The NEW New Whole Foods

OK, explain Irish Butter to me.

You see, I was raised in one of those heathen margarine-consuming households and as a result didn't really discover the wonder that is butter until my teens. Since then, it's been something of a cholesterol-laden love affair. My wife's family still talks about how (OK, they mock me. Whatever) I used to eat bread with more butter on it than bread, and sometimes even just ate pats of butter because yes, it was really just that good.

I must know more of this better-than-sex butter of which you speak.

European butter has a higher proportion of butterfat in it. It tastes a lot richer. Hell, even the smell is near-orgasmic. You open the package and that lovely fresh smell hits your nose and you instinctively start looking around for things that need butter on them. Bread, veggies, parts of the body...

Margarine is not even food. It's edible, in the sense that if you were lost in the woods you could eat roots and bark and margarine to survive, but it is certainly not something that should be served to your friends.

The one thing about margerine -- and maybe this is just a taste-from-childhood thing -- but grilled cheese sandwiches never taste right to me when grilled with butter.

Child abuse.

Ray, we made them with Spam and american cheese. And margerine.

Whatta ya gonna do. I won't buy margerine or american cheese. But you make me one of those now, I'd eat it.

Ya know, now that you mentione it, Spam & yellow mustard on white bread would hit the spot right about now.

Ever see how the natives make sandwiches up in New England? Bread, meat, and one condiment. That's it. You want a ham sandwich? It comes with mustard. You want roast beef? It comes with mayo.

The biggest thing I had to get used to when we moved to New Orleans was all the weird and dangerous stuff they put on their sandwiches down there, like lettuce and tomatoes. And pickles! They put pickles on sandwiches there, wouldja believe it? New OrLEANS is weeahd.

That's it. Yellow mustard. Which I hate. But on the right white-trash food, it's the thing.

Yeah, comfort food is exempt from rules of culinary goodness. I like an exotic grilled cheese as much as the next guy, but when it's cold and raining out and I just want lunch to curl up with while I'm watching a "Behind the Music" marathon? Grilled American cheese and tomato on plain old sandwich bread.

But with butter. That's how we've always done it.

the old package of the lindt chocolate bars used to have a lovely succinct ode to chocolate on the back... right where you slip your finger under the flap to break the seal. it was about what the mouthfeel of good chocolate should be. it said something like "a square of this chocolate on your tongue should feel like melting butter". it used to make me happy every time i bought a lindt bar (white wrapper only). and then it disappeared from the package. perhaps because the thought of eating all that butter became synonymous with images of irreversible cardiac remodeling on the way to heart disease. half a POUND of butter?! hmmm, better than half a kilo, i guess.

OK, so the Irish butter comes in half pound packages (equivalent to two sticks). Once dinner was over we had about 1/4 of it left, so figure we used about a stick and a half of butter total. Now a good bit of that ended up stuck in the pans (we had three pans, two for fish and one for the mushrooms) or left on the fish platter, so maybe a little over a stick of butter made it into our bellies, split four ways. Two tablespoons each? OK, not healthy. Just don't do it every day.

And yeah, it was damn good, too.

Sorry... didn't mean to imply you shouldn't eat all that butter. I love butter! (Mmmmm, right now I'm thinking about butter and artichokes.) I'm just cursed with a genetic predisposition for heart disease, so my great love of butter is tragically unfulfilled. -s

Ya know, now that you mentione it, Spam & yellow mustard on white bread would hit the spot right about now.

you know.. I've never eaten spam. It scares me a little..

and Irish butter.. I wonder if that's the same as the european style butter I buy. It's good stuff.

It's been a number of years since I've lived in Austin, but the time I was there coincided with the opening of both Central Market and the old, new Whole Foods (at 6th and Lamar, I don't even know where the new, new one is).

I've always found it a bit ironic that Whole Foods continues to get so much media press about how they are expanding the horizons of the country's grocery stores.

In large part, their big store concept was wholly "borrowed" from Central Market. If I recall correctly, it was probably two years between the opening of Central Market and the opening of the old, new Whole Foods, and when that store opened it was entirely a derivative of Central Market.

I think it's safe to say that HEB completely missed the boat on Central Market. For years they said that they were operating it as a "laboratory" for their regular stores. It was during that time that Whole Foods managed to scale up the concept and export it nationally. With their couple of year head start, the news media could have been reporting about Central Market's flagship store in Manhattan. Oh well.

Mel: Yeah, Irish butter is pretty much European butter. It rocks.

Andy: You hit the nail on the head. HEB really had a major innovation with the whole food-geek superstore concept. I remember being really skeptical when Central Market first opened. Like most central Austinites, I was a little bummed that we were losing the big open green space at Central Park for, what, just another dumb grocery store? But like everybody else, I was hooked once I shopped there. Their timing was perfect, what with the dotcom boom giving people more disposable income for expensive cuisine, FoodTV on the rise, etc.

But they've been coasting on their reputation for a long long time. They established themselves as the primary source for seafood, and then jacked prices up to such a ridiculous level that I had finally gone back to Quality Seafood for most purchases. The bakery has withered in the past few years. The cafe hasn't changed at all in ages. They've scored with some of their Central Market brand items, like the Italian Soda...but then they go and sell these items in regular HEBs! Meanwhile Whole Foods has italian soda too now.

And CM didn't have their sights set on the national market the way Whole Foods did. In a way, Whole Foods did it right...while Central Market was doing all the experimentation, Whole Foods was growing their national footprint. Now they can take the food-geek superstore nationwide...meanwhile Central Market has been around for ten years and now they even have one in...Forth Worth! San Antonio! Whooptyfuck.

HEB is a regional Texas market, and they never thought outside those boundaries.

Bottom line, though, is that Central Market, while still good, has stagnated, but Whole Foods is growing and innovating.

Hey I loved your article! I'm a cheesemonger at the new Whole Foods and I thought I'd fill in on just why Irish butter is just that much better than your average European butter. Thanks to its convenient location on the Atlantic climate conveyer belt, Ireland is lush and green year-round, and the cows eat that lush green-ness year round. It shows. You'll notice Irish butter (and cheese) is yellow on its own without any additional coloring - that's the beta carotene from fresh grass being passed through the milk, and that's the traditional sign of the highest quality dairy products. That's why people started using annato coloring to make cheese orange. And that's why Irish butter rocks. Thanks for your positive review! We love food and hope all those people who fear change will relax a bit and enjoy themselves in the best natural food store on the planet!