MarketStEl

I wouldn't call this rough, or even unexpected, but it is outside New York or LA: Koch's Deli, in the 4300 block of Locust Street in University City. Dave Koch is no longer with us, but I understand his son carries on the traditions, which include lots of samples passed along the line as folks wait for their sandwiches and generous helpings of wisecracks on the side. Not having worked at Penn (it's a favorite of students, faculty and staff who live in the neighborhood just west of campus) since 2004, I can't vouch for how well it has preserved Dave's spirit.

because sporting events generally run from about 7-10 p.m. (except for NFL, and day baseball games, and the occasional nationally-televised afternoon game in NHL or NBA). add in travel time and for many people the whole thing runs from more like 6-11. that's the whole evening, no matter how you slice it. gotta eat something. ← Actually, that pretty much describes my experience perfectly. I live in Center City Philadelphia and work in Chester, as readers of my first foodblog know. The fastest way from Widener to the ballpark via SEPTA is to head all the way back into Center City on Regional Rail, then down to South Philly on the Broad Street Subway. (I-95's path from Chester [edited to add: my office is one block from the freeway] to the Central Philadelphia waterfront takes one right past the South Philly sports complex; it would have been about a 15- to 20-minute drive at PM peak.) Including a pit stop at my apartment to drop off my briefcase and change out of office drag, total travel time (including walking, wait time and transfers) from Old Main to the third base gate was 1:35. That would have left me 30 minutes to eat something decent before the first pitch if I didn't eat at the ballpark. And no, I really didn't want to make and pack a sandwich that morning and carry it with me to Chester and back for that evening. Okay, I could have left it in the fridge. Still, it didn't seem worth it to me. But at those prices, I might reconsider if I'm short on funds.

I call myself watching my weight. In practice, this means I watch it fluctuate in a range between 202 and 207 pounds. It's a bit beyond the scope of this discussion, but I felt like an old fogey when I lamented to Jon that even a plain old ball game has become a multimedia extravaganza nowadays. I guess the food had to head in the same direction. Isn't the game entertainment enough? Trust me, I will be back to "the Park"* well before 2031. And I will probably splurge on a Schmitter while I'm at it -- assuming that I can get one before the game ends. (The lines for the McNally's stand, which is the only place the Schmitter is sold, can get very long, I've been told. "The Schmitter" has nothing to do with Phillies legend Mike Schmidt: It's a one-of-a-kind sandwich -- a cross between a cheesesteak and an Italian hoagie on a kaiser roll -- that originated at and is exclusive to H. & J. McNally's Tavern, a Chestnut Hill institution since 1921. It would probably be cheaper for me to take the R7 or R8 up to the end of the line and eat it in its native habitat, but I don't get up to Chestnut Hill that often either.) FTR, Jon carried a roast beef on rye sandwich and a bag of precut baby carrots into the park with him for snacking. The Phillies do allow you to bring soft-sided coolers into the park; rigid coolers, glass bottles, and metal cans are banned. *We in Philly love to refer to our sports facilities by the shortest possible version of their names. There's not much you can do to shorten "Wachovia Center," so that name remains unmolested, but as the Spectrum predates Wachovia's acquisition of the naming rights, only the managers and owners call that place the "Wachovia Spectrum". Lincoln Financial Field, where the Iggles play, is universally called "The Linc," and there have been several efforts to come up with a similarly snappy moniker for the equally unwieldy Citizens Bank Park. For obvious reasons, "The Bank" won't do, and "The Cit" just doesn't sound right.

For the last year, I was feeding a family of two on $75 a week (few economies of scale. 4 would have been easier) in Los Angeles, California. $75 was the average, and we needed to stay in that range because my partner was unemployed and I was underemployed. The months when the Culver City or Santa Monica farmer's market had a good variety of produce, we usually could come in under budget and afford meat easily. The winter was rough. Lots of beans, and even if we made good use of frozen produce, we'd often go over budget. ← To add another data point to this one, I note that my own food dollar goes farthest when I spend it on produce at the Reading Terminal Market. Well, actually, it goes even farther when I spend it on produce on 9th Street, but if you can use only one of the six cucumbers you paid $1 for before they start to rot, then that's no bargain.

