Over the past eight years, one question repeated all over town kept Circle Food Store owner Dwayne Boudreaux going in his fight to reopen the landmark 7th Ward grocery.

"They'd always ask me, 'When? When? When will Circle Foods open?" Boudreaux told a crowd gathered outside the store Friday.

"We weren't going to let anything get us down," he said.

[With help from the Fresh Food Retailer Initiative, a partnership of the City of New Orleans, HOPE Enterprises and The Food Trust], Boudreaux officially opened the doors of the store, surrounded by Mayor Mitch Landrieu, other city leaders, and bankers and developers who helped finance the $8 million renovation. A waiting line of customers, grocery carts in hand, snaked around the circular building.

Originally published in the Times-Picayune