MarketStEl

Yes, but now we must ask: Stroehmann or Wonder?

It used to be said of my hometown that the best restaurants in town were in other people's homes. (This, of course, was before the rest of the country discovered Barbecue.) Certainly, native son Calvin Trillin took a dim view of our hometown's attempts at haute cuisine. (And that, of course, was before the opening of The American Restaurant.) Even with the American Restaurant, I'm with Trillin. Nice way to put it all in perspective, Retrevr.

Well, that is the reason the chain is commonly referred to as "Whole Paycheck."

It looks to me like the company means "whole" in the sense of "unadulterated". From the overview on Whole Foods Market's Web site: In other words, no nitrites in the bacon, no polysorbate 80 in the sauces, no sucrose polyester anywhere, and so on. Though I see on a recent trip past the deli counter that WFM has made at least one concession to popular tastes: there is now process American cheese as well as Tillamook Cheddar, Muenster and Jarlsberg Swiss. They are not averse to carrying products from the major food manufacturers when those products meet their standards: Tropicana not-from-concentrate orange juice and Philadelphia Brand cream cheese can be found in their dairy case, and the Frito-Lay Naturals line of salty snacks is in their chip aisle. But generally speaking, the brands you will find in a Whole Foods store are not the ones you see advertised on TV or in the newspapers and magazines.

Since I see people were weighing in on a different thread (since merged with this one) with their childhood cereal memories, here are mine: I didn't really go for all the artificially colored, flavored super-sugary stuff, except for Froot Loops. My favorite cold cereal, hands down, was Quaker Life, the stuff Mikey likes, followed by the three varieties of Chex in this order: rice, wheat, corn. After that, Grape-Nuts, about the only cereal out there that really does stay crunchy in milk. But my favorite cereal of all was Cream of Wheat, with sugar and a pat of butter on top. All of this made or served with whole milk, of course. No fat police in my family, not in the 1960s, no siree. I too have gotten a little less sugary as I've gotten older. I still like Grape-Nuts and Chex (including Multi-Bran Chex), but have substituted Cheerios for the Life and eat GoLean Crunch more often than any of these others. That is, when I eat cereal at all. A more typical breakfast for me is a slice of toast with butter or a bagel with cream cheese, accompanied by a glass of fruit juice and a cup of tea.

Let's see...a typical 20-some-odd-ounce box of cereal goes for anywhere from $3 to $6, depending on the brand and variety. Unless you've got a very large family whose tastes run the gamut, chances are you're not going to be keeping six different boxes of cereal around your house. A Variety-Pak, maybe. So let's say you've got a sudden urge to mix Count Chocula with Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops, and top it all with bananas, strawberries and sprinkles just for good measure. You can: --Run down to the supermarket and plunk down about $20 for all the stuff you need, then serve a bowl of this to everyone in your family and anyone who stops by to visit between now and the time the bananas start to overripen, or --Go to this place and let them serve you a single bowl of this mix for $3.50 to $5. Now, this is purely a hypothetical, as I do not know exactly which 30 cereals they carry (despite my having walked past this place three times since it opened, I've not yet gone in). Besides, I doubt that most of us have even fantasized about eating Count Chocula, Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops all in the same bowl. But I can see the potential for some really campy fun in doing something like this, and college students would be exactly the people who would go for it. (We grownups would probably not miss Cap'n Crunch if it disappeared from store shelves tomorrow, but Penn students sure did when the campus dining service removed it from its cereal menu.) Wonder if they have a fiber trifecta--All-Bran, Grape-Nuts and GoLean Crunch?

You're confusing pepper pot soup and snapper soup. (Edited after reading post directly above:) Ouch! Always read everything before posting anything. Always read everything before posting anything. Always read everything...

