To grocer, with love

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/03/2012 (5227 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Didn’t you used to be Mr. Andrews?”

Two years ago, George Andrews, the owner of G.J. Andrews Food & Wine Shoppe, was operating a booth at the Winnipeg Wine Festival when he noticed a man in his 30s staring at him. A moment later, the fellow approached Andrews and said, “I think you used to be my teacher.”

Andrews asked for his name and sure enough, he remembered him, too.

“Don’t get me wrong — I loved being a teacher,” says Andrews, who, in another life, taught grades 1, 2 and 3 at Bernie Wolfe Community School. “But I always knew that business was what I was cut out for.”

Last month marked 25 years since Andrews turned his back on the three Rs for good in favour of a specialty grocery store. His market, located at 384 Academy Rd., has since become a go-to destination for foodies on the hunt for hard-to-find items like imported cheeses, gourmet chutneys and Prime grade meats.

To mark G.J. Andrews’ silver anniversary, we pieced together a chronicle of the store. But in a nod to the proprietor’s previous profession, we’ve broken things down according to school subject…

HISTORY

Out of habit, a lot of customers still refer to G.J. Andrews by its original name, Stephen & Andrews.

In late 1986, Andrews and his sister, Peggy, whose married name at the time was Stephen, were making final preparations to open a gourmet takeout restaurant on Corydon Avenue. That is, until the pair learned that Hardy-Buchanan, a neighbourhood grocery mart that had stood at the corner of Stafford Street and Grosvenor Avenue for 75 years, had gone into receivership.

The siblings paid a visit to Hardy-Buchanan and immediately changed their plans, despite the fact neither had worked in a retail environment before.

George and Peggy opened for business in February 1987 and 10 months later, they fulfilled their initial goal when they added a catering component to the mix. Peggy moved to Florida in 1989. Four years after that, she told her brother that he should buy her out, as she had no intention of returning to Winnipeg.

 

GEOGRAPHY

Andrews moved to his current, 2,200-square-foot location in 1997. A few years later, an elderly gentleman who had been a twice-a-week regular at the Stafford store came through the doors and apologized for not having been by since the change-over.

“He said that ever since we’d moved so far away, he didn’t get down anymore,” Andrews says with a chuckle, pointing out the Academy location is a mere 1.3 kilometres from its predecessor.

Distance isn’t a concern for everyone. Andrews has one customer from Kelowna, B.C., who pops by three times a year to buy steaks, which Andrews prepares and freezes for him for the long trip home.

“I also get a lot of orders from Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary. Just last month, I shipped a bunch of goldeye to an ex-Winnipegger in Montreal.”

 

HEALTH

Since Day 1, Andrews has been committed to stocking his shelves with as many chemical- and preservative-free products as possible. He credits his mother, a former home economics teacher at Windsor Park Collegiate, for his all-natural approach to life.

“Good food was just a part of my background. My mother and grandmother were both phenomenal cooks. We never ate prepared-anything and we definitely didn’t have any of those artificial-cheese-substances-with-crackers in our lunch boxes,” says Andrews, the middle child in a family of five.

When Andrews was 12 years old, he went to a friend’s cottage for the weekend. He vividly recalls bursting through the front door when he got home and telling his mother, “You’ll never believe what I ate — something called ‘balogna.”

“We just never had any of that stuff at home,” he says.

 

RECESS

One of the things that set Hardy-Buchanan apart from the Safeways of the world was its daily delivery service. Not wanting to disappoint longtime customers, Andrews continued that tradition when he took the helm. In the early days, he even performed most of the drop-offs himself.

“There was one lady in her 90s who would tell me that all her friends were dead,” Andrews says. “I felt like I was her only social contact for the entire week so, whenever I went there, I didn’t just drop off her groceries and run. I’d sit down for tea and spend at least an hour chatting.”

 

ECONOMICS

Andrews hears it time and time again: if you’re a specialty store, you must be more expensive. On some levels that’s true: if you’re craving a $200 can of beluga caviar, for example, let’s face it — your local options are limited. But for everyday items, G. J. Andrews’ prices are comparable to the “big guys,” he says.

“But we have carved out a bit of a niche; if people are cooking something and there’s an ingredient they just can’t find, we’re usually the first ones they phone,” Andrews says. “Or if it’s a special occasion and they don’t want to spend a ton of money at an expensive restaurant, they’ll come here, pick up everything they need, and cook a first-class meal for a fraction of the cost of going out.”

 

SHOW AND TELL

The Manitoba government amended its liquor laws in 1994 so that wine could be sold in private stores. A number of businessmen, including Andrews, applied for their licences at the same time. But because Andrews’ store was already up and running, he had a head start on the competition, most of whom had to build their premises from scratch.

“It was Nov. 24 and I was in here on a Friday night, sorting through 30 cases of wine,” Andrews says. “Jamie Murray came in — his dad owned Angus Murray Books right next door — and he asked me what I was doing.

“I told him I was pricing wine. Then I said, ‘As a matter of fact, if you were to get a bottle, you would become the first person in the history of the province to legally buy a bottle of alcohol outside of an MLCC outlet.” (How’s that for a sales pitch?)

There was one condition. Murray had to return the empty bottle to Andrews — which he did — so that Andrews could display it in the store, along with a note detailing its historical significance.

 

SEX EDUCATION

If Andrews ever tires of his current occupation, he might want to try his luck on the NBC talent show The Voice.

A few months ago, two women popped into G.J. Andrews, not to buy Belgian chocolates, but to meet the person responsible for the store’s radio commercials.

“I was working in my office when one of the girls called and said, ‘George, could you come out here for a moment?'”

When Andrews got to the till, one of the women took his hand and said, ‘We heard your voice on the radio and we decided right away that we had to drive across town to meet the man behind that voice.”

Yes, Andrews turned as red as the organic tomatoes in his produce cooler.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca