The Supermarket As Restaurant

Market-prepared foods are giving restaurants a run for their money.

At Whole Foods’ prepared food counter, it’s not cheap, but at least you don’t have to cook. Photo: Monte Costa

Outside the new Whole Foods in Kahala Mall, I ran into my friend, Kaui Philpotts.

Philpotts, a former Honolulu Advertiser food editor, has written half a dozen books, including Party Hawaii, Hawaiian Country Tables: Vintage Recipes for Today’s Cooks and the Great Chefs of Hawaii Cookbook.

She’s one of a handful of home cooks who are, essentially, professionals. She can cook rings around most people, including me. But as she surveyed the long lines in the Whole Foods prepared food department, she shrugged. “Nobody cooks any more,” she says. “At best, they sort of assemble dinner.”

Even her. “When I’m busy,” she admitted, “I’ll pick up one of those rotisserie chickens somewhere.”

I said I was equally guilty. “Why wouldn’t you?” she said. “They’re almost as cheap as an uncooked chicken and, hey, everyone is short on time.”

One of the country’s experts on food trends, a guy named Harry Balzer, puts it more bluntly. Says Balzer, a market researcher who has been proffering paid advice to food retailers for 25 years: “Consumers want the easiest meal possible. They want life to be as easy as possible. We are cheap and we’re lazy.”

Oh, Harry! We’ve got a lot to do, and, when evening rolls around, we’re hungry and tired. We want dinner instantly, and it’s always pleasant to be able to afford it.

Our first refuge from the home stove has been restaurants. The average American ate 207 restaurant meals in 2007, up from 168 meals in 1984. I did my share.

But every dollar spent in a restaurant is a dollar not spent in the supermarket, so supermarkets have struck back, plunging into the prepared foods business. There’s a Whole Foods in Manhattan that has seating for 200.

There are some hazards to this strategy. Markets need skilled personnel, “prepared food production workers” in supermarket speak, or, gasp, actual chefs. And if a market doesn’t come up with food that appeals to the customer, the profits go into the dumpster at the end of the day.

But there’s also a big plus. Getting you to fill a grocery cart is highly competitive—mainly on price.

Prepared food is much better for markets. The gross markup on traditional supermarket purchases is about 30 percent; the markup on prepared foods is twice that.

Still, supermarket prepared foods are cheaper than restaurant meals. While restaurant receipts have dipped 23 percent in 2008, according to the trade journal Supermarket News, prepared foods departments have held their own, dipping only 3 percent.

It’s not like me to buck a food trend. Right after talking to Philpotts, I decided to eat this month from the prepared food departments of various markets.

On the spot, I made some rough ground rules. No fried chicken under warming lights; it looks to me suspiciously uniform, as if the supermarket bought it factory prepared and dumped it into the fryer. No sandwiches. And I couldn’t do what I’d normally do when I was assembling dinner—buy cheese, bread, pâté, olives, green salad and wine.

No, I’d march bravely up to the glass-fronted chillers, the ones filled with dishes like chili-orange salmon, seared ahi and grilled asparagus. If, Mr. Market, you’re going to be a restaurant, let’s go head-to-head on the food.

Then I drove home and put it on plates for my family, just like I’d cooked it. Lazy, yeah?
 

Whole Foods overwhelmed me: hot food, cold food, Asian food, more salad bar than I could survey in a glance. All of it packed with customers.

Through patience, I got to the front of the prepared food line. Then I tried everyone else’s patience, ordering a dib of this and a dab of that, walking away with a stack of containers that cost me nearly $60.

To be fair, that included a pound of pepperoni pizza (who else sells pizza by the pound?), a mound of salad and a cupcake decorated with a frosting ladybug for my daughter’s dessert.

Carting home dinner in my green Whole Foods reusable shopping bag, I may have felt lazy. But I sure didn’t feel cheap.
 

When I got dinner on the table, the food was, well, uneven.

Best was the seared ahi—or as Whole Foods redundantly calls it, seared ahi tuna.