Turning to your other point, a random thought: it occurs to me that a good example of blending high, middle and low would be Philadelphia's Italian Market. ← Reading this, then reading the summaries of "Trading Up: The New American Luxury" on Amazon.com, I understand what you are talking about and how the Italian Market could serve as a model--if we can find the space for it in suburbia (you reading, hillbill)? For the benefit of the non-Philadelphians on this list, the Ninth Street "Italian" Market is as much a Philadelphia food tradition as the more centrally located Reading Terminal Market, and every bit as famous, as everyone who ever watched the first Rocky movie knows. The Italian Market, because it is not a single, centrally-managed physical space but a collection of individual structures and curbside stalls, manages to evolve over time, retaining vestiges of its past while adapting to the changing communities it serves. Nowhere else in Philadelphia could you find a shop that stocks live fowl for butchering on the premises and a store that offers Le Creuset , Calphalon and the latest kitchen tools in the same general area. The produce stands that offer huge bargains for shoppers seeking to feed large families or stretch their food stamps have been joined by others that offer high-end vegetables and specialty peppers. The Italian merchants--many still in business (Claudio, Esposito, Giordano, DiBruno...)--that gave the market its name have been joined by Asian fishmongers and Mexican mercados. The same butcher shop that offers 95-cents-a-pound ground beef in 10-pound bags will also sell you a $69 turducken for your Thanksgiving feast, and sure enough, you will find customers from every socioeconomic stratum lined up at its counters. On Ninth Street, you still encounter the broad cross-section of the city that you won't find at the North Philly Station Pathmark or at the Wegmans in Wayne. Granted, some of the places tend to skew to one end of the class spectrum or the other--even though DiBruno's takes food stamps, you probably won't find too many customers whipping out their Access cards to buy five-year-old aged Gouda or chevre, and on the other hand, you don't find too many of the people walking out of DiBruno's with their cheeses crossing the street to buy seven cucumbers for a dollar at the sidewalk stall; instead, they head to Judy and Stan's or Michael Anastasio's, where the quality is more consistent and higher (as are the prices). But still there is that wonderful mix that defines a good urban space.

I'm not so sure it's bad, either. But I too worry that we may be losing that broad middle where we used to find a whole bunch of things that we had in common as Americans. If I thought that this phenomenon meant a leveling up of tastes and quality of food across society, I wouldn't worry so much, but I suspect it may also be another manifestation of a status symbol, something to set the superior Us above the ignorant Them. And that is where I have problems.

This seems unlikely; I'm not likely to shop at the bottom-rung markets if I can avoid them; and I wouldn't buy plastic wrap, for example, at Whole Foods. Unless I really wanted organic plastic wrap imported from Nepal, that is. ← But when Wal-Mart undercuts your local Super Fresh (let alone the neighborhood butcher or fishmonger) and Whole Foods skims off the high-end customers who keep all of these afloat, where will you go then for the plastic wrap or basic ground beef?

I'm absolutely fascinated by urban planning; how people and places interact; how space affects the way people do or don't interact, and the ways that space defines how people see/feel/think about themselves; the public vs. private dichotomy in this society; and how (or why) it is that, even after having 40+ years of learning that sprawling suburbs are not healthy for children and other living things, the majority of us (with notable exceptions) flock gleefully to ever-expanding McUrbs, and the zoning laws most everywhere apparently both encrouage and demand sprawlurbia. I'm also really interested in the business of business; and in vernacular and pop culture and in food (yes, there is a reason for my lurking at eGullet!;) thus all of these interests manifest in curiosity about supermarkets, shopping malls, urban markets, "walkable" neighborhoods, etc. etc. ← I sensed that from your posts on the various supermarket threads. Wanna visit Philly? I'd be glad to show you around 9th Street and the Reading Terminal Market.

Woody's Bar (202 S. 13th) has traditionally dished out free cups of pepper pot soup on New Year's Day. That's about the only day of the year when, if you see a man in a dress inside, he's straight. (The bar's owner, Bill Wood, has a long history of supporting the Mummers, and many marchers stop in after they're done parading.)

