Bazaar didn't do a whole lot (yet), but did kind of reset and clean up the layout a little bit. My general impression across all the stores is that Western Beef had more clutter than Food Bazaar does.

I think it's likely that, if Food Bazaar chooses to remove the walk-in cold rooms in the other locations, they'll do something like this where the layout roughly stays the same but there's no longer a separate room.