Lidl Finally Opening Its Third Manhattan Store in Kips Bay
The discount grocery store outpost has been slated to open for at least a year and is finally doing so on Feb. 26, a sign notes.
| 09 Feb 2026 | 05:32
A Lidl is finally opening on Third Ave. later this month, after a year of waiting. (
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The chain also operates a store in Harlem (pictured above) and a store on the Lower East Side. (
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A third Lidl discount grocery store, long on the drawing board, is finally slated to open in Kips Bay later this month. It’s been in the works for a year, and will open at E. 31st St. and Third Ave.
A user of the local social networking app NextDoor, Marise Hausner, alerted neighbors of the news on Feb. 5. A photo of hers depicts window signage promising a “Grand Opening” on Feb. 26, with another photo handily depicting the street corner that the Lidl will be coming to.
If the early reaction to Hausner’s post is anything to go by, the store’s opening could be met with an outpouring of enthusiasm, or at least acceptance.
It’ll be something of a novelty to Manhattan shoppers, however, as Lidl currently operates only two preexisting stores in the borough—one in Harlem and one on Grand St. A telling response to Hausner’s post came from NextDoor user Gail Koch: “Great store! I go to it in New Jersey!”
Its 23,000 sq.-ft. location at 408 Grand St. actually opened last year, not long after the unveiling of the soon-to-be-opened Third Ave. store. That branch came about as part of a deal inked with an affordable housing group.
Lidl also operates multiple stores in the outer boroughs, however, as well as on Long Island.
The Third Ave. store has been in the works for at least a year, with various outlets reporting that the nearly 21,000 sq.-ft. store was slated to open back in Feb. 2025. A deed cementing the plans was signed in Sept. 2024, and became public months later.
As first reported on by Crain’s New York Business then, the grocery store company signed a 15-year lease for the store at 135-155 E. 31st St., a 31-story luxury apartment building owned by Ogden Cap Properties; the building is otherwise known as Windsor Court. The lease can be renewed three times, for a period of five years each.
It was unclear what Lidl paid for the space at the time, Crain’s noted, but clarified that retail ground-floor space was renting for between $92 and $165 per sq. ft. at the time.
The ground-floor space that Lidl will be inhabiting formerly housed a Bed Bath & Beyond location, which closed in 2023 after its parent company filed for bankruptcy. Another business, an outpost of a barbecue chain known as Brother Jimmy’s, operated in the building alongside Bed Bath & Beyond until 2022.
Lidl, a European chain, has its U.S. base in Virginia. It carries less private label food than discount competitors like Aldi, making it more akin to other big-box stores.
The “Lidl” brand name has a rather amusing history, too. It originally stems from Anton Lidl, a 19th-century German exotic fruit seller; the business he gave his name to eventually became “Lidl & Schwarz KG” by the 1930s, when a man named Josef Schwarz became a partner at the company.
Schwarz passed the business to his son, Dieter Schwarz, who began pursuing the discount deals strategy that defines the business today by the 1970s. The younger Schwarz could no longer partly name the business after Anton Lindl’s family for legal reasons, however, yet he reportedly didn’t want to name the business entirely after himself. After all, “Schwarz-Markt” unfortunately translates to “black market” in German.
Therefore, according to German press outlets, the younger Schwarz reacquired the “Lidl” name for 1,000 Deutschmarks–from a retired painter and schoolteacher, who had no relation to the fruit seller that gave the business its original name.