Yow, you can have open containers in parking lots? Not here! ← Yow, you can buy wine in supermarkets? Not here! ← I can buy motor oil if I want it. Booze and their movin towards Home improvement stuff. Garden supplies, the X rated aisle with it's own checkout. Yes we can buy all of the things that were prohibited by the Blue Laws were I grew up. It's called free enterprise. ← I suspect that somewhere in the Philadelphia suburbs, maybe out by the Blue Route (Interstate 476, the western bypass of the city), there is a humongous big box store that offers all of that plus great deals on home electronics in one place. But you still couldn't buy wine in it. That's because Pennsylvania has something even stronger than Blue Laws: a state liquor monopoly. Oenophiles in this state are thanking their lucky stars that for the first time since its creation after the lifting of Prohibition, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board is headed by a wine enthusiast. It is now possible to (a) find all sorts of wonderful wines in certain state liquor stores and (b) buy it without feeling like a criminal.

Good news or bad, you ask? After reading the article, I'm not certain I can give a definite answer one way or the other. If it means people are becoming better educated about good food and willing to pay more attention to what goes on their plates, then it's good news. If this is just another example of merchants catering to the rampant status anxiety among the upper middle class, then I'm not so sure. One thing I am certain of after reading this, though: The folks in Johnson County, Kan., now definitely have more money than they know how to handle and more ways to dispose of same than when I lived in Kansas City. Though it is touching that Leslie Rudd was fond enough of her hometown to want to share her food finds with it.

There was a neat essay about this subject in the NY Times magazine a few weeks ago: Über Market Well, well, well--great minds think alike? (I refer you to my starter post for the "Unflattering Names..." topic. No, I did not coin the term "Uberfresh.") And there is the source of the adventure, the excitement and the anxiety all rolled into one. How can you know that what you have pulled out of those 300 sandwich creme cookies is indeed one of the exceptional ones beforehand? What if you've selected a stinker of a cookie instead? Perhaps we should not fear failure so much--after all, on the road to success, most of us encounter a lot of failure getting there--but we do, and that's what makes those hypersized supermarkets somewhat intimidating. And if your local Pathmark is like most stores in the chain, you could hardly call it small, right? (There are other things about Pathmark that don't really appeal to me, and one of them has to do with a lack of the right kind of choices. I talked about that in the first post of the "Food Shopping in Philly" topic.) Maybe you and I should go hang out on an urban planning board. I think we'd find much to discuss over there too.

Yow, you can have open containers in parking lots? Not here! ← Yow, you can buy wine in supermarkets? Not here!

I imagine that many of you out here have either heard of or shopped at Trader Joe's by now. And just about everyone who has likes the place. An article in the December 2004 issue of Philadelphia ("The Cult of Joe" by Maureen Tkacik) explains why. What Trader Joe's has done, if I understand the article right, is apply the Aldi/Save-a-Lot formula to specialty foods: Stock only private label merchandise and keep the selection of items limited (2000-2500 per store). TJ's may also contribute to the bottom line of some national food manufacturers as well. Quoting from the article: "As food brands became more varied and important in the '70s and '80s, the 'private label' strategy drove Trader Joe's success. If a maker of marinara sauce, for instance, wanted to sell to Joe's in bulk for a price that would piss off other grocers, he'd just let Joe [Coulombe, the chain's founder] make it a 'Trader Giotto's Marinara.' As Trader Joe's became more and more popular for food-makers to work with, the company established an official 'tasting panel' that would choose the best example of an item for the price and anoint that 'Trader Joe's.' The private label became a mark of quality." What this does, the article states, is free the shopper from the tyranny of too many choices. For all that our capitalist cheerleaders prattle on about choice as an essential value, the truth is that for most of us, too many choices prove frustrating. We don't have the time or the ability to evaluate them all, so it's easier when someone--like Trader Joe--comes along and weeds stuff out for us. People apparently love this approach (and at least can put up with the hokey decor), for the chain is expanding at a rather rapid clip. How about you? Would you rather have 100 different balsamic vinegars for you to choose from or just two--aged and non-aged? (As Philadelphia does not post the full text of articles on its web site, I cannot provide a link to the story. If you want to read it all, you will have to find a copy at your local newsstand.)