Tonight, for the first time in the 24 years I have lived here, I attended a Phillies home game. My friend and former Penn colleague Jon Caroulis had a spare ticket, and his original guest for the game had to back out, so he called me yesterday. I must say that Citizens Bank Park is a wonderful place to take in a baseball game. If you're lucky enough to have seats in the front rows of the lowest level, as we did, you are right on top of the action, with excellent sight lines. And according to a banner that hung just inside the third base entrance, if you get hungry during the game, Citizens Bank Park is also a wonderful place to take in some eats. Seems that the Food Network proclaimed the park home to the "Best Ballpark Food" earlier this year. There's certainly plenty of variety. Cheesesteaks, in three different versions: Rick's, Tony Luke's, and some place called Cobblestone Grill. Burgers. Pizza. Barbecue ribs and chicken. Crab fries. Hoagies. Tony Luke's legendary roast pork Italian. A sandwich called "The Schmitter." Soft pretzels and soft-serve ice cream. At least four different sit-down restaurants, including one billed as serving bistro fare. And, of course, popcorn, peanuts and Cracker Jack -- and hot dogs. Beef and vegan. For only one dollar! "So," I asked Jon, "do they charge captive-audience prices or same-as-South-Philly prices?" "Captive-audience prices," he replied immediately. And so they were. The hot dogs were the one true value at the ballpark. They were Hatfield dogs, which IMO are pretty good; I prefer their taste to that of Dietz & Watson -- D&W are a bit milder and sweeter, Hatfield beefier and more savory. But from there, it was a short trip from the sublime to the ridiculous. A chili dog? $4.50. A burger? $6. Cheesesteaks? $7.50. A 20-ounce bottle of Coke? $4. Needless to say, all I ate were the Dollar Dogs (limit 6 per fan per trip to the concession stands; I had two). "Those Dollar Dogs must exist as a sop to the fans to keep them from saying that this place is a total rip-off," I said to Jon as I returned to my seat with the dogs and a Coke Zero. Next time I get to go to a Phillies game, I will know that I'd better come with a wad of cash for the food. But if I'm going to spend a wad of cash for food, I'd rather do it at somewhere I will get food worth spending that much cash on. I thought that Aramark -- which runs the stadium concessions -- had sworn off this kind of gouging. I guess I was wrong.

I'm with you on this sentiment! I know (or can imagine) the people you're talking about, but I'm pretty sure that the shopper trying to feed four people for a week on $75 does not belong to this class. It was that person I was concerned about in my post.

Thank you for a thoughtful response, townsend. It is a question of striking the right balance, isn't it? Your bringing up Downtown Cheese in this context is illustrative. Even though this is less the case now than it was before DiBruno's upgraded its offerings, there are still cheeses that Downtown carries but DiBruno's does not, and the quality and variety of Downtown's offerings are, as they always have been, top-notch. Certainly when it comes to cheese -- the food on which DiBruno's built its reputation -- DiBruno's is far from "all we've got." Even Salumeria in the RTM and Claudio's on 9th Street offer a decent selection, though they don't have the more exotic varieties that DiBruno's, Downtown and Whole Foods carry. (Claudio's, however, does make its own fresh mozzarella right on the premises, something no other specialty cheesemonger I know in town does.) And certainly the presence of DiBruno's and Fante's on 9th Street haven't diminished the Italian Market's reputation as a bargain hunter's paradise. The specialty butchers there, having been part of the market for decades, also don't have that kind of an impact on its rep. Is there room in the RTM for more artisanal producers from the surrounding region? Physically speaking, there is; the seating area near Fair Food used to house a produce market (the weakest of the three, so it's no surprise it went out of business) and hosts several independent producers and entrepreneurs every Saturday, so if Paul wanted to experiment with having one or more of those great farms in Lancaster or Bucks set up a stand on a weekend, this would be the place to do it. This is where the politics would come into play. Running a market composed of dozens of independent merchants is like managing a shopping mall; one of Paul's strengths is that he understands this. The problem with managing a shopping mall is that if you have too many of one type of store, all the stores of that type suffer. At the RTM, it may be compounded by the feelings some of the merchants -- who have their own association, don't forget; shopping mall retailers often don't these days -- may have about exclusivity or internal competition. Together these make adding more artisans a trickier process than it otherwise might be. But the obstacles aren't insurmountable. I know Paul keeps abreast of discussions such as these. Consider this a suggestion whispered in your ear, Paul; I don't think it contradicts what I said above.

