Best Storefront Greens
STAFF PICK: The Green Grocer's one place a cat would feel right at home. It has the feel of having been here forever and it only just turned five. Fruits and vegetables are stacked in neat rows of boxes on wooden counters at waist height, a bit of ice melting beneath or cooling burlap draped gently over perishable leaves and skins. Drying herbs hang from the ceiling, and the rest of the place is jam-packed with glass jars of olive tepandade and pestos, and packages of imported small-maker Italian pastas, basmati rice, or tiny pearls of jet black Mediterranean or shiny green French lentils. Baby spinach, a mesclun mix of seasonal greens such as red oak leaf and green orach lettuce, red-white radicchio, mildly mustard mizuna, sharp arugula, the delicate oriental baby cabbage tatsoi, curly frissee and whatever else is available for a fresh salad mix in season. Green Grocer, 135 S. Eastbourne Ave., in the Broadway Village shoping center. Seems always the first to have anything that's ready to pick when it's time. The fruit and other produce here includes beautifully round and full, not watery, Asian pears; Calimyrana and over-sized golden figs; purple Incan and golden Klondike potatoes; Italian pearl onions; and baby vegetables, even squash blossoms. There's also fresh John Dough bread and raisin muffins daily, fresh, hand-made specialty cheeses and also garden supplies for your home herbarium. But what's really great at Green Grocer is they're small enough to care for what they sell. Their mushrooms are the best in the city, not just because of the varieties they're able to get, but because of the infinite care they give to the mycelial buds in their charge. There's portabello (big, woodsy flavor), shiitake (delicate, nutlike), oyster and crimini (the "real" button mushroom) nearly always available. But here you'll also find umber-toned chanterelles, and even deeper flavored morels, skinny little salad sprites enoiki and then, once a year but briefly, some of the mysteriously spawned American black truffles, impossible to get anywhere in the Southwest but at Green Grocer. Folks in the woods and dales of the Pacific Northwest shoot each other over these.
