Not by me, but by Peter, who’s in Santa Monica right now:
I was in the produce section and some packs of carrots fell about 5 feet behind me. I went to help the worker pick them up, and he said, “That happens, because this stuff is alive. Over there in the junk food, stuff never moves. Not on the shelves. Not in your body.”
Ha. Even better is that it wasn’t some standard California wheatgrass-drinking hippie who said this, but a middle-aged, not-hippie black guy.
5 Boroughs Ice Cream has discontinued its Astoria-inspired Bakla-Wha?! flavor. I wasn’t crazy about it (too fluffy), but still, the hood should be represented in all fields, from bad architecture to cold desserts.
Instead, I see that Jackson Heights gets a mango flavor, and the “Rich White” vanilla represents the Upper East Side. That is a stroke of genius.
Peter came home all teary-eyed yesterday, having sat in a bar and read the new issue of Saveur, which is all about Chicago. He was maybe sad and homesick, but maybe also crying with laughter over Moo & Oink, an iconic Chicagoland grocery store.
Check it:
Best. Suicide. Food. Ever.
I’m gettin’ back the basics, back to my real field of expertise over at About.com’s Queens section–five places to get the grocery goods in our great neighborhood.
I am so happy to know someone who is so excited about the opening of major grocery stores that he takes nearly 150 photos of the occasion. I only wish he’d call me and tell me. But I guess the big day for the fantabulous Whole Foods on the Bowery wasn’t any secret.
See his beautiful photos here. By about page 8 of the flawless stacks, you will find yourself in a restful, trancelike state.
After that, you can look at equally beautiful photos from Mercat de Sant Josep in Barcelona. The stacks of severed, skinned lamb heads are also soothing, somehow.
(And, in case you missed the first time around: opening day at the Red Hook Fairway.)
I love groceries.
I was just doing a little research about New Orleans restaurants, in prep for my visit on Thursday, when I discovered Dan Baum’s New Yorker blog about living in the Crescent City.
All of it is interesting (especially a post about riding bikes), but the post on grocery shopping (or “making groceries,” as apparently people say) is absolutely fantastic. Of course it’s dedicated to the things that really interest me:
I figure I owe it to myself—I owe it to my readers!—to plunge in with a cultural anthropologist’s zeal and explore, during my brief sojourn here in Louisiana, all the excellent reasons to kill pigs.
And there’s a brilliant comparison between grocery stores in Boulder, Colo., and New Orleans.
If I were ever to go back to grad school, it would be in NYU’s Food Studies program, and I would write a vast, comparative study of groceries around the globe. I would never finish my dissertation, and I would become one of those thirty-years-ABD cranks, but I would love my work.
Even when I’m not in Spain, I love it.
Sunday Night Dinner was celebrating (loosely and late) Columbus Day with Spanish food, and I’d worked up a varied menu, but really, I was just looking for an excuse to buy a ham. Several years ago, some friends of mine got married in Spain, and at one of the parties, they had a ham hanging from the rafters, and everyone could just go slice off a bit–I always thought that was classy.
So yesterday I biked to Despana Brand Foods in Jackson Heights to buy a ham.
This was the first time I’d be buying a whole entire jamon, still on the bone, and I was excited. I’d never been to Despana, because for a while we had a Spanish grocery right in Astoria (now taken over by Croatians, alas).
Despana isn’t the most welcoming-looking place–there’s no display window, just a granite facade. So I walked in, blinking in the dim light (and waiting for my stupid glasses to adjust–Transitions, you suck). The place is quite small, it turns out, considering it is Spanish Ham HQ in NYC–and I was a little disappointed that there weren’t hams hanging from the ceiling.
Just on my right were a couple of shallow shelves, though, and they were filled with paper plates. The plates, in turn, were filled with five different sorts of chorizo, three kinds of cheese, wedges of quince paste, olives stuffed with anchovies, a heap of boquerones…and there was also an open jar of Spain’s answer to Nutella, as well as a little basket full of turron (nougat). They looked like plates of samples, but never in my life have I seen such heaping plates of free samples. There was a little clay bowl full of toothpicks, though, so I picked one up and speared a chunk of Las Cuevas del Mar cheese.
Just as I’m lifting the cheese to my mouth, a man springs out from the back of the store. “Debestomarelvinotambien,” he rattles at me.
Huh–I could’ve sworn I heard the words ‘drink wine,’ but I haven’t really spoken Spanish in a couple of years, and really, he must be joking, right? It’s 10:30 a.m. And where would I get any wine, anyway?