Pardon me for second-guessing Paul here, but I think one of the things he tries to do at the RTM is to maintain a wide mix of vendors and purveyors -- and to hold onto market share in the face of competition from places like Whole Foods, the Super Fresh and -- yes -- 9th Street. (Paul has told me that he sees all of these places as the competition. He has had a hard time convincing some of the merchants that this is the case -- some think the RTM's uniqueness makes them less interchangeable -- but he is more right than not.) People will pay more for what many RTM merchants offer because they recognize these merchants offer better quality, but too heavy a reliance on artisanal boutique stuff and the management runs the risk of losing the bulk of the shoppers you find clogging the aisles at Iovine's. Recall my surprise at finding out that most of what Wegmans sold costs no more than you'd pay at any other supermarket? Recall the post in response to my surprise explaining why? There are probably many more people like me out there who don't shop Wegmans because of what they know about the place, and they'd be equally surprised if they did. The RTM would soon gain a similar rep if everyone there sold what Fair Food and Livengood's sold, and those people might not come there anymore even though Iovine's still charges what they always have. Edited to add; As far as I can tell, the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority doesn't interfere much with the Reading Terminal Market Corporation's operations.

The tone I pick up from the Petrini excerpt that you posted, rancho_gordo, is that Mr. Petrini finds something unreal, precious, dilettantish, about the producers and retailers he encountered in the Ferry Building and the food they sold. Perhaps it was the air in San Francisco that got to him; after all, there are those who would characterize the entire city in this fashion. Now, I guess that in Italy, everyone who is involved in this sort of pursuit are the salt of the earth, live modestly and put in long hours to produce what they produce, which they sell at prices Giuseppe and Gianina Sixpack can afford. Something tells me that this assumption would be every bit as inaccurate as the assumptions Petrini made in that excerpt. And yet, for all the condescension that drips from Petrini's prose, and for all that he gets things wrong -- I too noted that there was food to be had in the Ferry Building for prices that weren't way out of line, and I didn't even visit on a day when the farmers' market was set up -- there are some serious questions that are worth addressing, questions that the respondents here so far seem to answer through what they do not say rather than what they do. The most serious of the implied questions is this: Why can't food that respects the planet be sold at prices an average consumer can afford? Those may not have been actresses carting home those peppers, but they sure were affluent: in the course of researching an argument I was making about the upcoming Philadelphia mayoral primary on Phillyblog, I noted that San Francisco has, if not the highest, one of the highest median household incomes of any large US city. That most definitely makes it atypical, and were the Ferry Building in, say, a city in the Central Plains, a lot of its customers might be making whistling noises and scratching their heads at the same displays that set Petrini off. "Quality costs more," true, but not everyone is going to be able to "just pay more," and I thought that the ultimate goal of Slow Food was to improve the quality of what everyone eats. Saying that cheap food costs us in other ways probably doesn't make much of an impression on the person who is trying to make $75 feed four people for a week; what counts is how much cash she must part with. Petrini may not really care all that much about this issue, but it certainly can be divined by reading between the lines of his sneer. And just because he sneers doesn't mean it's not an issue we should care about.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all of the other places you mention -- except for Dean and DeLuca, which has 14 outlets in five markets, including my hometown -- in New York, and only in New York? I can think of only a few other places in the US where there are enough people with the money, the sophistication and the desire to support multiple such stores. Perhaps San Francisco, which is one of the most affluent large cities in the US. Definitely LA. Maybe Chicago, though pace Grant Achatz, I think most Chicagoans don't eat on such a rarefied plane. After these three, where? (Dallas/Fort Worth? Houston? Both have the money, but do they have the food culture? Any others?) Dean & DeLuca describes their Leawood store as bringing something to Kansas City that it's never had before, and I think they're right. KC is not atypical as moderately large US metros go, and I think it probably shares this attribute with several larger areas too. (Though KC did have a very good specialty food shop and a nationally known and respected high-end grocery chain in the years I grew up there. Wolferman's* was done in by the Bon Vivant vichyssoise disaster, and I think the owner of The Country Store -- which specialized in fine foods from Europe -- simply retired.) Still, "all we've got," from where I sit, is probably pretty damned good when compared with other places about our size. *The company was revived about a decade ago as a purveyor of high-quality English muffins; they've expanded their product line into related baked goods. I've had them, and they are definitely, in the words of their longtime slogan, "Good Things to Eat."

