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At the new Central Market in Southlake, they have a salt bar, with 27 salts, called Salts of the Earth. On a recent afternoon, I found myself standing at this salt bar, savoring a coarse grain of Himalayan Pink, when, a few yards behind me, a stout man in his late 40s started shouting.
“Hey, I just want to know how a Granny Smith apple can be red,€VbCrLf he said to two flustered, apron-clad Central Market employees standing by a raised kiosk called the Foodie Station. Behind their pulpit, the “Foodies” (an actual Central Market job title) were in a mild panic. One searched the pages of The Food Lover’s Companion, while the other stumbled through a store product folder.
I was just as skeptical as Mr. Granny Smith. Leading up to the December opening of Central Market’s eighth and allegedly best store ever, I’d received gobs of adjective-laden PR material. It all made me tired, wary. The press releases carried the tagline “The journey of a thousand discoveries begins with just one bite€VbCrLf and ended with me taking a handful of Advil. “Central Market’s 80-foot seafood case, selection of 600 cheeses, amazing floral department, 2,500 wine labels, and stupendous specialty grocery aisles are among the dazzling features that make the everyday shopping trip an event to enjoy.”
As much as I love food, the words “stupendous” and “dazzling” just don’t leap to mind when I think of shopping for it. The only sort of shopping that’s fun results in cute shoes, purses, and dresses. So I’d gone to Southlake with an empty stomach, a grumpy mood, and doubt in my heart. Central Market fixed all three.
My epiphany started when I followed Mr. Granny Smith and the two Foodies to get some answers about apples. We found Jeff in produce. Without hesitation, he explained that the red Granny Smiths, a Central Market exclusive, were discovered as seedlings at Harvey Farms in California. That’s where the stock is grafted and grown. “Of course, all apples are hybrids of sorts,” my fellow shopper was forced to admit, as Jeff pulled out a paring knife and cut slices for us to taste.
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| Rambutan from Honduras photography by Kevin Hunter Marple |
That’s one of the differences between this store and Central Market’s other locations: every time you open your mouth to ask a question, someone puts something tasty in it. If you’re willing to open your mind, they’re willing to open pretty much anything in the store. Helpful Foodies are everywhere, peering into your basket, offering to pair a wine with the fish you’ve just bought or recommending a new cooking technique. If it sounds oppressive, it’s not.
They call it a “next generation” store. Since H-E-B opened its first Central Market in Austin, in 1994, it’s been testing concepts, learning. The Southlake store is a greatest-hits compilation of best ideas from each of the seven stores that preceded it. There’s a full-service restaurant with beer and wine and an adjacent outdoor eating area with twinkle lights in the trees and a stage for live music. There’s a housewares department filled with nifty gadget must-haves. Coffee lovers hang for hours in the new Coffee Station. Customers can blend their own aromatherapy bath salts or watch a big-name chef demo a recipe. Just inside the front door, there’s a library of free reference material: cheese-buying guides, wine-pairing guides, how-to-buy-beer booklets. A handy dandy Map of Edible Treasures becomes a veritable pocket atlas for the budding food lover. Signage abounds. If you want a Chiquita banana, they’ve got them at the same price as H-E-B. But if you choose an exotic banana-it wouldn’t shock me if they carried one harvested in the wilds of Zimbabwe by a four-legged gnome-the signage explains the increase in price.
This Central Market is not a grocery store. It’s an amusement park for food lovers. It hurts me to say how hard I fell for it. But having suffered through the bleak grocery years, I suppose I was ready.
For the past 10 years, the grocery business in Dallas has evolved from a dreary chore to entertainment. The Southlake Central Market and, in its own way, the Whole Foods at Preston and Forest are products of that evolution. Each has brought a high concept to grocery shopping. But Whole Foods is dedicated to an all-organic lifestyle. Central Market works to procure all things delicious-organic or not.
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| Swiss Alpine bread photography by Kevin Hunter Marple |
Like Grapples. “Looks like an apple, tastes like a grap,e” said a Foodie unloading a box of fresh coconut meat. She’d noticed my furrowed brow as I studied the Grapple package nearby. “Here,” she said, whipping it open and slicing off a hunk. The scent of grape Kool-Aid hit my nose as I bit into the crunchy apple. “Hmm,” I said, somewhat disconcerted as my brain struggled to connect the taste of grape with the texture of apple. But she got me. I plopped a package into my “Chew With Your Mind Open” cloth shopping bag and pressed on.
