Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, (213) 553-8181, has been a Westside fixture since 1957, catering to the denizens of the Hillcrest Country Club and other carriage-trade folk who never really felt comfortable at Jurgensen’s. It offers home delivery-just the way markets used to back when dinosaurs roamed the earth-and also makes up beautiful food platters and gift baskets. ![]() He also takes special orders and will cut and prepare meats to order.Ĭustomers are greeted by name at the Larchmont Market most of them have house charges. ![]() He also stocks Black Forest hams, imported prosciutto and Lido veal, and claims to be the only purveyor in town to offer Prime grade lamb from Northern California. All the beef is corn-fed and from Iowa, all Prime grade. “You pay 10% more here, but we get our meat fresh every day,” he says proudly. The meat department here, Prime Corner, is owned by Jerry Rothstein, and is an absolute gem. And you’ll find Dean and DeLuca risotto mix alongside Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice and pozole and flageolets a la Bretogne cheek-by-jowl to the navy beans. There’s really nothing ordinary about the Larchmont Market even the magazines carried here are haute (Paris Vogue, Maison et Jardin). Clean, light and airy, the Larchmont Market looks almost like an Andy Hardy-MGM version of a neighborhood grocery store-except it’s doubtful that Andy had ever seen a baked potato bar or green corn tamales. Granted, it inhabits the space of the old Larchmont branch of Jurgensen’s, but it’s much closer in spirit to a friendly country store than to the former inhabitant’s sniffy chill. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 856-9953, feels as though it’s an entrenched, established part of this sleepy, retro-genteel street, when in fact it’s only 2 years old. Larchmont Market and Green Grocer, 131-133 N. Some of them are survivors of another era some of them are only a couple of years old. This was almost better than going to the scary funhouse ride at Kiddiepark.ĭespite the hammerlock that supermarket and convenience chains have on Los Angeles, a few neighborhood markets remain. While my grandmother endlessly baited and cajoled the butcher into giving her a better cut of lamb chop or brisket, I patrolled the meat case with a 7-year-old’s mixture of horror and fascination real-life cows’ tongues lolled on a bed of parsley, hunks of calf’s liver were hefted onto the scale with a diabolical-looking metal hook and glass containers held the tiny yolks and viscous whites of unlaid eggs removed from butchered hens. It was the first place I ever saw (and got) Crayola jumbo crayons. The produce man, who was Japanese and barely taller than my 4-foot-11 grandmother, would always give me a handful of cherries or peas in the pod. My parents thought it dank and old-fashioned, preferring to shop at the more contemporary Market Basket on Third Street, but it’s Merlo’s that I remember most fondly. I’d go there a couple of times a week with my grandmother. In turn, when I was a kid living in the Borscht Belt of the next generation, the Beverly-Fairfax area, the neighborhood market was Merlo’s on Beverly Boulevard, across the alley from the Fairfax Theater (where Standard Shoes presently stands). In her neck of the Heights it was the only market of its kind, where you could see everything under one roof. When my mother was growing up in Boyle Heights, then a Jewish-Latino ghetto, the focus of her neighborhood was Everybody’s Market on Brooklyn Avenue.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |