Masha Badinter is behind the counter at Golden Hour Grocery, at Pearl and Wall streets in Uptown Kingston, on Saturday—and every other day. It’s her business, and she opened it back in July. The store is brightly lit by daylight reflecting off piles of snow outside. Tall windows set into the brick exterior, divided with colonial frames, let the light in. One can sit and drink a coffee or eat soup to warm up, sitting at a small countertop along the window, and watch the fat snowflakes fall.
Call it a grocery. Call it a corner store. Call it a neighborhood market. Whatever you call it, don’t call it a boutique grocery. The Golden Hour has the proud blood of a bodega in its veins.
“I guess it’s missing a few of the bodega things,” Badinter admits, “like cigarettes and aspirin, but I wouldn’t call it a boutique grocery. I have heard people say it before, but to me, we’ve got the coffee, we’ve got hot food. What I’m trying to do here—it’s like a corner store, neighborhood grocery, with bodega vibes… and a café.”
But there is no bodega cat. The Golden Hour is missing a mouser.
“They’re at home,” Badinter assures me. “They’re in training.”
Badinter has good reason to be allergic to the moniker “boutique grocery.”
It’s just the sour taste of the times. “Boutique grocery” has come to mean exclusive and pricey, and the last thing Badinter wants the Golden Hour to be known for is being exclusive—or exclusively pricey.
“Though to be completely honest with you, everything is so f***ing expensive,” Badinter says. “I am also small, and the way that it works is, if you don’t have a ton of buying power at scale, things are just more expensive. I’ll never be able to buy things at the price that Target and Hannaford buy them. When I’m shopping wholesale, I’m shocked at the prices. In the six months or so that I’ve been open, I’ve just seen the prices go up and up and up.”
So Badinter splits the difference, offering her wares at a range of price points. Variety is the key. And quality. Packaged grocery items are more expensive for her to buy. Produce, less so.
“I have a mix of organic and conventional produce,” Badinter says. “In general, the rule that I follow is the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15.”
The Dirty Dozen are fruits and vegetables that don’t have a protective barrier from pesticides—peaches, plums, apples, berries, potatoes, tomatoes, leafy greens.
“Also, potatoes suffer from all this blight, so there’s crazy pesticides. So that stuff I always try to have an organic option. But then the Clean 15 are the citrus, bananas, avocados, that stuff.”
Go to the self-checkout at Hannaford and bring some zucchini through. The screen will ask you to specify: Is your zucchini “organic zucchini” or “Italian zucchini”? But the question is framed disingenuously. The real question is: with or without potentially cancerous chemicals?
In the food desert that is Kingston, where grocery stores are few and far between, smaller groceries—borderline boutique or outright boutique-identifying—have been popping up year after year, between the persistent appearance of overpriced “curated” antiques, vanity clothing stores and scented-candle shops. It’s unclear who is clamoring for more of these shops and the products they sell, or if the businesses themselves are just tax write-offs or something to keep a spouse busy. But the leases certainly aren’t cheap. If Kingston Social, across from the DMV, can sell a desiccated cinnamon donut and a peppermint tea for $10, well, perhaps Kingston does need another candle shop.
The timeline is this: Village Grocery (and Refillery) opened in April 2021. Rosie’s, in May 2022. Golden Dawn, in July 2025. (Honorable mention for the Meatwagon, a bona fide butchery, which also opened in 2021, filling a hole left by the closure of Fleischer’s Craft Butchery in 2017.)
A quick rundown of baguette prices:
Village Grocery: $5
Golden Hour: $6
Rosie’s General: $4
Now, you can also get a $5 baguette at Hannaford, but their baguette has the longest ingredient list of them all. All you need—as the winners of the annual competition for best baguette in France will tell you—is flour, water, salt and yeast. Additional ingredients? Eye them with suspicion.
The prize for cheapest decent baguette in Kingston, from a grocery, at $3.50, goes to Adams Fairacre. But their store is not actually in Kingston, and when you add in the cost of gas to drive out and back, the best deal is either Rosie’s General or Village Grocery.