This was ahi as steak—sashimi grade, deep red in the middle, flavored along the seared crust with wasabi, ginger, green onion, garlic, a bit of cilantro. The only thing I could see wrong with this was that it cost $21.99 a pound. Three pieces, each about as big around as an orange slice, weighed more than a quarter pound. “Eat up,” I insisted. “These are $2 a slice.”

They were good enough, however, that I didn’t want to dwell on price. Three slices, some greens, a nice sesame dressing, and you’d have a fine light dinner for one.

My three slices of chipotle lime London broil were nowhere near as successful, and almost equally expensive. These were interesting in the sense that they had been marinated in tomato and lime juices, honey, garlic, cilantro, oregano and cumin, giving a kind of kick to the outside. But this was top round, not roast beef, overcooked and tough. At $15.99 a pound, this baby isn’t going to get many dinner invitations.

Whole Foods’ crab cakes were made with whole wheat breadcrumbs, in case you are terrified of refined flour. Almost every market I visited had crab cakes or something like them; none worked. How could they? Crab cakes are good when you eat them immediately, not when they’re cooked, cooled and then zapped in the microwave. Save your $5.29, which is what they cost apiece.

We applauded the $10-a-pound pizza, right out of the pizza oven, thin crust in the Italian style, authentic tomato sauce, excellent mozzarella, slices of a flavorful, large pepperoni. But a pound is not a lot of pizza, so maybe you’d be better off with takeout from California Pizza Kitchen next door.

On the advice of the woman next to me in line, I purchased a container of raw kale salad. Kale is a crunchy, bitter green. I thought it was brilliant, lightly dressed in olive oil and lemon juice, its bitter edge set off by dried cranberries and toasty pine nuts. Nobody else would take the smallest bite.

Far more popular was the caprese—a classic tomato and fresh mozzarella salad. Also, I’d heavily loaded my salad bar container with Ha-ma-kua mushrooms, not a bad bargain at $8.99 a pound. They taste great all by themselves, dipped in Whole Foods sesame dressing.

Finally, I bought two less high-tone items, a Mainland-style potato salad with eggs and celery, and a container of mac salad. I took a forkful of mac salad and thought, “At last.”

My wife, who grew up here, took her first forkful and said, “These people need to go to Zippy’s and learn to make this.”

Whole Food’s mac salad is Mainland style. It has tang: cider vinegar, mustard, sour cream, bell peppers and, instead of bottled pickle relish, cured cucumbers and cauliflower. It’s got crunch, flavor and acid to balance the mayo.

Much as I’ve adapted to local-style mac salad, it’s merely an excuse to break out the Best Foods. Whole Foods may have to change, though at $9 a pound, I doubt it’s going to sell a lot of mac salad, except possibly to me.

Whole Foods differentiates itself by selling food that’s organic and “natural,” with meat from humanely treated animals (though how you humanely treat a crab is a mystery to me).

I can’t comment except to say the prepared food at least seemed fresh and alive with flavor. Especially as I washed it down with Whole Foods’ “certified organic” Greenbridge chardonnay, produced south of San Jose in an area of California more noted for garlic and outlet malls than wine grapes. Still, at $9.99 a bottle, not bad, and it was the only part of the meal that seemed like a bargain.

“You ate the wrong stuff,” said a friend when I recounted my Whole Foods adventure. “Try the hot food.” When I returned, I couldn’t bring myself to sample the steam table offerings, which looked a little sad at 7 p.m. But the Asian food counter was bustling—and this is where Whole Foods shines.

The udon has al dente noodles in a classic broth (the broth comes in a separate container, should you wish to take it home), all under a soft carapace of spinach and seaweed.

But let me extol the kimchee fried rice, grilled to order. It comes with fresh tofu squares on top and lots of chopped zucchini and summer squash, adding some nice texture contrasts. But it’s meatless—no Portuguese sausage, no bacon, no SPAM even.

Still, it’s incredibly “meaty,” because it’s made with the kind of kimchee that includes shrimp paste. That disqualifies it at the last minute from being vegetarian, but qualifies it as rich, warm, spicy and a joy to eat. You get 10 ounces for $7.35, too much for one. Even me, and I really tried.
 

