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| - When I first stumbled into this place on a Ribena-hunt, in the late eighties or early nineties, I think, it was some kind of low-rent but authentic Caribbean supply house. They had all kinds of pepper sauces, and dried peas I'd never seen, and weird crazy shit with strange labels and names like Lucozade and Mauby. They also had a table in the back room covered with while plastic buckets, with SALT BEEF and PIG SNOUT crookedly written on them in big black Sharpie. Jamaican patties were sold from a heat-lamp cabinet next to the cash, behind which were all kinds of shampoos and hair lotions that looked like they'd been packaged and labelled by Martians. They had about sixteen kinds of brown and Basmati rice, though, and some spices I used a lot of, and large-sized bottles of Tabasco that my local foodstores can't be bothered to stock, so I kept making the trek a couple of times a year to resup. Never really stopped.
Maybe fifteen years ago, though, the place changed hands. The new owners took things upscale. Noticeably upscale. The buckets of bloody snouts disappeared, as did the scalp-poultices; in their places went artisanal hand-rolled pastas, freakishly unusual and expensive fruit preserves, and an entire wall of assorted high-end olive and nut oils. To their great and everlasting credit, however, the new guys kept most of the old, low-end, rice-and-beans dry & canned goods inventory people were used to. They just fleshed it out. Hugely.
You can still get just about any bean or seed CLIC puts in a bag or a can, here, right alongside six types of organic brown rice from California and spelt personally harvested by Brigitte Bardot. Need bulk sea salt, or a hundred grams of sun-dried tomatoes, or a bag of malt flour, or those delicate Scottish biscuits that little old ladies eat? They got all of that, along with frou-frou canned cassoulet and bottled sirops from France, oven mitt-sized vacuum bags of Malabar peppercorns, blackcurrant & quince jams from those crazy little European countries that people are always driving tanks across, and an entire shelf of curry spices imported straight from the Mercator of Hell.
And they still sell my big bottles of Tabasco. As I was paying for my winter's supply of the stuff at one end of the counter yesterday, I heard another customer ask the other counterman, "Can I still get a Jamaican patty here?" And I think the answer was "Yes."
If they still sold salt beef, I'd give 'em five stars. But hell, then I'd prolly have to live there.
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