Paul Schmitz’s book opens with a list of New York City institutions: the Public Library, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and among this “august company,” D’Agostino Supermarkets (p. 1). D’Agostino’s, in fact, placed themselves on this list, which is from a 1995 advertisement for the chain. While such positioning may seem hyperbolic for a supermarket, Schmitz convincingly demonstrates that D’Agostino’s deserves its place as an important New York institution.

New York’s Family Grocer traces the history of D’Agostino’s from its single store origins in the 1930s through to the 2020s when the business left family ownership. Across five chapters, the book explains how the chain succeeded and later struggled in New York City. The first chapter examines New York’s Italian immigrant culture in the long twentieth century. It constructs the backdrop against which the book’s central protagonists, brothers Nicholas and Patsy D’Agostino, started their market. Chapter two follows the D’Agostino brothers from their childhood in rural Italy through to the opening of their first store—originally called Yorkville Food Shoppe—in 1932. In this chapter, Schmitz focuses on how the onset of World War II was critical to the business’ identity. As federal war-related policies challenged the store with increased regulation, Patsy testified on this plight before Congress. This testimony, along with press coverage and interviews, turned Patsy and the store into something of a “folk hero” in the media (p. 67).

The book’s third chapter follows the business from the end of World War II through to 1960. At this time, New York City was transforming as new apartment complexes sprung up and a new white-collar, gourmet-minded consumer base entered the city. D’Agostino’s capitalized on this moment of postwar abundance. The brothers opened new locations and embraced more fresh meat, fish, and produce in their stores. However, as the business grew, Patsy and Nicholas grappled with “the price of affluence and assimilation” that followed from their success, particularly around their relationship to their Italian immigrant community (p. 75). The chapter ends with Patsy’s untimely death due to cancer, which leads Nicholas to take over and his sons Nick Jr. and Stephen to join the leadership team.

The fourth chapter follows the business into the 1960s and 1970s. Under Nicholas and later Stephen, D’Agostino’s embraced new technologies like barcodes, started stocking new gourmet foods, and corporatized its business with new accounting and filing systems. The chain also continued expanding, opening more stores across the city. And, even as the city economically struggled, the chain emphasized its connection with the “cosmopolitan spirit of New York,” running advertisements that, for instance, compared D’Agostino’s to landmarks like the Statue of Liberty (p. 13). The company positioned itself as New York’s supermarket. Behind the scenes, however, family tensions led to Stephen leaving the business and his brother Nick Jr. taking charge.

In the book’s fifth and final chapter, which follows the chain from the 1980s to the early 2020s, Schmitz interrogates how D’Agostino’s continued to emphasize its identity as New York’s grocer. While his predecessors did so through marketing, Nick Jr. turned to philanthropy to affirm “the company’s commitment to New York City” (p. 182). Building on this community-centered ethos, Nick Jr. also introduced new company programs that expanded the idea of a family business—which was always central to the chain’s identity—to encompass the full D’Agostino’s team. However, the chain faltered amid the entry of new online rivals like FreshDirect, the continued growth of gourmet supermarkets like Whole Foods, and the arrival of new groceries run by Korean immigrants. Then, in the late 2010s, the chain was bought out by its rival Gristedes, and soon after, the last family member left the leadership team.

As the title—New York’s Family Grocer—implies, this book is the story of how a city and a family created an iconic supermarket chain. On the former, Schmitz convincingly demonstrates how New York made D’Agostino’s. Most notably, Schmitz focuses on the interplay between D’Agostino’s and the city’s Italian immigrant community, but the book also makes room for other forces—such as shifting food cultures, world wars, new technologies, urban crises, demographic changes—that influenced the chain’s evolution. Schmitz presents D’Agostino’s as a microcosm of New York City, a case study of how New York City’s transformation over the twentieth century shaped one of its most iconic grocery stores.

And, on the latter, Schmitz entwines the story of D’Agostino Supermarkets with the story of the D’Agostino family. We learn of divorces, marriages, and succession debates. He highlights how family dynamics shaped the business. “At a family firm,” Schmitz writes when commenting on Nick Jr.’s approach to adopting new technologies, “revolutionary ideas did not have to be filtered through an unwieldy management bureaucracy” (p. 195). To understand the history of a family business, one must understand the family.

Schmitz interweaves these family dynamics and the firm’s decision-making with the wider urban forces shaping New York. The book is speckled with compelling evidence around the changing design of and food selection at the stores, different attempts at embracing technological innovations, and varied marketing campaigns. It is the marketing angle that, often, Schmitz seems most interested in—and rightfully so. From advertisements emphasizing the chain’s New York roots to Patsy’s storytelling in the press, marketing was how D’Agostino’s constructed an identity that intertwined the supermarket with the city and the family behind it.

In these ways, New York’s Family Grocer speaks most pointedly to readers interested in the history of New York City, but the book will also resonate with audiences interested in American food history and the dynamics of intergenerational family businesses.

Schmitz is (arguably) the ideal historian to write this history. The book’s original source materials came from a cardboard box he found in his grandparents’ house. His grandfather? Nicholas D’Agostino, cofounder of the eponymous supermarket. This isn’t just the history of any New York family business. It’s the history of Schmitz’s New York family business.