I was amazed at the array of dishes behind the prepared foods counter at the Beretania Foodland. Big, bright, beautiful, well-marked platters of high-end food from a local market chain.

The clerk was congenial and even cheerful about loading up dibs and dabs of this and that into a stack of takeout containers.

We were cheerful, too, right up until we tasted the food.
 

The salmon cake with tofu and ogo was about the size of a premade burger patty. It looked good, but it was dry and we couldn’t discern any ogo or, for that matter, any tofu, though it may have been hiding somewhere.

Recently Reviewed Here are some things John Heckathorn had to say in past months. Visit our Dining page to read more reviews! • Kyoto Ohsho Hookipa Terrace, Ala Moana Center 1450 Ala Moana Blvd. 949-0040 Kyoto Ohsho approaches the concept of buffet dining with a little less buffet style and a little more Japanese style. For example, “the long line of largely Japanese dishes … is all in individual portions on an appropriate little tray or in a bowl, so they look like Japanese food,” writes Heckathorn. Just remember, when eating the sushi, eat the whole thing. They charge you more if you eat the fish but leave the rice. Reviewed in our November 2007 issue.   • 21 Degrees North Turtle Bay Resort, 57091 Kamehameha Hwy, 293-6000 Nestled in the North Shore country—known more for its shave ice and shrimp trucks—is 21 Degrees North at the Turtle Bay Resort. Receiving its name for the latitude of the Hawaiian Islands, 21 Degrees North offers a great ocean view. Heckathorn recommends the single scallop. “Ours arrived hot, perfectly done and seasoned, as it were, with a dollop of salty Osetra caviar,” complete with leeks and sliced, poached Asian pears. Reviewed in our June 2008 issue.

The ahi cakes at $1.99 apiece were small, heavily breaded and dense. They didn’t work cold, so we warmed them, which released all sorts of fishy odors. These were not saved by the small cup of “Asian remoulade,” in other words, tarted-up mayo.

The $3.89 chicken breast with ginger scallion pesto was pretty much the classic Chinese restaurant dish, cold ginger chicken. The differences: a better cut of chicken, not enough ginger and not as much oil. Though it was no doubt healthier, and certainly edible, it made us miss Chinese takeout.

The “ultimate potato salad” had everything in the world in it—imitation crab, bacon, peas, green onion, hard-boiled eggs. But like the “Best Foods Macaroni Salad,” it tasted almost exclusively of mayo and salt.

The winner here was the meat loaf—by far the best of the many I was soon to sample. Under a sweet glaze of barbecue sauce, the loaf was dotted with Portuguese sausage and kernels of Kahuku corn. This we fought over.

The vegetables looked fantastic, vibrant and green. The problem was the preparation. The asparagus—quite good in itself—came with mushrooms and olives. But the olives were canned “ripe” olives, cured in lye, which deprives them of both flavor and texture. And the mushrooms—well, if we searched hard, we could find them. The asparagus was dotted with sesame seeds, which didn’t add much.

Similarly good-looking—and promising from its description—was the broccoli rabe, in olive oil with “toasted” garlic. I don’t know how you toast garlic, but the process deprived it entirely of its flavor. This left the predominant note of the dish the bitterness of the broccoli rabe—not a brilliant strategy.

I spent more than $40 on all this, except I’d ordered one more item, a fancy brochette of grilled seafood, a strip of salmon serpentined around scallops and topped with shrimp.

Unfortunately, the young woman bagging our order was busy ranting about a co-worker to the checkout clerk. When we got home with the bag she handed us, it lacked the brochette. Foodland, you owe me $9.99 plus tax.
 
 

I enjoy the new Kapahulu Safeway—an acre and a half of American abundance. Mylar balloons at the checkout! Roses for $12.99 a dozen! Fresh ground cashew butter! A half-dozen kinds of salami! A sushi bar! Aisles of wine! A bakery! A bank! Starbucks! Wi-Fi! Add a bookstore, and I’d move in.

I have a bachelor friend who loves the store for a different reason: “They have lots of food you don’t have to cook.” This is a person who once bought pots and pans because they were shiny and on sale at Macy’s. They’re still shiny.

