Krauszer's to close, making way for new shops

DAVID GEST/YH With the closing of Krauszer's, Yalies will have to find a new place for Twinkies at 4 a.m.

The properties office has been dissatisfied with Krauszer's for years, Jacobs said. "The prices are high, the selection of merchandise is not good, the cleanliness and presentation are bad," he said. "It's an unappealing place that doesn't add to the district."

But in about a month a store called Gourmet Heaven is slated to open on Broadway, and Yale is convinced the new store will make students forget about Krauszer's before it's even gone. Don't be fooled by the name: Gourmet Heaven isn't all about sun-dried tomatoes and escargot. As Jacobs put it, "They'll have the Cheez Whiz and the Gouda."

Most of us don't remember what Broadway looked like four years ago—the Daily Caffe instead of Ivy Noodle, the Yale Co-op instead of the Barnes & Noble Yale Bookstore, Broadway Pizza rather than Origins, and no construction site in the middle of it all. And most of us will barely recognize it four years from now. We're witnessing Broadway's adolescence—the transition, the awkward years.

A bite from the Big Apple

Gourmet Heaven's 4,000-square foot space will contain an extensive salad bar, a grille, a cold-cut deli, and a mezzanine seating area for dining and studying. It will carry produce, fresh flowers, and cosmetics and toiletries in addition to the usual convenience-store junk food. It won't carry cigarettes—Yale decided a few years ago that new lessees could no longer sell tobacco products—but neither could Krauszer's if its lease was renewed. Gourmet Heaven will try to stay open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; if there isn't enough business during the wee hours, it will stay open until 2 a.m., owner Keith Jung said.

The Jung family—Keith, his sister Ryung, and two brothers—went into the grocery business about 15 years ago. "We started at the bottom," Keith said, by opening a Korean-style deli at 28th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. Ryung, who will manage the New Haven Gourmet Heaven, was and is the boss of the operation. "She's a tough girl—she controls the boys," Keith said, laughing.

Now, the family owns 14 locations throughout Manhattan, including a much larger 25,000-square-foot store near Grand Central Station. That store, the 101 City Food Cafe, won an award from the American Architecture Association for its modern design and novel format, which Keith Jung described as "self-service, but in a more elegant way."

DAVID GEST/YH

"Gourmet" doesn't also mean "pricey," according to Jung. "I have enough money already. I don't want more pennies from the students." The store's lease with Yale actually includes a provision that forbids charging more than the regional norm. "That kind of [contract] language is difficult to write and difficult to enforce, but it's there so that we can point to it if things get out of hand," Vice President of New Haven and State Affairs Bruce Alexander, BK '65, said. If Gourmet Heaven suddenly decides to sell Doritos for $10 a bag, Yale will come down hard.

If the real Gourmet Heaven is anything like the one Keith describes, it will be not only a pleasant, affordable, and complete replacement for Krauszer's, but also a hard-working, quasi-local family business. Yale hopes this will reassure conspiracy-minded students that the University is not bent on kicking out local merchants in favor of national chains. In this case, a national chain—Krauszer's—is being booted in favor of a family-owned local chain.

And whereas the manager of Krauszer's, who identified himself as Peter Ne, claimed he did not know or have any way to reach the store's owner, Keith Jung could be reached for comment—enthusiastic comment. "If the students say the food is great and the service is great, those are all the things I want to hear," he said. "That's what I want."

Restaurant shopping

Somewhere in the Office of Properties, gears are turning, but officials are tight-lipped. They don't like to say anything about the process of filling up Broadway until the lease is signed and sealed and—surprise!—another little "Coming Soon" sign appears in a vacant window.

But something is definitely happening in that office. Student and community focus groups are discussing, officials are taking notes, and Andrea Pizziconi, PC '01, is evaluating potential tenants and trying to find the right ones.

Pizziconi, a history major from Concord, Mass., lived in New York City during the summer of 1999 and frequented an Italian restaurant near Columbia University. The restaurant's owner told her he wanted to expand to another university setting and asked her to see if there was a place for him near Yale.

She e-mailed Joe Fahey, then Properties' director of operations, and got no answer. So she wrote him again, and this time he wrote back: Want a job?

Pizziconi was leery, but Fahey told her the office was looking for a student who would basically act as a professional shopper—looking for stores that might fit in on Broadway. "Brokers get really busy doing deals—they don't have time go to New York or hang out on State Street, talking to business owners one-on-one," she said. "Owners aren't sitting in New York thinking, `Gee, I'd like to expand to New Haven.' You have to find them and create interest."

DAVID GEST/YH A gaping hole in the middle of Broadway will soon be filled by a new Urban Outfitters and sit-down restaurant.

Pizziconi now participates in every Properties staff meeting. She has a title (Retail Recruitment Consultant), a salary, and even an office. She's also a member of the United Merchants Association, and this summer the association rallied around one of her ideas: freshman baskets. On every freshman's bed when school began was a welcome package of donated goods from local merchants—frisbees, chocolate-covered espresso beans, pens, keychains, and a gray T-shirt with "Top 20 Things You Didn't Know About New Haven Businesses" on the back. There was also a folder of information and a coupon book worth about $100.

This year, two more students will work part-time with Pizziconi in Properties. She believes she's living proof that the office values student input. "You wouldn't believe the veto power I have in a meeting—I just have to say, `Oh, I think that's kind of lame,'" she said. "Bruce [Alexander] is so concerned with what students want. To him, if something misses with the students, it's a failed venture."

Coming soon...

Ivy Noodle, which opened on Elm Street in May, can't be considered a failed venture. Over the summer, usually a time when Broadway merchants expect to lose money, the noodle restaurant had five times the customer volume it had projected—for the year.

Whimsels, a quirky ice cream and crêperie, is slated to open in November in the former Y Haircutting space on York Street. Proprietors John Robinson, DC '70, who owns a local digital-imaging firm, and his wife Lupi, DC '71, have always wanted to open a restaurant on the campus of their alma mater. They plan to offer traditional French crêpes as well as crêpe-like dishes from around the world, such as the Thai kanom kluk, a crêpe made with coconut-milk batter. The store will be open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and the crêpes priced from about $2.50 to $6.50.

Next on the agenda for Broadway are a few key retail spaces: three street-level storefronts in the new Urban Outfitters building, the York Street space that was once Ashley's Ice Cream, and the soon-to-be-former Krauszer's space.

For the Urban Outfitters building, Jacobs said Yale has three probable tenants. One would sell "gifts and accessories primarily targeted to women," one would sell clothing, and one would be a reasonably priced sit-down restaurant with outdoor dining in back. "They're all small entrepreneurs with great concepts," according to Jacobs, who said focus groups indicated a desire for more apparel and gift shops. Upstairs in the same building, a 6,000-square foot space will be divided into offices and allocated by the Dean's Office to student organizations, including the Yale Herald and The New Journal.

Several local merchants and one small national chain are being considered for the Krauszer's location, while the Ashley's space is "up in the air right now," Jacobs said. But Properties is having no trouble recruiting prospective tenants. "Suddenly, a lot of retailers want to come to Broadway," he said. He noted that there has been a bidding war of sorts for 21 Broadway, formerly Boola Boola, a property Yale does not own.

The invisible hand of capitalism, then, has already decided that Broadway is booming. The rest of us will have to wait and see how fast Gourmet Heaven can make a sub, what these newfangled crêpes taste like, and whether Urban Outfitters takes checks.

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