Well, out jumps another man, wine bottle in one hand and plastic cup in the other. Glurk, glurk, glurk…he fills my 8 oz. cup nearly to the brim, and hands it to me.
“El vino,” he says.
“Gracias,” I stammer.
This was all before I’d made any indication that I was a grocery high-roller, that I was about to plunk down $190 on an animal haunch. This is how they treat the common man in Despana! Did I mention it was 10:30 a.m.?
I finally managed to drink all my wine, and then I loaded my 17 pounds of pig into my bike bag (along with some of that cheese–the samples had worked!), and then I weaved home. (I blamed that on the fact that my bike was out of balance, not on the wine.)
Our dinner guests, predictably, made only the tiniest of dents in jamon, and now it’s hanging in our pantry. It was funny–I was thinking what a shame it was that the Spanish grocery here in our neighborhood closed, because it was a little more deli-like (whereas Despana is more of a wholesaler of prepackaged stuff), and I think it would’ve been able to buy pieces of ham bone there. And then I realized that, duh, I am the proud owner of a whole lot of ham bone. I just have to get to it.
I think this might be the beginning of an annual tradition of ham purchasing–though I’ll definitely be going back to Despana before then. Maybe next time I’m thirsty.
Peter reports on our barbecue-rib bonanza last night chez Tamara here: Grizzled Gastronomes Guzzle NYC BBQ. I would write about it myself, but I just sat at home all day doing crossword puzzles, and then showed up just as the ribs were ready for eatin’. They were goo-ood.
Then, from farther afield, Matt Shaw proves that Hawaii Mart kicks U-Mart‘s ass: Your Goose Uterus Superstore. But he’s in L.A., so it’s not quite a fair comparison. Still, I’m envious.
For the first time in my life, probably–except for visiting Dairy Queens along I-40–I followed the advice of a billboard.
I was biking back from Elmhurst, following a third failed attempt to pick up my glasses from the half-assed insurance run optical shop, when I saw the little billboard for U-Mart, at the corner of Northern Boulevard and Broadway. Big red arrows promised it was nearby. Tiny print, too small to be read by passing motorists, promised all kinds of Asian delicacies.
I made the short detour to 56-02 31st Avenue, pulling up to the back door of the place, off 56th Street. First of all, it’s a novelty in NYC to have that set up with the back door into the parking lot. I felt like I was in L.A.
Then I really felt like I was in normal suburbia when I walked through the sliding auto doors and was deposited first of all in the beer section. I put a $4.99 six-pack of Tsing Tao in my basket and proceeded on.
Actually, I didn’t buy much more than beer, some 409 and a mango, because I knew I wouldn’t be cooking at home for a few days, but I saw plenty of intriguing things for a future visit:
So, U-Mart, final review: pretty damn good, and the closest fully stocked pan-Asian grocery to Astoria.
Here in Astoria proper, you can find a few things on random shelves: for instance, the Guyanese-run grocery on 36th Ave and 33rd St has fish sauce and dried shrimp, and the produce place on 31st St right under the Ditmars train stairs has fish sauce and noodles. But no consistent source of greens or other condiments.
After I left the store, I went around the front to see the main facade. Huh–I’ve been biking by the place on my way to Jackson Heights for years, but I guess there was a tree in the way of the sign, or I just wrote off the whole block of shops because it started with the Bagelman of Woodside.
The weird thing is that since I went to U-Mart, I’ve now seen its ads everywhere–random flyers on the street, guys with a U-Mart sandwich board outside the Steinway subway stop, etc. But you heard it here first: U-Mart wants to feed you some chicken kidneys!
Wow. I thought I liked groceries. But obviously–or at least, you would hope–the guy who runs a grocery store likes them even more.
Check out the Fairway blog. The frenzy, the neurosis, the obsession of exotic groceries…it’s all here. I’m not sure if I like Fairway more or less after reading this.
To be honest, I’ve never set foot in a Fairway. This is a terrible admission, seeing how I live in NYC and pretend to like groceries. The place is legendary, but, hey, it’s not in Astoria. If I go grocery shopping outside of Astoria, I have to be verrrry careful, because then I have to carry everything home. And I suspect I wouldn’t be too careful in Fairway.
The big Fairway news, though, is that a giant one just opened in Red Hook, basically civilizing the neighborhood in a single day. Curbed reported on the opening festivities, and my pal David Prince took the most gorgeous photos. Andreas Gursky, eat your heart out.
David, it turns out, has been to three major grocery store openings in his life. Savvy. There’s a new store going up around the corner here in Astoria (34th Ave). It’s no Fairway, but that opening I can definitely make it to.