When I finally surveyed the prepared food offerings, however, I was disappointed. They seem extensive, but they consist of a quick-serve sushi bar, where they pump out rolls filled with imitation crab and not particularly spicy spicy ahi. A deli/sandwich bar, which has customers standing in line.
But not much in the prepared foods case, served up, in my case, by one of the last surly Safeway clerks.

So few were the choices that I was forced to supplement them from the steam table of hot entrées. There, you can pile up a clamshell full of stuff and pay $6.99 a pound. The Chinese food looked, well, like Chinese food on a steam table.

There were, however, plenty of proteins. “What’s this?” a gentleman asked me as I piled some on my clamshell. “Barbecued beef,” I said, having read the placard. “Looks good,” he enthused.

I drove it all home, and, you know, he was right. The barbecued beef was good, proof that if you are going to put something on a steam table, make sure it’s covered in sauce. Even if the sauce is slightly sweet.

Similarly good were the slices of white-meat turkey and the mashed potatoes. The meatloaf, stolid and slathered in dried-out tomato sauce, was a non-starter. This wasn’t stunning food, but it was adequate, a notch above college dorm food.

The cold food from the prepared counter was uneven: a classic quiche Lorraine; some orzo salad with a nasty vinegar and less than optimum cheese; a caprese in which no one had bothered to slice the tomatoes, instead adding grape tomatoes; a tofu-watercress salad which is a long-standing Safeway item. Normally, it comes with dressing, but the clerk skipped that step.

The best thing in the prepared food case was the cold vegetable “torte rustica.” In other words, layers of vegetables wrapped in pastry. This wasn’t great cold, but microwaved briefly, it unlocked wonderful tomato, red bell pepper, spinach, cheesy flavors. It cost $3.49 a slice and was worth it.

I dropped $30 buying prepared food at Safeway—and guess what, I’m back to buying only groceries.
 
 

Umeke Market is a smaller operator than all the others, with a store near Kahala Mall imperiled by the opening of Whole Foods, and a new downtown branch.

Downtown, Umeke is a store, I guess. It has shelves of organic chocolate, krill oil and homeopathic headache remedies. But it functions mainly as a takeout place for breakfast and lunch, one of perhaps three dozen in a two-block area.
  

The downtown Umeke Market is largely devoted to take-out, including the free-range turkey meatloaf. Photo: Monte Costa

What I like is its ambition. Where else downtown does someone sell ostrich burgers? For $8.75? And get people to buy them? Well, me, at least.

I bought more food than I could eat, just to try it, though my office mates benefited from my largesse.

The free-range turkey meatloaf, stuffed with vegetables, was more than acceptable, nowhere near as dry as it sounds. The small fillet of misoyaki salmon (I’m guessing wild salmon) at $8.95 was even better, surrounded by brown rice and a surprisingly tasty “Asian” slaw.

You can supplement the food with Blue Sky organic sodas and smoothies with names like Melon Bliss. I even ordered a spirulina-infused brown rice musubi because I wanted to experience it in its full horror. To my surprise, it turned out to be not bad, just boring.

Oh, and you want to know about the ostrich burger. Ostrich is lower in fat than beef, which makes it taste drier in the mouth. However, in a burger, piled on a whole wheat bun, with sauce, grilled onions, tomato and provolone, that hardly matters.

How does ostrich taste? Clean—you only get farm-raised ostrich. It’s not gamey, but it does have a quick mineral aftertaste, from iron, instead of zinc, which adds the finishing note to beef.
 

I was walking through Costco, trying not to impulse shop and go home with a big-screen TV, when I realized that Costco, while not exactly a supermarket, was seriously in the prepared food business.

It has actual cooks—perhaps prepared food production technicians—risking their fingers taking rotisserie chickens hot off the skewers and selling them to people waiting in line. I had vowed not to write about chickens, but I might mention that Costco’s are a boon to mankind, $5.99 for a cooked 3-pound bird, crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside.

