Today we needed some groceries. Bored and needing to get out of the house on one of these few beautiful fall days left before the awful winter sets in, we sort of steered ourselves toward the market and wasted some time there. I had planned to steer us to the Rideau Loblaw, but as we started to make our way there, Etienne remembered that he wanted to visit Nicastro's. Nicastro's is an Italian market in a very tiny place, packed largely with imported foods from Italy, a smart deli, and wonderful fresh breads.
At Nicastro's, I get more of a feeling of what it used to be like to shop in Europe than I did when I actually shopped in Europe. The large grocery store experience of North America is alive and well in large European cities (though with worse parking problems), and we ate out a lot, so I didn't get to take part in that European experience of shopping for supper after work in those small markets. When we went to a store in Switzerland, it was a large, well-lit, well-stocked multi-story Co-op store, reminiscent of Safeway or Loblaw here in Canada. There was no mom-and-pop shop experience, with reusable bags brimming over with fresh vegetables and deli-cut meat for supper that night.
In our own neighbourhood, we do have a small mom-and-pop market, Boushey's which we will sometimes go out of our way to get to after work, but it really does require going out of our way. If the Nicastro's or Boushey's were more accessible, I'd love to do daily or semi-daily shops there, but that isn't the case, so once a week, we venture to our large big-box grocers to stock up.
Fresh shopping...
...Wish you were here.
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