“We buy our baguettes from Rosie’s,” Badinter acknowledges. “They sell them to us for $4.”
So there you have it. If you’re an Uptowner who can’t be bothered to bike or drive to the Rondout, Badinter has saved you the trouble—for a slight upcharge.
Kingston Bread & Bar, a bona fide bakery, pastry-dabbler and sandwich maker, has also been on the scene, beating the bread market into shape since 2020. It has since expanded to two locations, one on Broadway in Midtown, the other on Barbarossa Lane next to the Roundabouts Now Art Gallery. Kingston Bread’s baguette, at $4, is Rosie’s low-price challenger.
“So we do get baguettes from Rosie’s, pretty much every day,” Badinter says. “And then we also have Kingston Bread. We also do Rising River [Bakehouse] from Phoenicia, and we’re about to start carrying Sparrowbush [from Livingston], and Brooklyn Sour [in Marbletown]. My idea here is I want to have a different bakery every day, and it’s going to be an established schedule so everyone knows, like, if they want to get their sesame table bread from Sparrowbush, they’ll come in on whatever day.”
Kingston has been queasily reviving from the long sleep brought on by the wealth-suck of the corporate-chain-and-franchise whirlpool built out on Ulster Avenue, on the path to Quigleyville, in the ’80s. This was during a time when the American Dream still required an automobile to pursue it.
Now, every building developer hoping to get the blessing of the planning board babbles significantly about walkability, and even police officers are encouraged to ride bikes and meditate. The extreme automotive disturbance of the last 75 years is starting to settle and sink. Big-box stores and fast food outlets are perishing. Bakeries, butcheries and neighborhood groceries are back—if one can afford them.
But it’s hard to know who to hold responsible for the explosion in the prices of tinned fish in the grocery stores. The instinct is to blame the trendy nightlife spots like Mirador, which sells a tin of fish for $18, or Brunette, which sells sardines for $16. But in Mirador’s defense, their tinned fish is, after all, a conserva from Spain.
It may just be that tinned fish has crossed the blood-brain barrier of the collective unconscious—like lobster, Mexican corn and sushi before it. These ideas travel up and down between classes, from a poor person’s budget food to a delicacy served at a fundraiser.
For tinned fish, a quick comparison among large grocery stores describes a sort of Wild West—even among individual chain locations.
Hannaford on Ulster Avenue sells Bar Harbor Wild Herring for $3.40
Hannaford in Kingston Plaza: $4.89
ShopRite: $5.99
Adams Fairacre: $7.59
Whoever is responsible, rumors that the Shamrock Tavern had gotten into the tinned fish game have turned out to be unfounded. Snapper Magee’s has likewise held themselves aloof. The Salt Box dabbled in tin fish briefly, but the memory of the price haunts regulars still.
What the Golden Hour is—and can be—is more than just a grocery.
“Local DIY music is a big deal for me,” Badinter says. “I used to book music events next door at the bike shop, and I want this to be a space for that as well. There have been small shows here, and I definitely want to do more of those.”
Badinter got Rixey Browning—like the rifle—guitar player and red-headed chanteuse, to play in her grocery, set up alongside the windows.
While Browning usually plays more standard venues—bars with stages, lighting and a soundboard—the Golden Hour wasn’t her first corner store gig in Kingston. She also played neighborhood favorite Joe’s Deli.
One more grocery gig and she’ll be something like the actor Bill Paxton, the only actor so far to have faced a Predator, an Alien and a Terminator. Browning is one more neighborhood grocery bodega show away from completing her own less dangerous trifecta.
About the gig at Joe’s: Word has it that local gastroenterologist Dr. Eddie put that show together, out of his love for both music and delis. Joe—who is more interested in making desserts (carrot cake, coconut cream pie, cheesecakes)—obliged him.