Reading the ingredients carefully, I think they’re juicy because they are injected with water-salt-sugar seasoning back at the chicken factory. Hardly a Whole Foods solution, but welcome to America.

I got myself a chicken, but I also took a look at the other offerings, which included lots of dishes made with leftover rotisserie chicken, like chicken alfredo and chicken enchiladas.

I skipped those and picked up a meatloaf, not bad, topped with tomato sauce surrounded by some nicely textured and flavorful mashed potatoes, which, if they were made from mix, were made from a damn good mix.

The meatloaf was only partially cooked. The directions called for you to bake it for 45 minutes (in a plastic container??). That seemed to cut against the whole prepared food thing, but, really, if you slice it, it microwaves in a few minutes.

The big surprise for me: Costco makes a decent Greek salad. The base is unthrilling chopped romaine, but it contains plenty of feta, grape tomatoes, red onion and real kalamata olives, pitted, which is always a help in salad. Can’t say I was blown away by the dressing, but you can always whip up your own with a little decent olive oil and wine vinegar.

The only problem: The chickens are cheap, but the meatloaf cost $3.89 a pound, which sounds fine until you realize that the package weighs nearly 4 pounds. The salad is similarly sold by the pound, and costs $9.92. Admittedly, it serves at least four people, maybe more. But if you don’t have four people …

 

Remarkably good was the orange-sesame salmon and, especially, the grilled asparagus at Times Supermarket. Photo: Monte Costa

I was getting a bit tired when a friend of mine told me that Times, too, had prepared food, which he insisted was good and reasonably priced. Ah, he’s lazy and cheap, I thought.

The food counter at the Beretania Times takes a little finding, in defiance of the supermarket wisdom that says you put it as near the front as possible, à la Whole Foods.

But when I got there, I was surprised by the ambition and extent of the offerings.

The food made me popular when I got home. Let me take a moment and praise the asparagus. Sure, it’s no trick to cook asparagus. But you are unlikely to, first, marinate it in a balsamic dressing, then blanche it, then grill it. For $8.99 a pound (and a pound of asparagus is a lot; I bought half), these were excellent, nice, small, tender spears, grilled al dente, with simple salt, black pepper, olive oil. Better than mine, I’m sad to say, but now I know where to get it.

The other vegetables were good as well—crisp green peapods, barely blanched, with grilled tofu squares, sprinkled with black sesame seeds.

There were thick slices of pork tenderloin, still tender, slathered in a hoisin chipotle sauce. Perhaps the sauce was a bit too sweet.

I checked in later with Times’ director of Kitchen Operations, Matt Holmes, who’s cooked at Donato’s, C&C Pasta, Nick’s Fishmarket and Formaggio. “It’s too sweet for me, too,” he says. “But this is the way especially our older clientele likes it, so why argue?”

Sweetness aside, the tenderloin was as good a meat dish as I had encountered, at only $7.99 a pound. “We’d rather sell a lot of it,” says Holmes.

It’s the same philosophy with the grilled salmon fillet with an orange sesame sauce. This was $10.99 a pound, but you only had to buy as much as you wanted.

Even the lobster cake was, as these cakes go, palatable. It’s in panko, lots more panko than lobster, with a little Thai sweet chili sauce, red onion and bell pepper. It cost only $2.30 for one.

“Look, crab cakes, lobster cakes are meant to be served out of the pan. Cold and rewarmed, they’re never going to be what they’re supposed to be. You should taste this baby when it’s still hot,” says Holmes.

Finally, Times had great potatoes, roasted red potatoes that weren’t too tricked up, seasoned mainly with rosemary, black pepper and parsley. But the real winner was a simple potato and chive pancake, which had a wonderful, toothsome texture and a nice hint of chives. It tasted like the batter around great onion rings. This cost me 62 cents, and made me wish I’d bought half a dozen.

I tried to buy roughly the same amount of food at each place, though I may not have succeeded. Still, I spent the least at Times, $21, and I enjoyed it the most.

Cheap and lazy, I think I’ll pick up dinner on the way home.                      
 

John Heckathorn has been writing award-winning restaurant reviews for HONOLULU Magazine since 1984.