Requiem for a Deli

Sometimes change means a much more expensive loss

Written by MARIE SPEED

think we at Boca and Delray magazines spend most of the year highlighting why we love living here, from the people we talk to, the food, the music, the fashion, the art—all of it— and we mean it. But South Florida is changing at warp speed now, with a flood of new people, a dearth of affordable housing, traffic issues, climate changes, threats to agricultural areas and more. So it’s not always easy to feel the love, and it really hit home last week for me, when my neighborhood changed irrevocably.

OK, in the grand scheme of things, the Seaside Superette (they call it the Seaside Market & Deli these days) was never going to make or break South Florida. But this little store with its famous subs and split pea soup (and wax lips on occasion) has always been there on A1A next to Nomad Surf Shop—an outpost of mom-and-pop groceries and takeout that everyone from Boca, Delray and Gulf Stream up through Manalapan used day in and day out. This is where you went for the Sunday Times, the extra bottle of wine, the made-to-order sub, the jar of olives. A lottery ticket, cream cheese, fresh OJ, you name it. And now it’s gone, the operator forced out because of some kind of rent dispute and rumors of a sale.

Real estate is a gold mine there now; the Superette is just a little neighborhood store.

It’s where we ran into our neighbors, shared gossip, picked up some butter or wound up after a long Sunday walk by the ocean. I remember stopping in there on our way to a black-tie event with my then-husband so Fred, the owner back then, could take our picture—like prom. Or the times I’d walk over there with the dog at lunchtime the precious days I’d work from home, past the Briny Breezes shuffleboard courts, to get a No. 6 Italian sub. I remember the Big Band American standards music Fred played, and the celebrity customer photos on the wall that he’d collected over the years.

It was all just everyday life in my little neighborhood at the south end of Ocean Ridge. The Town of Briny Breezes (an iconic trailer park sandwiched between the Intracoastal and the ocean) is next door, with its Quonset hut that’s a wood shop, its beauty parlor, its annual rummage sale. Nomad Surf Shop is still there, sacred ground now for decades for our surfing community. The County Pocket, an unincorporated part of the county that has always been a boho surfing enclave, is next to that. The Seaside Superette was in the middle of all of it, a sweet portal to another era that somehow managed to survive all these years.

And, now, it is gone. Maybe forever. Maybe not.

It’s this that is going to finally change the face of South Florida, I’m afraid; that one last little road stop, or café or domino park or street. The disappearance of what might have passed for a past, a fragile link to history, a throwback to what was once the dream of Florida to so many. This is my fear; this is how we lose what we love.