Saltines? Is that what Late July calls those crackers that resemble Ritz in appearance and low-sodium Zestas in taste? Since they were not advertised as "low sodium," I didn't expect them to taste like paperboard, but IMO they did. Now I will have to look at the nutrition label the next time I'm in Whole Foods to see if in fact they are. Kettle seems to know how to make "good for you" stuff that tastes good. I sampled some of their new baked chips this weekend, and they weren't half bad, though you didn't quite get the same hearty, satisfying crunch out of these that you get from their regular fried chips. The TLCs aren't bad, either, though I have yet to try the ranch variety. "Junk food" is probably the easiest of these to define. Junk food is anything that's tasty but of low nutritional value (or high in stuff that might hasten your demise if you eat lots of it). The term is usually applied to snacks but sometimes extended to encompass fast food such as burgers and fried chicken. "Organic" products are anything that qualify for the USDA Organic label. It's easier to describe what you can't use in producing them or their ingredients than what you can: Chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides are forbidden, as are any synthetically produced substances (powdered natural cheese is OK, imitation cheese flavoring is not). Growing methods are supposed to replenish the soil, eliminate or minimize runoff, and not pollute either the ground or the water. Purists complain that the USDA Organic label allows large-scale production methods that run counter to the philosophy that originally underlay the organic movement, but given the USDA's purpose, how could it be otherwise? "Sustainable" means whatever you want it to mean.

Over on the Food Traditions & Culture board, a denizen of Mouseworld has started a discussion wondering "What makes a place a great food city?" by starting with a lament that Orlando isn't and will probably never be, a state of affairs for which Disney is to blame, apparently. One of the followup posters, Magictofu, posited a formula that I think has much to recommend it and which Ms. Cowin might find useful in explaining why Philadelphia is a great food city despite coming up short (in her estimation) on most of her seven criteria: Philly definitely scores high on the last two factors, and has been playing catchup lately on the first one. What do you all think of this hypothesis? I think it has more than a little merit.

1. This is akin to finding a place that claims it sells "Philly Cheese Steaks" outside of Philadelphia. 2. In his warm and entertaining recollection of his father and his childhood in our mutual hometown that ran in The New Yorker about a decade or so ago, Calvin Trillin wrote that "in Kansas City, 'New York' was code for 'Jewish' much as 'Lincoln' was code for 'black'."

Hi, Yunnermeier! I'm beginning to feel like Matt Lauer,* heading from the Netherlands to Malaysia in this fashion! You call that messy? Hah!, say I. That is mere clutter. Otherwise, your fridge is a model of organization -- paraphrasing Bill Cosby, "everything's right where you put it." Do you find that sauces and condiments accumulate over time, the way they do in my fridge and pantry? I've lost count of the number of half-full bottles of things I have. Carry on! This will be a highly educational experience for me. *Matt Lauer is the co-host (with Meredith Viera) of the top-rated US morning news program, NBC's Today Show. Twice a year during sweeps period, the show runs a week-long series dubbed "Where In the World is Matt Lauer?" Originally inspired by the children's game show "Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego?", the sweeps stunt shares the game show's interest in world geography, sending Lauer globetrotting to a series of interesting destinations. The most recent edition had Lauer heading from the Boeing plant outside Seattle to Ireland, Dubai, Bhutan, and Cape Town.

As usual, another fabulous contribution to the foodblogs on your part. I'd hate to see what you're capable of when you're in good health! Wonderful photography, and I love your sense of adventure. I've got a mind to adopt your lunch habits -- mine run to tossed salad and sardines lately. Hope you're feeling better, and thanks for sharing another week in your life with us.