The two demo stations were in full swing. One Foodie was serving black-eyed peas cooked with applewood smoked bacon. The other offered chicken fajitas wrapped in house-made flour tortillas. I did not deny myself.
I passed under the “Epicuriosity Rewarded Here” banner, picked up a weird-looking little fruit covered with soft spines, and hailed a Foodie. “Oh, that’s a rambutan from Honduras,” she said as she sliced it open and offered its soft, white innards. “Kind of like a lychee,” I said. “Yeah, or a longan,” she said. “Right,” I said, as if I’d eaten longans all my life.
I moseyed around the corner to Protein Alley, where seafood cases displayed more than 80 varieties of fresh fish and shellfish, and eavesdropped on a thirtysomething Southlake mom with an Oilily-clad baby strapped into her cart. The woman surveyed the translucent pink fillets spread before her. I had seen these transactions take place in other grocery stores a million times-a confused consumer ends up getting hooked by a lazy fishmonger hawking the oldest fish in the case.
“Is that tilapia farm-raised?” she asked with the authority of a seasoned marine biologist. So much for judging a woman by her child in designer clothing. This chick was wise to fish tales. While farm-raised is a good thing for cows and chickens, for fish it means they are reared in pens in the ocean and don’t get lots of swimming room, are prone to disease (and therefore fed antibiotics), and can escape and infect the fish in the wild. Ms. Tilapia eagerly switched to wild coho salmon after learning from the well-trained “Partner” (that’s “employee” in Central Market-speak) that the company supplies fishing equipment to the Quinault Indians in Washington state, pays them to fish, and buys the caught salmon. How PC and mercury-free is that?
On to the Wall of Wines. An array of adjectives-Opulent! Lush! Bubbling!-painted on bright signs helps you determine your wine chakra better than your old mood ring could. I was bubbling at this point in my journey. I’d found a shelf with 14 different pink sparkling wines. I wondered: if I ask a question about one of these, will they open it, too?
I was able to stay on course only by consulting my trusty map. For the next hour I strolled six rows of grocery shelves packed with local and imported olive oils, chocolates, candies, pastas, cereals, juices-a pantry worthy of royalty. All around me people huddled in nerdy food conversations, sampling, comparing, getting advice and recipes. I passed a single man deep in thought. “Would you use an Italian or Spanish olive oil?” he asked his Foodie. I could not remember the last time I shopped someplace where people were actually taking time to make such culinary decisions. There was nothing fast about the food here. Not once on my visit did I see a shopper on a cell phone.
I wheeled past the frozen food and hit the “Mozzarella Live” station where they “wow their customers with in-store preparation of fresh mozzarella cheese.” A couple in their late 60s was grilling the cheese lady manning the counter. “We want to find the perfect cracker,” one of them said. Rather than simply pointing to the numerous boxes in the aisle, the cheese lady countered with several serious questions: “What kind of cheese will you be serving? Do you want something you can spread a cheese on or would you prefer something more like a thin wafer?”
For the next 10 minutes, the threesome debated the pros and cons of crackers. Not world peace. Crackers.
Finally satisfied, they plunked two packages of the potentially perfect cracker into their cart and disappeared. I looked both ways before I strolled over and snapped up a couple of bags of crackers for myself. I mean, really, you can never have too many house-made Australian Water Wheel crisp breads in your pantry.
Or cheese in your fridge. Central Market is cheese heaven and Southlake’s counter stocks 40 “new arrivals.” Of course the Foodies were here en masse, slicing and sampling. I tasted Perl Las organic blue from Great Britain; Bica from Portugal; and Cacio al Pepe Nero, an aged Italian pecorino covered with ground black pepper that I found buried on the bottom shelf, behind several puckered, brown, moldy rounds of Corsican Tomme de Brebis.
By the time I hit the checkout aisle I was levitating. This, despite the several pounds of samples I’d eaten-and despite the fact that I’d been shopping for four and a half hours. In a grocery store. And then I rushed back to the office and put on a foodie fashion show for my colleagues, displaying everything I’d bought. “Look at my Grapple!” I exclaimed. For a cynic like me, it felt strange.
Odder still, I went back the next day.
