Central Market
Despite Fort Worth’s incessant calls for a particular grocery store chain to open more locations within the city’s limits (ahem, HEB), Cowtown happens to already possess the third best grocery store in the entire nation.
That’s right, the Central Market — a gourmet grocery store that happens to be owned by HEB — on the corner of I-30 and Hulen Street took home the bronze medal in the nation-wide battle of food marts.
The ranking comes courtesy of an incredibly unscientific study conducted by Solitaired — yeah, a website where you can play solitaire while also reading up on things like individual grocery store rankings. A strange duality, indeed.
According to the study, which analyzed Google reviews from 3,000 individual stores across 100 cities, a Trader Joe’s in Gilbert, Arizona, is the nation’s best grocery store, followed by yet another Trader Joe’s in St. Petersburg, Florida.
In fact, Trader Joe’s pops up nine times at the top of the list, making Fort Worth’s Central Market the only non-Trader Joe’s store to crack the top 20.
And ya can’t tell us this is a “Texas-just-so-loves-HEB-so-much thing.” No, committing a degree of grocer blasphemy, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Plano all had stores that reached the top 20 — and all were Trader Joe’s.
On the flip side, Safeway and Walmart Supercenter occupy the majority of the grocery stores at the bottom of the list, which includes a Walmart Supercenter in Irving.
The study only took into account stores that had over 1,000 Google reviews, so no mom-and-pop stores made the list — our apologies to Bodega South Main and Roy Pope.
At press time, Fort Worth’s Central market had amassed 3,790 reviews and carried a 4.7-star rating. With a quick glance at the reviews, most people appear plum pleased with the store’s quality of food, options, and customer service.
But not all is hunky dory at the Central Market. Upon conducting our in-depth reporting, we discovered the Google review currently sitting atop all other reviews awards the store only one star due to the reviewer’s recent purchase of extra-virgin olive oil that “did not at all solidify” after being kept in the reviewer’s car — where temperatures no doubt reached the “low 30s” — overnight. Elsewhere, a patron complained in their one-star review of the store not having a specific vegetable dish they had ordered and offered to substitute the dish with potatoes. “Subbing a carb for a squash vegetable dish is not a good solution.”
The horror.
