To market, to market - shopping in small, intimate food stores in New York, New York - Column

National Review, Oct 18, 1993 by Linda Bridges

MY OLD first-year French textbook was of the kind that attempts to give the students a feel for the texture of everyday French life while teaching them the language. We read about Robert Martin, an American exchange student, and his Parisian friends Marie and Jacques Dalembert; many of the incidents were fairly yawn-making, though we did find titillating the one in which Jacques tells a reluctant Robert that with choucroute garnie one simply has to drink beer.

But there was one real culture shock for us Angelenos, who had grown up with nothing but supermarkets: the scene in which Mme Dalembert was laid up with the flu and Marie had to go shopping for her. Or rather--for this was no one-stop shopping--she had to "make the rounds" (faire les courses): the greengrocer, the fishmonger, the sausage man; the butcher, the baker, and, practically, the candlestick maker (the authors actually sent poor Marie to the ironmonger's, so as to teach us the immensely useful word quincaillier). And someone had to make all or some of these rounds every day, because Mme Dalembert refused even to buy a fridge. Marie thought it incredibly primitive, and we agreed.

When I came to New York I started to shop the modern way, until the day I needed a bunch of leeks, which were evidently too exotic for any of the local supermarkets. And so I wandered into A. & C. Trentacoste, Greengrocers, and nearly walked right back out. I If Southern California supermarkets seemed too impersonal and antiseptic, this went to the other extreme. Except for the refrigerator case with salami and cheese, the shop--a corner grocery as well as a greengroceFs---looked as if it hadn't been altered since the turn of the century. And it was not serveyourself; you had to give your order to the men behind the counter, one of whom was yelling on the phone to an about-to-be-former customer, who was accusing him of adulterating her (factory-packed) Martinson's coffee.

It sounded like a madhouse, but the leeks were good; and it turned out that the yelling was mostly theater. The irascible customer was an elderly shut-in whose main recreation was fighting with Tony Trentacoste. (Every time he canceled her account, his younger brother, Charlie, would let her reinstate it.) The shop indeed dated from the turn of the century, and Tony and Charlie had grown up in and above it. They loved talking about produce, and I learned a lot from them--what to look for in asparagus; what the various kinds of onions are for; how to care for a basil plant.

Also, I enjoyed the show. There was, for example, The Case of the English Muffins. The distributor required a minimum purchase, and so the Trentacostes gently pushed them. If you didn't eat English muffins, that was fine; but if you did, you were expected to buy from them. One day a regular customer asked for arugula, which was not yet common, let alone a cliche. Tony started to fetch a bunch, asking as he went, "Would you like some English muffins?"

"No thanks," the woman replied. "I just bought some at Gristede's" (the supermarket across the street).

"I'm sorry," said Tony, turning back. "We don't have any arugula."

"But you just said . . ."

"That was before you said you bought English muffins at the chain store." (The woman eventually got her arugula, along with a nice four-pack of Thomas's.)

Too soon, the Trentacostes retired, leaving the neighborhood to the new wave of Koreans. It wasn't their fault that you couldn't say to them: "Charlie, the recipe is Sicilian, and it says small eggplants. How big is small?" Not their fault, but still not the same.

Then came the Greenmarket. These farmer's markets, in several locations around the City, are run by the Council on the Environment, which sounds suspect. But in fact they're like the outdoor markets in most French and Italian good-sized towns. Truck farmers from the surrounding areas (plus a few fishermen) bring their own produce, freshly gathered. It's like going to a series of country farmstands. But even while evoking the country, the Greenmarket demonstrates the point of a city: people meet in it from all points of the compass. To "make the rounds" by car--to the tip of Long Island's North Fork, across the Verrazano Bridge and down to the southern tip of New Jersey, up through eastern Pennsylvania, into the Catskills, and then back to Manhattan--would not leave you much time to enjoy your booty.

As it is, at the height of the season a tour of the Greenmarket is likely to take an hour. So far from anxiously hoping someone will have what you want, you can stroll critically, choosing the best of three purveyors' lettuces or chard, rejecting tomatoes better than the ones that shoppers at glitzy uptown stores elbow each other aside for. Nationwide (and indeed worldwide) food distribution has its points; it levels out the availability of produce across seasons and locales. But as with most things, it is easier to level down than up. Tomatoes picked green enough to stand the trip from Holland or Israel simply can't taste like the ones Cherry Lane picked ripe the evening before; corn that has been handed around from grower to wholesaler to retailer for three days or more can't taste like Samascott's. (I remember Tony glaring at a pint of strawberries one December morning and saying, "One of my customers has to have strawberries at Christmas, but it breaks my heart.")