1) So does this mean Super Fresh lives up to its name? 2) I'm guessing that with Acme, this depends on the Acme. I haven't run across any outdated food being sold at the Passyunk and Reed store yet.

As of last year they are actually owned by Starbucks but the 'bucks chose to keep the Seattle's best locations open under that name - probably to create the illusion of competition. Talk about having your bases covered. Starbucks Completes $72 Million Purchase of Seattle's Best [...]If you read referenced articles about large grocery chains where Seattle's Best bagged coffee started getting placement after the acquisition, it becomes evident that the focus of this move may have been to get more shelf space in supermarkets rather than more sales in cafe's. ← Seattle's Best also appears to supply coffee to independent coffeehouses, something Starbucks proper does not do. There is an indie coffeehole near me (11th and Spruce streets, Center City Philadelphia) called Stellar Coffee that has served Seattle's Best from the day it opened three years ago.

For a period of about two years, up until very recently, I was a teetotaler--trying to avoid following my father's downward spiral into deep depression. Giving up booze turned out to be beneficial for me, and I now feel I can drink again in moderation. But are you telling me and people like me that we could not possibly enjoy superlative food without wine?

If Rich performed as he did at Franzone's, I think that restaurateur will come up empty-handed.

URL, please? ← Your wish is my command. ← Thank you! --Your Neighborhood Lame Pseudo-Sophisticate, heading off to the couch with V8 in hand Edited to add: The Oracle got this much right--I don't curse a lot, except when I'm pissed. I'm wondering where karaoke addicts fit in in this cosmology.

I only worked there. (Though, in keeping with my philosophy, I did sample Dining Services food on several occasions. Having a friend who was their marketing manager didn't hurt either.) Generally speaking, I thought the in-house dining operation at Penn was not bad for institutional fare. Bon Appetit added a touch of flair to its presentation and a little more variety to the menu. I have no idea whether Aramark has built on this or torn it down, but I do know that the food court has made further inroads on campus under them. Though speaking of food court: Penn's food court at 3401 Walnut is shutting down. On a trip there yesterday, the only outlet still in business was Famous Famiglia Pizza. Two people at Bitar's, which looked as if it had just shut down the day before, inform me that a CVS drugstore is taking its place--relocating from its current site in the 3900 block of Walnut. This will mean: a) Longer lines at the trucks and carts, b) more harried clerks at Wawa, c) you won't be able to get a seat at lunchtime at the New Deck, d) maybe Penn is planning to put a food court where the CVS is now? This seems least likely, along with: e) Penne will finally fill to capacity at lunch.

URL, please?

On the larger "Starbucks: good or evil?" question, put me down as answering "Yes." Good for all the reasons others here have already listed, especially in treating growers and staff decently and educating the public about what good coffee can be like. Unfortunately, Starbucks isn't good coffee. It's horribly overroasted--the chain didn't get the nickname "Charbucks" for nothing. As for their predatory locational choices: In Philadelphia, Starbucks has not only the local indies, but two other chains to contend with. One, Cosi, beats them hands down on both ambience (their shops have lots of comfy furniture to slouch in and a funky-casual decor that encourages lingering, as any good coffee place should) and quality of the coffee (though it's as overpriced as Starbucks'). And they serve sandwiches and pizza, using bread baked in wood-buring ovens in each store (the bread is unlike any other I've had--I'm not quite sure how to describe it; the sandwiches are a tad expensive, though). The other is a homegrown outfit, Bucks County Coffee, which IMO has the best coffee of the three and is not as outrageously priced. (But let me second the observation that if those higher prices translate into better wages for the staff and better prices for the grower, then they're worth paying.) None of these chains appear to have put a serious dent in the business of the dozens of local independent coffee houses, all of which offer something distinctive (besides the coffee) that enables them to stay afloat. (Many of them serve coffee from a great local roaster, La Colombe.)