Stainless steel the best cooking medium? I've been led to believe otherwise -- that aluminum conducted heat faster and cooled down faster. The makers of Farberware (stainless steel pots with aluminum-clad bottoms) and Revere Ware (stainless steel pots with copper-clad bottoms) obviously bank on this understanding of the relative performance of stainless vs. aluminum and copper respectively. What about stainless recommends it over these two metals (besides the fact that copper pots must be lined with another metal, something aluminum pots don't need)?

Bob: In your capacity as eG's resident Reading Terminal Market specialist, you have chronicled the progress of Herschel's East Side Deli, a newcomer on the scene and the latest addition to the RTM's stable of prepared-foods vendors, as its owner strives to Get It Right. Perhaps you might want to share your assessments with the people reading this topic, not all of whom are Pennsylvania board regulars?

"Evaporated cane juice" being good old sugar, I can't see how it couldn't be less bad for you than HFCS. Score another one for the euphemizers.

I think I could be very happy indeed if I ate nothing but this, or variations on it, for lunch every day. Aren't the French similarly inclined at lunchtime? Can I throw in a side question here? What's your opinion of Rem Koolhaas? I was able to tour his stunning Seattle Public Library on my recent visit there (chronicled on the Pacific Northwest board). Edited to add: Forgot to ask: What varieties of cheese are those? One appears to be a blue cheese.

Nearest SEPTA service: Route 47m (South Philadelphia to 7th and Spring Garden) operates northbound through the Italian Market, and Route 47 (Olney to South Philadelphia) operates southbound on 8th Street, one block east. The main Route 47 service operates northbound on 7th, two blocks east; as 9th Street is likely to be closed off for the festival, you will probably want to take the 47 if you are coming from points south; from points north, it's the 47 down 8th. Route 64 (Parkside to Pier 70) operates via Washington Avenue, which crosses 9th at about the midpoint of the Italian Market. You can transfer to Route 64 from the Broad Street Line at Ellsworth-Federal station; walk one block north from the Ellsworth Street exits -- I think that SEPTA no longer diverts the bus off Washington to connect directly over the subway entrances. Edited to add: Your sister will be traveling with a stroller? Be aware that SEPTA asks that you fold strollers and carts when riding and take them to the rear of the vehicle. All the buses that work Routes 47/47m and 64 are low-floor buses with flip-out ramps at the front door, so boarding and alighting will be no real hassle. * * * * * DiBruno's had a dress rehearsal going on today, with a live band in their parking lot and a stand set up offering samples of their own label salsas with "Dirty" Potato Chips for dipping, a selection of their grocery products (no cheese ) and roast pork sandwiches (the pork came from Cannulli's, which roasted it for them), with sharp provolone, broccoli rabe and roasted red peppers as add-ons. I had a roast pork with everything they had. The roasted peppers were a form of gilding the lily: nothing beats the interplay of savory pork, bittersweet broccoli rabe and sharp Provolone, with nothing else added. They had good Kaiser rolls for the sandwiches, too. Best $6 I've spent all week.

