Attention shoppers: Met Market sets opening date for long-awaited Gig Harbor store
Metropolitan Market has finally dropped the other shoe.
The long-awaited premium grocery store will open in Gig Harbor on Oct. 7, the company announced this week.
The store at 5010 Point Fosdick Drive in the Harbor Plaza shopping center has been under renovation for almost a year, a constant tease for anxious shoppers. The building was formerly home to Main & Vine, an experimental grocery store operated by Kroger that closed in 2018, The News Tribune reported.
“It will be an absolutely gorgeous store, with a little bit of a Gig Harbor twist,” the new store manager, Ginger Henderson, told The Gateway. “We will have some things in the Gig Harbor store we don’t have in our others.”
Among them, the color blue. Henderson said the architects added “a really beautiful blue” to the chain’s iconic gray-and-beige color scheme “to pick up a little bit of the water.”
Metropolitan Market, formerly known as Queen Anne Thriftway, is a high-end grocery chain based in Seattle. It has a popular store in Tacoma’s Proctor District.
The store will be the ninth location for the company, which has stores concentrated in affluent communities from West Seattle to Sammamish.
Henderson said she has been surprised and gratified by the high level of interest shown in the Gig Harbor store.
“Omigosh, every time I’ve had to go by the site, I see people already peering in the windows,” she said. “We are just completely ecstatic to be part of a community that has welcomed us with such open arms.”
Mayor Kit Kuhn reciprocated: “We are thrilled to have Metropolitan Market coming to our City and look forward to being at the grand opening,” he said in an email. “Many citizens, including, myself really enjoyed the Main & Vine that was at the location and are excited to have Metropolitan Market grocer in Gig Harbor.”
Like the Proctor store, the Gig Harbor grocery will have a bakery, a floral shop, seafood department, locally sourced cafe, cheese department, butcher shop, kitchenware and a variety of made-to-order selections, according to the Met Market website.
An innovation in the Gig Harbor store will be what Henderson called a “salad island,” where customers can prepare their own salads, to eat there or to go. Another will be a pad thai and ramen bar. The company has tried out that concept in its Mercer Island and Sammamish stores, “and it has been very popular,” she said.
Henderson said about 70 percent of the 110 jobs in the store will be filled by workers who live in the immediate Gig Harbor area.
“We’re very proud of that,” she said. The company held a Gig Harbor hiring event in July.
Henderson herself lives in South Tacoma. She has previously managed Metropolitan Markets in West Seattle and Sammamish.
More stores on the way
Two other big grocery stores are on the horizon, The Gateway and The News Tribune have reported: Town & County is looking at a downtown site for its own high-end store, and the developers of Harbor Hill in the city’s north end are still looking for a tenant for a planned supermarket there.
Town & Country says it is considering the former Thriftway/QFC store location in the Peninsula Shopping Center on Judson Street downtown.
“Wish I had more definitive news, but we are still working with a developer on a possible site in Gig Harbor,” said Susan Allen, the company’s senior director of brand development. “We are getting close to finalizing, but as of now we are still in negotiations.”
Town & Country had originally intended to go into Harbor Hill, but a long delay caused by the developer’s dispute with the city caused them to drop the plan. That suit was settled last August, and a spokesman for the Olympic Property Group told The Gateway then that he was looking for a new grocer.
The Met Market store will join Safeway, Albertsons, Fred Meyers, Harbor Greens and Costco in the Gig Harbor market. There is also a longtime locally owned traditional grocer, Finholm’s Market, in the downtown area.
This story was originally published September 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM.