Shubies

Unless your town is my town, then your town doesn’t have this.  Have you ever eaten food?  I have a pretty good sense that you have (what with you being alive and all). We have this much in common. We all eat food.  Alrighty then, do you enjoy really delicious food?  How about kindness?  Do you appreciate community and creativity?  How about one stop shopping?  I hope you do.  (If you don’t let’s talk off line and I will try to help you out). So we have all these things in common and yet as I said in my opening line, unless your town is my town, then it doesn’t have this.  The “this” in question is a place called Shubies.  

Some of you just sighed and thought “ahhh yes”.  You either live here or have been here and if you have, then I don’t even have to tell you where “here” is.  Others of you are thinking that I am talking about a restaurant.  Nope.  To call Shubies a restaurant would be like calling the Beatles a band or Ginger Rogers a dancer.  For those of us who live in Marblehead Massachusetts, Shubies is an institution.

Started in 1948, family owned and operated Shubies has taken over sixty years to develop it’s own brand of culinary prowess blended with community spirit.  The Shube family has also developed a family within a family.  You will always find an authentic Shube family member ready to offer a suggestion or a bit of direction, but the family within the family are the non-Shubes who serve as though it was their own name on the awning. 

What exactly is Shubies??? They do indeed sell delicious food that is prepared fresh and ordered from a menu.  It is therefore, in one sense, a restaurant.  It sells beautiful groceries as well though.  Not the kind of stuff you’ll find at Market Basket or Stop and Shop, mind you.  Shubies has the best versions of familiar staples mixed in with the kind of things you see on the Food Network and wonder about. (I once ate ham that was made from special pigs who roamed the countryside and lived off of acorns… seriously). So Shubies is also a market.  Markets generally don’t sell Le Creuset pots, Wusthof knives or hand-made Vietri Italian pottery, but Shubies does.  I suppose that makes it a kitchen shop as well!  But kitchen shops rarely employ a pastry chef, a sommelier (wine expert) or an executive Chef classified by Esquire magazine, as one of Americas top chefs (Shubies executive chef, Lynne Aronson holds that distinction though she blushes a little when I bring it up to her.)  So do you get where I am going?  

Shubies, simply put- is an award winning, community minded, restaurant, market, bakery, cooking school, wine and cheese shop, Asian noodle bar, liquor store, prepared food seller, salad bar, kitchen store with a cigar humidor, world-class staff and is run by a family that genuinely cares about their staff, customers, neighbors and each other.  

I am fortunate to be a five-minute walk to my dear Shubies. George & Carol, their great kids (Douggie, pictured above, is the man!) as well as the staff that make up their family within the Shube family, are an important part of why I love this little town.  

Shubies 16 Atlantic Avenue  Marblehead   MA    (781) 631-0149