Ah, Walkers, we miss you! We’ve tried all sorts of different US crisps, which naturally come in enormous bags, enough to feed a family for a month. They’re either too salty or have no salt; too strong tasting or just plain horrible. Fairways comes to the rescue because it sells Walkers crisps for 99c a bag. The only problem with this is that the well kept secret that they do this keeps coming out. I go every week and look at the British section and it’s either feast or famine depending on whether some boxes of Walkers have made their way across the Atlantic. Last week, I scanned the section for the pink bags of prawn cocktail crisps. As I’m scanning, an American lady asks the staff if they have any ‘prawn cocktail chips’ and she explains they are ‘from England’. The men look suitably bemused as prawn cocktail flavour isn’t sold here. They look for some time and whilst her back is turned, I spot two bags nestled in amongst the salt and vinegar hula hoops and carefully extract them and put them in my trolley. I cover up my bounty with my Bounty (just 2 rolls). And then I slowly walk away, feeling victorious. But this week, there must have been some over ordering as every aisle was garlanded with bags of prawn cocktail, like pink decorations. I don’t think I was hallucinating, but I did stock up. Just in case.
Category Archives: Supermarkets
New York’s gone Irish mad
It’s St Patrick’s Day tomorrow, but New York is in full Irish mode today as the St Patrick’s Day Parade is underway. Unfortunately it has just started snowing here, but I doubt that will stop any of the enjoyment and excessive Guinness drinking. I saw people going into Irish bars early this morning, bedecked with green clovers and flags. Even in Fairways they are in the same spirit with these rather fetching cup cakes!
A note to Mr Sainsbury
So I noted the obsession with cleanliness that seems to exist here in NYC. It has just gone one step further. Presenting wipes for your supermarket trolley (that would be ‘cart’ in the US). The photo below was taken in Target, a massive retailer of food, clothing and home stuff across the US. In one section you pull out your wipe, use on your trolley and then bin it in the hole next to it. What a brilliant idea. No more wet trollies to plonk your toddler into; no more disgusting gloop on the handlebars for your oral 15 month old to gnaw and slobber over. Sainsbury’s take note.
Bounty hunters
And can someone please tell me why New Yorkers are so obsessed with Bounty kitchen towel? Every time I walk down First Avenue there are the poor Fresh Direct delivery guys wheeling huge trolleys with massive multi packs of Bounty kitchen towel perched on top. When I am in Fairways, practically every trolley (except mine, of course) has a 6 or 9 or even 12 pack of them. I don’t get it.
A hierarchy of gourmet
Gourmet must be the most overused word in New York. The corner shops selling everything claim to be gourmet, the pizza joints do the same. But there really is a hierarchy of food here. It starts with the independent deli, ubiquitous and fairly generic, selling sandwiches, bagels etc. Then there are the supermarkets, starting with Gristedes, which has been around since 1888 and here is open 24 hours, great for a quick in and out to get odds and sods. D’Agostino around since 1932 is ok, but a bit over priced. Morton Williams, founded in 1946, is similar but so tightly packed with goods it is a real challenge with a buggy, especially on Tuesdays when seniors get their ten per cent discount. My regular haunt is Fairways, huge, with great fresh produce and big on organic. The Food Emporium is similar, but I rarely go in as it is hidden by the horror of the Second Avenue subway construction works. I did go to Trader Joe’s once, out of my way, but as so many people had raved about it I went and had a look. I didn’t think it was anything special, especially the queues, so long they have someone specifically to indicate the end of the queue with a white paddle saying ‘end of the line’.
Then you change to the fancy specialist supermarkets cum deli shops. This is where the true meaning of gourmet comes to life. There’s Eli’s and its West Side relation, Zabar’s. Wonderful cheese counters, great on Jewish food but hefty on price – definitely treat territory. Agata and Valentina is a real favourite: mouth watering cakes and the best liquorice all sorts. There is also Citarella with its famous fish counter – don’t count on much change here.
And top of the hierarchy? It has to be Dean and Deluca. It is incredible. Located on Madison Avenue and very close to Central Park and the Met, its clientele don’t need to look at the prices. It has amazing cakes, bread and the best sushi I have had so far. Its white understated bags undersell quite how expensive and upmarket this place is. When you see the local private school girls buying their lunch here, you know you are in Gossip Girl territory. Best not go in with a credit card and a post run appetite, that’s for sure. Now that really is gourmet.
