Linda Falkenstein
Jerreh Kujabi and Samba Baldeh in the new store.
Jerreh Kujabi, left, and Samba Baldeh, opened Gooh Grocery in the former Visions nightclub.
It’s a success story on a number of levels. Strip club is transformed into neighborhood grocery store. A neighborhood within one of Madison’s food access improvement areas gets a locally owned market aimed at serving its specific needs within easy walking distance. An historic building in the Streamline Moderne style is saved from being replaced by another cookie-cutter development. And there are four new apartments on the second level. Win, win, win, win.
“This is a business, and we are in this to make money, but the business has a community component,” co-owner Samba Baldeh said at the grand opening of Gooh Grocery, 3554 East Washington Ave., on Friday. “As members of this community we feel it is our responsibility to give back, and to give back in a good way.”
Linda Falkenstein
At the grand opening: Samba Baldeh, foreground left, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway. Co-owner Jerreh Kujabi is between Rodriguez and Rhodes-Conway.
The 3,200-foot-store was packed with friends and family, staff, neighborhood residents, and dignitaries including Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez; Sam Rikkers, deputy secretary and chief operating officer of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation; and Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway.
The store stocks American staples as well as harder-to-find East Asian and West African foods, reflecting the population of the area.
“We are from the immigrant community, we know what people eat,” Baldeh tells Isthmus in an interview. Baldeh is state representative for the 48th Assembly District, which includes the market’s area. He is also a former city alder for the district adjacent to the Truax neighborhood where Gooh is located. “I know the neighborhood very very well,” says Baldeh.
Baldeh and co-owner Jerreh Kujabi, who was also on the Isthmus call, are originally from The Gambia. Kujabi lives in Sun Prairie where he works for the school district. Baldeh lives about five minutes from the store. Both have been in the U.S. for about two decades.
Baldeh and Kujabi’s project was grass roots. Neither had any experience with the grocery business when they started dreaming of the store. “Growing up in Africa, there are smaller corner stores, nothing of this magnitude,” says Baldeh. “I don’t have any professional experience in terms of running grocery stores. Jerreh, you can speak for yourself.”
“No, that’s accurate,” Kujabi says with a laugh.
They had run a West African restaurant, Burgers Plus, at West Towne Mall — but rising rents closed the business. They at first planned to reopen that restaurant elsewhere but about five years ago began thinking of better ways to provide access to food in one of Madison’s “food deserts” — areas that lack affordable, healthy food.
Other shopping options in the area include a Kwik Trip gas station that stocks some items and the Hy-Vee and Aldi grocery stores about a half-mile northeast on East Washington Avenue from Gooh — but across the major intersection of East Washington Avenue and Highway 51, perennially one of Madison’s most dangerous and least pedestrian-friendly intersections.
Baldeh and Kujabi had three sites in mind; they “got beat” to the former Kentucky Fried Chicken at 2958 East Washington (now a Sherwin Williams paint store), says Baldeh.
The option they settled on was the former site of Visions Nightclub, which closed Jan. 1, 2020. Visions and previous businesses at the site had a long history of nude dancing, massage parlor activity, and calls to the police.
The Visions site had a number of things to recommend it. It was in an area that could benefit from a walkable store and they would have a chance to improve a blighted property. “The neighborhood was tired of the activities there,” says Kujabi.
The building began life in 1948 as Kehl’s Casino, a restaurant, nightclub and event space. Baldeh and Kujabi were elated to learn that the building was in good shape so they could renovate it instead of tearing it down and starting from scratch. They have restored the building to look much as it did originally, including installing green awnings over the windows and a “porthole” window near the front door.
Funding for the $3 million project has come from a partnership of state and local agencies, including from the Madison Food Policy Council and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, and $1.2 million of the partners’ own investment (including loans). Additional funding for the nearly-finished apartments on the second floor has been applied for from WHEDA, says Baldeh.
Baldeh and Kujabi say they didn’t quite realize how much new housing was coming to the immediate area when they decided on the Visions site.
The Rise Madison project broke ground on Jan. 25. The 100% affordable housing development at East Washington and Fair Oaks avenues, at the longtime site of the Gardner Bakery (later Bimbo Bakery), will add 245 housing units to the neighborhood. More housing is headed for redevelopment at 3555 East Washington, the site of Pedro’s restaurant.
Baldeh and Kujabi wanted a global grocery store that could serve the immigrant community. In planning, they asked neighborhood residents “what they couldn’t find,” says Baldeh.
While the two have been involved in every aspect of the project until now, they have hired four employees to run the store and are still interviewing for other staff. They are going to stay “very connected” says Baldeh, for the next six months or longer while the business gets off the ground.
Linda Falkenstein
Cans of coconut cream concentrate on the shelves as customers peruse the aisles.
Shelves are stocked with a wide variety of global products catering to the cuisines of neighborhood residents.
The deli section stocks cold cuts and will also carry lamb, beef and goat — popular meats in West Africa and southeast Asia, especially in the Hmong community that has a “high presence in Truax,” says Kujabi. Ten varieties of fish, palm oil (often used in African cooking), gari (cassava flour) and gari ijebu (cassava cereal), millet, Egyptian rice, powdered rice and African teas are among the harder-to-find items stocked at Gooh, as well as food “everybody eats,” from greens to frozen pizza, Kujabi continues. The store will stock more than 3,000 different items with a focus on quality and healthy foods.
Gooh (the name means “the one” in the West African language Fulani) will not, however, sell alcohol or tobacco.
“As humans there is a purpose as to why we are all here. How do we contribute, to make the world better than we found it? We want to be that somebody you have never met, never seen, but who is changing your life at a distance,” says Baldeh.
