As you enter the doors of Bel-Garden Bi-Rite Supermarket, you realize this neighborhood store could only be in Baltimore. There are jumbo jars of pickled onions and pickled eggs. On Wednesdays in the winter, the store offers ladle-your-own take-home sour beef and dumplings. Tuesday is liver-and-onions day. Schmierkase, the creamy dessert cake beloved by old-fashioned Baltimoreans, is available seven days a week.
People in greater Northeast Baltimore consider the Bi-Rite, an independent, family-owned store, their little secret. The 30,000-square-foot market is the kind of place where the meat manager has been on the staff for 41 years. The seafood department understands Baltimore's exacting passion for shrimp, crab and oysters. There is a dizzying inventory of preparations for fried oysters and rockfish. There is a section devoted to Otterbein and Berger cookies.
Shoppers appear to be in a budget-conscious mood as they scan the store's weekly sales circular. Veteran Bi-Rite shoppers adhere to Baltimore's beloved hair fashions, too. Husbands accompany wives here and carry the bags.
The family has been in business along Belair Road since the 1940s, when the present owners' grandmother, Rose Novak, took the No. 15 streetcar out from her Canton home and scouted a location for a general store.
"My grandmother didn't drive, and she walked a couple blocks from the old Gardenville loop when she heard a store was for rent," said Elizabeth "Sandy" Banthem, who runs the family business with her sister, Christine Bird. "My grandmother's family had emigrated from Poland. She was an intelligent woman, and she was a hard worker. She rolled cigars, picked strawberries on the Eastern Shore and shucked oysters in a canning house. She had a third-grade education, and her husband died when she was 35. Yet as a child. she noted that shop owners had horses and carriages. She wanted to be like them."
Rose Novak retired and watched her daughter, Betty Novak Shinosky, who trained as a meat cutter, and her son-in-law, Leonard Walter Shinosky, open and expand a grocery business. This was the beginning of Bi-Rite.
In 1964, the Shinoskys cut the ribbon on a new Bi-Rite in the 5900 block of Belair Road. The site had been the old Gatch Brothers stone quarry, which hadn't been used for decades and was considered a neighborhood nuisance.
The family had to pay for deep steel pilings to get their building constructed atop the old stone pit. Land was at a premium when Belair Road was a busy commercial strip dominated by new and used auto dealers.
The family enlarged the operation many times. And the current owners are doing it again.
This month, they engaged Southway Builders to enlarge the Bi-Rite empire. They acquired a former Koons auto property and are building a commercial addition to the store. It will house a PNC Bank branch and a Dollar Tree. The parking facilities will also be reconfigured.
"We wanted to create something complementary to the food business," Banthem said.
The two sisters who now run the store did not anticipate taking over the family business. Banthem earned undergraduate and master's degrees from the Johns Hopkins University and had planned to go into scientific research. Bird studied English literature and had thought of doing marketing and advertising.
But their parents needed help at the store, and before long the sisters took to the idea. They visit grocery operations in the Mid-Atlantic and keep up with food trends. Then they add their only-in-Baltimore grace notes.
"When the store was closed on Sunday in the 1950s, my father brought me here and I rode my bike in the aisles," said Bird. "But if the Colts had a home game, I went to the stadium with him."