Family Beef is burning up on the future of the iconic New York grocery store chain Western Beef.
As cheap as a sensitive cactus mascot (his name is Charlie) and meat, the cheap supermarket brand Tartare (e.g., luxury condo) could soon become.
In 2020, Peter Castellanas Sr., the founder of Wester Beef, died of COVID-19. During his life, he was charged with and convicted of a number of mob-related crimes, including selling adulterated meat, defrauding the government in a stolen food stamp scheme, committing bankruptcy fraud, lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Extortion (to have meat) included. According to Curbed, the suppliers had threatened to break bones because of the debt.
Now, his grandson, Peter III, who until recently was Western Beef’s CEO, is trying to take the company in a new direction.
He hopes to capitalize on the skyrocketing land prices in the cities by demolishing his family’s shops and developing luxury residential buildings in their place. He closed seven Western Beef stores to build projects such as Astor in Long Island City, where rent for a two-bedroom unit is about $5,000 a month. In The Bronx, he teamed up with a developer to create a nine-story, 159-mixed-unit development.
“I had a business plan, all the numbers worked out,” he told Curbed. “I had some of the best affordable brains available.”
But his father and Western Beef Board Chairman Peter Jr.—who grew up in the family business, made it into a $300 million chain with 20 stores and 2 million square feet of real estate in the New York area—to take with One bone is his son.
“I just want to get my business back,” Peter Jr. told the magazine. “This is my child. This is what I live for.”
He has since relieved his son from his position and halted redevelopment projects.
,[They] offered us big, big money for real estate,” Peter Jr. said of a Western Beef near Marcy Projects. “They wanted to have huge condominiums over there, like they’re doing all over the area.”
she does not have.
But Peter the Young isn’t “staking” out of his territory. He has since launched a real estate firm called Cactus Asset Management, which manages more than 25 mixed-use developments and Western Beef properties. He plans to target Western Beef stores and other businesses in areas such as Carroll Gardens and The Bronx for further redevelopment.
What will happen next? We are looking forward to Western Beef-branded accommodations.
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