Before I go any further, this article, for all its problems, deserves to be filed in that growing "Next Great City" folder. Odd how that phrase, which I'll bet the editors of National Geographic Traveler didn't give more than two seconds' thought to when they put together that issue, has become a sort of mantra and target on so many fronts. I think I get your point, inasmuch as just about every article that tries to explain the city to outsiders usually covers these -- it's like barbecue in Kansas City -- but I think there's still a reason for it. Let's face it, even in New York, the things that unite everyone, rich and poor, are the common foods -- the egg cream, the droopy slice of pizza from "Ray's" that you fold to eat, the pastrami sandwich -- and even these can be done badly or superlatively (e.g., DiFara's pizza vs. "Ray's"). That said, I will allow that magazines like Gourmet and Food & Wine, and others in related areas of consumption, are not about uniting rich and poor, but distinguishing the wanna-be former from the latter. (Full disclosure: I have a subscription to Gourmet, I've consulted Epicurious for recipe ideas, and my Food & Wine subscription went the way of my American Express card several years ago.) Which brings me to a question for you. If, as your comments suggest, these magazines are actually a form of escapist fantasy for the masses, what does the serious cook read, other than an industry trade publication? Cook's Illustrated? Saveur? You do make a valid point: We have often complained loudly that we don't get our props as a fine dining destination in the same league with San Francisco, Chicago, or even New York. Now here comes someone -- a New Yorker, no less -- who finally concedes that, all right, this really is a great dining destination, and here we go saying, "But where's the roast pork Italian?" In which case, the problem lies not so much with the article or its writer as with the people who read it -- or what the editors of the magazines assume about them. Now I need to go back through the archives of these mags to see if, when last they covered Chicago, they mentioned Vienna Beef hot dogs or the Italian beef sandwich. Probably category bias: I suspect most food and travel writers consider hotel restaurants as a category inferior to stand-alone establishments, and thus don't quite know how to deal with exceptions to the rule like the Fountain. As for the markets: Remember that -- like Chicago -- this is a blue-collar town at heart still. There's money here, all right, but most of it decamped for suburban estates decades ago, and now it's busy turning Chester County farms into McMansions. The rest of us still live here, and still eat; somebody's got to feed us. "Artisanal" Kauffman's may not be, but honest it is, and it's local, too: just about everything they sell is from Lancaster County. There are enough of these stands at the RTM that I think the problem is strictly one on the high end (again), and there are the folks like Fair Food Farmstand, Green Valley Dairy, and Livengood's to fill in some of that hole. Your point about five-star food at one-star prices is well taken, but is five-star food at three-star prices too much to ask? (And I'd still maintain that, within their given categories, there are plenty of places here turning out tip-top fare for little cash. Most of them, however, are sandwich shops of the kind the Hungry Detective visited on his swing through Philly.) Actually, I think we're talking about the top quartile in this argument: "the rest of us" are eating at Applebee's, Red Lobster and Ruby Tuesday. Edited to add: P.S., confidential to matthewj: Did you ever see my PM of several months back? I can't guarantee anything, but there are still some holes in the August Postscript I have to fill.

Baby turnips, eh? They're still cute, but I think you'd be hard pressed to get me to eat them. Turnips and chitterlings are the only two foods I've eaten once and never again. Then again, I don't remember much caring for beets as a child, and I like them now, so perhaps with the right recipe, I might reconsider turnips too. I draw the line at chitterlings, however. I have noticed significant variations in the saltiness (or at least salty taste) of cream cheese sold here. Most of the brands of cream cheese I've tried are a little less salty-tasting than "Philly", and one--America's Choice, the A&P-family store brand--is noticeably sweeter than any other brand I've tried.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but excellence in everyday fare, or excellent fare you can afford to eat every day, is not the stock in trade of the high-end food magazines like Food & Wine or Gourmet, or at least not something that I think their editors consider their readers would be interested in. Given that Utz potato chip bags sported that 1991 Food & Wine top rating for a decade, maybe I'm not quite being fair to these magazines here, but my impression from flipping through these mags is that street food and budget-minded dining are at best subjects they deal with infrequently. Agreed with you, Holly, that the common fare tells you a lot more about a city's soul than the stuff that gets conoisseurs' tongues wagging, though. Don't forget barbecue in this category. Edited to add: Nonetheless, that Ms. Cowin concludes by saying there are now more places she wants to check out here than in New York is saying something about our fine dining scene. Clearly the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

They need to update their web site. All it says is that this sauce is "coming summer 2006."

I think that at some time or another, I have posted here on eG about an advertisement that had me doubled over with laughter when I ran across it. It was a bus shelter ad for a new housing development in a marginal neighborhood on the far northwest fringe of Center City Philadelphia. The houses in this development sell for anywhere from two to four times what existing nearby structures would probably have fetched before this development opened. The ad depicts an African-American couple beaming in their spiffy new kitchen, with solid wood cabinets and stainless steel appliances. The legend above them reads, "We've started watching cooking shows!" This is cooking as conspicuous consumption, a form of status display. I don't believe that Americans collectively are as divorced from good food as things like this imply -- no culinary culture that produced great indigenous barbecue can be that bad -- but I agree that it's certainly not instilled from birth in many Americans.