Jae Chambers wrestled white paper around a massive chopped Italian sub as her mom, Ernestine, watched from the other side of the deli counter.

Wrapping is the hardest part of making these sandwiches, like wrapping a gift. “You know that awkward present during the holidays?” Ernestine said. She offered some encouragement to her 21-year-old daughter: “Go for it, Jae.”

Ernestine has never backed down from a challenge. Last week, she and business partner Naté Gordon officially opened Chopped Broadway Bodega & Deli, Fells Point’s first Black woman-owned bodega. The spot at 307 S. Broadway aims to offer necessities, jobs and inspiration, as well as those massive internet-famous sandwiches to Baltimore.

With Chopped, Ernestine said, she and Gordon wanted to recreate an authentic New York bodega where a sense of community is as much a part of the identity as the products they sell.

The shop space, previously called Broadway Bodega Convenience Store, was failing when Ernestine and Gordon took it over last fall, Ernestine said. They spruced up the store’s offerings and used their own savings to build out a deli.

Jae Chambers prepares a chopped sandwich at Chopped in Fells Point, which offers sandwiches and affordably priced groceries to the community.

The deli opened earlier this year on a limited basis to get customer input on sandwiches and other menu items, including Maryland crab soup. Already, the shop’s chopped Italian subs have gone viral on local social media, getting a shoutout in January from Baltimore Food Scene’s Samantha Stern, who reviewed it with a baby strapped to her chest. The sandwich appeared to be roughly the same size. After that, weekends were “crazy,” Chambers said.

For Ernestine, whose career has focused on workforce development, the Fells Point shop is a dream come true. She grew up in public housing, rotating through various developments in West Baltimore. For fun, she’d take the bus to Fells Point or the Inner Harbor and walk around. “I knew that I could probably never afford to live here, let alone own a business here,” she said.

But she was determined to build a different life for herself. “I was 14 years old, and I begged an Italian restaurant to hire me,” Ernestine said. As a young cook at Mamma Ilardo’s in West Baltimore, she learned to prepare Italian sauces from the owner, an elderly Italian woman who visited the shop every week.

Ernestine was a sophomore at Delaware State University when she had Jae, her first child. The young mom met with professors ahead of classes to see if she could bring her baby with her. There were tough years ahead; the family lost electricity for three months when Ernestine couldn’t pay the bill. She pitched a tent inside and tried to convince Jae they were camping.

Ernestine met Gordon when the former was hired by a welfare-to-work program that she initially joined as a participant. Gordon was program manager at the time, and the two formed a lifelong bond, eventually deciding to open up a bodega that would bring jobs and community to Ernestine’s hometown.

“For a lot of people this looks like something that just happened overnight,” Ernestine said, referring to the opening of Chopped. But she wants people to know how much work happened behind the scenes. “We only celebrate when the flowers bloom, but all season, that tree was working.”

In addition to Jae, Ernestine’s two oldest sons, Jahmaal Davis and Miguel Davidson, now help out at the deli. Many other staff members are people Ernestine has mentored over the years who have volunteered their time. Ernestine’s life lessons continue at the store: “Let’s be good stewards of our time,” she said as Davis and Davidson unpacked boxes days before the grand opening, repeating an oft-used mantra.

Chopped, a new bodega in Fells Point, specializes in chopped Italian sandwiches. The trend was first popularized on TikTok.

At the grand opening Friday, a DJ played music as gatherers danced and noshed on samples from the restaurant. Amidst the chaos in Washington, D.C., and the dismantling of programs focused on promoting racial and economic justice, the opening was proof of Baltimore’s renaissance, said City Councilman Jermaine Jones.

“I remember when this was just a dream that these two young ladies [Chambers and Gordon] had,” City Council President Zeke Cohen said. “I remember saying, ‘That sounds amazing. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I know you can pull it off.’ And guess what? They did pull it off.”

After the speeches, Jae and her siblings rushed into the store to prepare the mountain of orders waiting for them: all 200 of them. For Jae, it was surreal to see the city turn out for Chopped. She knew from the beginning that her mom was going somewhere, she said, but “I would have never imagined this.”