Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Wegmans (Or, How I Stopped Kvetching and Learned to Love the Suburbs)

After spending most of Saturday afternoon at Eastern Market, I made a trip out to the Wegmans in Fairfax to buy Jewish-y food for Monday's break-fast.

I am now just the teensiest bit in love with Wegmans.

Conclusion: It is the ultimate suburban grocery shopping experience. (Check out Sweet's picture and you'll see why.)

First of all, let me state that this was not my first time. There's a Wegmans in Manalapan, NJ, right near where my family lives. (Yeah, my family lives in Jersey. Just deal with it.) Every time I go up to visit -- which is not as often as it used to be -- someone inevitably winds up having to go there. And you wander around and around, marveling in all the gourmet and specialty food items, right alongside your run-of-the-mill groceries.

On Saturday, they had round challah, black and white cookies, hamentashen, knishes, whitefish salad, lox (actually nova), all in the same aisle. Then I got to the deli, the beer, the halloween candy, the produce . . . . I managed to get everything but the bagels, but it's not like they didn't have bagels there. I just wanted to buy them fresh on Monday.

Inbal even got a bunch of her weird Israeli foods there. (One of them is some kind of chip-like concoction named Bissli, which she says translates to "Bite for me," and which I refer to as "Bite me," 'cause I'm funny.) She now wants to go back there every couple of weeks.

They even have Go-Tarts. (But that's an inside joke that's apparently not funny to anyone but me or Dan.)

Harris Teeter is so last year -- well, except for the fact that I live upstairs from one.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Totally agree. Wegman's is an experience. At other grocery stores I run around frazzled, but not here. The place is huge -- but in a strangely cozy way. Maybe it's the lighting? And they carry my favorite Vitamin Water (Focus, the pink one) that I can never usually find around here. Now if only they displayed Entertainment Weekly a little more prominently at the check out counter, they would be my perfect place.

dara said...

Exactly. The less-frazeled feeling you're talking about is that you go to Wegmans for the shopping experience, as opposed to the just-getting-food experience.

DSL said...

The Go-Tarts would have been funny to me if they hadn't come from Dan, who, despite all his protests, I still think of as serious. Anyway....so now I want a field trip to Wegman's. I must have the experience.

dara said...

Debby, I don't remember if it was while we were there or on the way back, but I know that at some point, I said to Inbal, "You know who would like Wegmans? Debby."

Seriously. Go.

dara said...

Oh, and Debby, I'm serious, too. Seriously funny. Or silly. Or maybe just stupid, if you ask Emery (see below).

And the Go-Tarts joke? It was less Dan and more me. It started when Dan brought them to the baseball game, whereupon my first reaction was to ask if Justin had been making fun of them yet, since "go-tarded" is something that I thought he would have come up with first.