Just this last summer, there were a few bright and sunny weekend days that cried out for stuffed French toast extravaganzas and a deli DJ. DJ TK spun music for the neighborhood. It wasn’t an out-and-out block party, where streets are closed off and neighbors mingle, but it could have been. These are echoes of community building.
“One of our employees and baristas, Sam—he’s the best,” says Badinter. “He really loves to dance, and dancing is a big part of his life,” she says. “And he was kind of telling me about dance parties he used to go to, and I want to have some daytime family-friendly dance parties here. To kind of shake the winter blues away.”
It’s a struggle to imagine any DJ gigging in the aisles of a Hannaford or ShopRite—much less a live musician, or even being invited to.
In New York City, it’s open season for a businessperson’s dreams. An art gallery can also be a T-shirt shop and a barbershop on Tuesdays. A hardware shop on Metropolitan puts on live shows. Interesting mutations are coming out of the “reimagined space.”
Lower a disco ball, and a grocery store becomes a roller rink. Cover it in sod, heft a few kegs upstairs, and a rooftop becomes a beer garden with a view of the Catskills. (Looking at you, Home Depot and Lowe’s.) Powered by familiarity with the customer—who is more often than not also one’s neighbor—a corner store is uniquely suited to such iterations. Project movies on the wall. Hold a séance to communicate with a long-dead Dutchman. Get Rixey Browning to play her guitar in the corner.
“I like surprising people,” Badinter says. “The best part is when regular customers come in and they’re trying to be quiet, but they still do their shopping. I think it’s really funny to come upon a live show when you’re just trying to do your groceries.”
And it helps to have a license to sell and serve beer, cider and wine—which the Golden Hour has.
With Utility Bicycle Works one door down, it also tracks that Golden Hour hosted Cranksgiving this year, with plans to make it annual. Another reimagining of the possible.
“What’s Cranksgiving? It’s like a race with four or five checkpoints,” Badinter says, “and all the participants ride around getting certain items, and everything’s donated at the end. One sweet potato, one seasoning, one feminine hygiene product, one allium—whatever it is, it’s a list that you get just moments before, called the Manifest. Then, as soon as the whistle blows, everyone races around. Golden Hour was on there—Terry’s Deli, Meat Market, Phoenix Deli. It’s a high-speed scavenger hunt. And we’re going to do more bike events through the store, and also, I’d like to do some more charitable events, just raising food or cash.”
Photography from local photographers hangs on the walls. Tinned fish from Fishwife and Patagonia for the deep-pocketed; Ortiz and Porthos for the less so.
Eggs, too, come at price points.
“Campanelli’s—they are $6.75 a dozen and they’re very, very local. The Titusville is a bit more upscale, pasture-raised—they’re $10. They literally have a nutritionist that comes to the farm.”
An Asian ingredients section. Ingredients for borscht. Badinter says in all her endeavors, she’s trying to offer a variety of experience.
“I guess that’s what maybe makes it boutique, but it’s not about fanciness. It’s more about just the enjoyment and pleasure of cooking with new ingredients—like cooking with the yuzu kosho, like cooking with some Momofuku stuff. Variety and quality. It’s about that.”
The coffee she serves—there is an espresso machine—is supplied exclusively by local coffee roaster Mirra.
“It’s like a really light roast, like Scandinavian style—super light, super bright.”
Badinter is still working on being able to accept food stamps.
“For a long time the website was literally down, I guess because of the shutdown. But I also want to do a bargain bin. Just, you know, tomatoes that are starting to look not so great—I’ll put them in a bag someone can buy for cheap and make sauce. But there’s not a ton of waste, because all the soups we cook—that’s kind of the purpose.”
Today it’s Vietnamese chicken soup for the carnivores and omnivores, and red lentil coconut curry for the vegetarians and vegans.
“We just go through the produce before it goes bad, and I’m not having to throw it away. And then we also just donate to the Blue Fridge, the food pantry fridge at the church on Clinton Street.”
The Golden Hour does all things—and Badinter still wants to do more.
Join the family! 
