Joanie and Chachi seem to have stepped out for a moment. Or I’m not hearing their dopey dialogue in my head right now, which I guess is a sign my health is improving? Gosh, those antibiotics were pretty intense.

Anyway, this blog is ostensibly about how much I love Astoria, but the poor nabe hasn’t gotten too much specific attention of its own.

This essay in praise of the local supermarket won’t make you yuk it up the way talk of aggressive thong underwear does, but, people, we should learn to be serious sometimes, yes? Especially about something as essential as groceries.

A moment of somber silence, as the screen goes wiggly and we’re transported back to the cramped aisles of Trade Fair…

January 27, 2004
Astoropolis

Why do I love my neighborhood so? It’s all about the groceries. (Has “It’s all about…” ever had those words tacked on the end?)

When I first got off the train in Astoria, when I’d first arrived in New York and was looking for an apartment, one of the first things I saw was a huge mass of glossy black eggplants, all beautifully stacked in a pile that went well above my head. I love stacks of vegetables. There’s nothing more gorgeous to me than a produce stand in the wee hours of the night (and in Astoria, the stores are open in the wee hours), when all the bruised things have been chucked and all the fresh stuff is neatly arranged. So, considering that most other neighborhoods I’d visited could offer nothing more than a few over-waxed oranges and a limp bunch of scallions, I was totally sold.

In the last five years, you’d think I would’ve discovered all the food there is to buy in my neighborhood, but I keep finding new things. Or learning more about different cuisines and finally realizing what that whole dusty shelf of dried potatoes was for, for instance (next research stop: Peru). And every year a new group of people move in, bringing all their food with them: Brazilians, Yugoslavians, Mexicans (in that order, I think). Could they be showing up just to keep me entertained? Sometimes it feels that way: “Tired of gyros? Try my adorable cevapcici!” “Perk up–taste these cheese-and-shrimp-filled pies!”

Over the years, I get more things pinned down (usually with help from Peter, who has even more free time than me): best source of tamarind concentrate and verdolaga (Hidalgo), only source of reasonably crusty well-leavened bread (small Portuguese loaves at Trade Fair), good mint at the Lebanese grocery (look for sign in Arabic saying “we have Moroccan mint”), fish sauce at the produce place under the tracks, stupendous bacon from the Romanian orange-window place, duck fat from the Hungarian deli. But even as I’m poking around, finding New Zealand honey and green coffee beans and forty kinds of beer, this little know-all-eat-all frenzy is building in me… The more I discover, the more I know I haven’t found. And don’t even mention Flushing or Elmhurst.

So this all culminated recently when I visited the Trade Fair Near Tamara (as opposed to the Trade Fair Near Me). Now the TFNM is stupendous enough, with a great array of treats, including loofahs for scrubbing yourself in the proper Middle Eastern way and numerous brands of dulce de leche, as well as that Portuguese bread, but it is nothing compared to the one at 30th Ave. and 31st St. I’d gone to the TFNT once a few years ago, but it didn’t seem worth a special trip. And I’d been a little deterred from going in because Tamara calls it the Trade Scare, and says she’s had to abandon her basket and run screaming out the door because of the crowds.

But I had a small inkling of its treasures when I was trying to rustle up some goat for Karine (for her own carnivorous New Year’s project), and the guy on the phone at the TFNT spoke to me in Spanish for some reason and told me they had it in the regular meat case. At the smaller TFNM, you could only order from the butcher, and they were out of it anyway. Karine picked up her goat (right inside the front door–which seems like a sketchy, un-temperature-controlled place to put your meat case, but soooo instantly gratifying) and came to my house raving about the place. Apparently they’d expanded.

The first time I visited post-expansion was on a quick errand for Tamara. I was gone for what must’ve been hours. I roamed aimlessly, running my hands over stacks of legumes in every color, every imaginable spice in bulk, Lebanese olive oil for $4 a bottle, up and down every aisle. I doubt they had anything that couldn’t be found elsewhere in Astoria, but here they had it all in one place: Pillsbury Ready-Puff Pappadums next to mulukhiya next to banana leaves in the freezer case, above which hung about thirty kinds of dried Mexican chiles. Whole lamb carcasses next to D’Artagnan duck breasts. Organic Valley European-style butter next to those big green tins of Egyptian ghee. Baltika Porter for 99 cents. Banana-flavored tobacco for the sheesha pipe. One aisle still bears the standard-issue “Spanish products” that Trade Fair must send from HQ in the suburban Midwest, to label the Goya stuff. But at the TFNT, “Spanish products” also includes Peruvian huancaina and chile pastes.

There are some serious logistical flaws–“Trade Scare” is no joke. The aisles are just wide enough for one cart, the lines are often eight people deep, the produce section (more of a produce prison) can be reached only by one tiny passageway, and some children always seem to be screaming on aisle 6. I know there are bigger, more amazing international groceries out there, but I don’t live an eight-minute bike ride from them. I live next door to the people who shop here: The Egyptian families buying mulukhiya and Cheez-Its, the men on their cell phones asking which kind of chana dal they should be getting, old ladies shaking the coconuts in the produce section (oh wait, that was me). I feel very lucky, if a little overwhelmed, to live in the Independent Republic of Trade Fair.