Open all hours
It’s funny to think about Ronnie Barker on the streets of Manhattan, but it did strike me that Arkwright is alive and well here. The supermarket is open until midnight every night (no Sunday trading laws to scupper business here) and the pharmacy is open 24 hours. The pharmacy has gone way beyond its drug dispensing remit and sells pretty much everything. I am yet to see Nurse Gladys Emmanuel, the object of Arkwright’s affections, in the queue (that’s ‘on line’ here in the US, apparently queues don’t exist here) at CVS. I like it at CVS because it doesn’t have cashiers and the self service tills take all of the change I keep accumulating because I’m too slow to count it out in normal shops.
I love our local deli, open 8am till 9pm 7 days a week, which makes its own cakes in front of you. I think they may start charging me and E for watching them several times a week. So nice. I am gradually trying them all out. In true New York style we don’t cook and get take out from the deli – don’t want to boil those sprouts? Then buy them ready cooked, as the guy in front of me did. Want chicken for dinner? Well, how about 8 different types cooked and ready to eat. I frighten the man in front of me by saying I will have the other half of the chicken he has just ordered; he looks at me like I’ve just proposed to him. Nearly home and there’s a delivery guy in the lift (elevator) with a small brown bag that says Luke’s on it. I ask him what he’s delivering. Lobster. He’s delivering 2 lobster and prawn (shrimp) sandwiches and 2 fish soups. Now that’s true New York. You don’t go out to get your food, you get it delivered. Granville used his push bike, up and down the hills of his Doncaster suburb to deliver barm cakes to local housewives. The delivery guys here use mountain bikes to deliver lobster. Not so different from 1976, eh?
Milking it
Most weeks when I was in the UK, I would buy 2 four pint bottles of milk, semi skimmed organic from Sainsbury’s preferably. Never really thought much of it until I got here. There is a ridiculous number of types of milk in New York supermarkets. We start with your ordinary milk, it is low fat, 1 or 2 per cent. Is that semi skimmed? 3 per cent seems to mean whole milk, so is that full fat? Or maybe I should opt for some DHA Omega 3 milk? What is that about? I think it might be closely related to the milk with added vitamin A and D. Soy and goats milk I’ve seen before, seems reasonable for bodies that can’t cope with milk, but here they go one step further and have lactose free (probably flavour free too). There is rice milk, coconut milk, buttermilk and organic milk from cows which are grass fed. There is almond milk for those nutty moments and local milk for local people. Half and half anyone? Half of what? Is that semi skimmed? And a whole selection of creamer, what’s that, surely it is just thick milk? No. It is specifically for coffee (not tea, of course, there’s a whole other piece begging to be written on what Americans do to tea). And I still don’t know which one to get!
Alcohol free
My beer bottle tells me not to drink when driving and not to drink when pregnant but it doesn’t tell me how alcoholic the content is. When I bought the beer, I had to tell the cashier my month and year of birth when I am clearly, very clearly over 21. But beer bottles do come in matching carry cases, so I can look stylish whilst kidding myself that someone thought I looked young and falling over drunk because I have no idea how strong the beer is. Cheers!
Plastic fantastic
In the UK, there is a strong drive to reduce plastic bag usage. Visit the major supermarkets and you now have to ask for a plastic bag and those that are available are so thin, they are hardly worth using. Anya Hindmarch led the style crowd with her I’m not a Plastic Bag which came out in a heavy canvas with thick rope handles in 2007 and instantly sold out. Every major retailer, museum, even school has their own hessian bag of sorts as we all salve our environmental conscience. Every week I would take my bag of bags off to Sainsbury’s smug in the knowledge I would not need a bag, annoying the sales assistant when I refused to put my loose veg in a bag and it rolling off on to the floor. So I brought this attitude to New York and thought it would be pretty much the same. I already have a massive collection of plastic bags: double bagging at the supermarket and just in case, let’s stick yet another bag over that chicken, which has already been aggresively shrink wrapped. One bag for the washing liquid in case it escapes from the child locked bottle. Agh, i cannot bear all these bags, even in the health food shop they’re at it and you’d think they would at least make an effort! I do refuse bags but that seems to be unusual. I haven’t quite summoned up the courage to recycle my Fairways bags – mostly because they pack for you and I’m too scared to ask them not to. I had this romantic notion that everyone in the US used large brown paper sacks and held their groceries like a small baby, but I’ve only seen brown bags in use once: when they were inside a plastic bag.
I am a former fat person
Now, like most women, I am conscious of my weight and as per my previous post am figuring out how to remain well and truly in my jeans whilst in New York. Puzzling over which cake to buy for J’s birthday we met a self confessed ‘former fat person’. I have never heard this phrase before. How is it possible to work behind the bakery counter and not eat the cake? She showed me how large her bakery clothes were and how she never wants to be that large ever again. We bought the smallest chocolate cake, munched on oatmeal cookie samples and I pondered on this vignette of New York life. The battle with food is a constant here.
nw3 to nyc 