This is the fourth in a series of articles (love letters?) by food writers who are passionate about where they buy their bananas.Read the entire series here.
I lived in New York City for 16 months and spent the whole time missing a supermarket in Texas.
Knock suburbia all you want, New Yorkers, but have fun going to your corner market only to find out they’re out of butter. (Yes, this happened to me. More than once. At different stores.) Give me plenty of parking, wide aisles, and a store where you can buy light bulbs, Oreos, organic local kale,Topo Chico, and get your car washed.
Give me HEB.
That’s H-E-B; you pronounce the letters. They stand for Howard E. Butt, which sounds like a playground taunt but was the actual name of the supermarket chain's founder. Nowadays, the initials also stand for "Here Everything’s Better," the store’s slogan. Hyperbole? Maybe. But...maybe not.
HEB is famous for its private-label foods. They make just a ridiculous number of products for their stores, ranging from the obvious—flour, peanut butter—to the, um, less obvious. Things likepumpkin cremeandsangria flavored sodas,apple-celery juice,Texas-shaped tortilla chips,white bread with the crusts cut off, and, of course,That Green Sauce, ataco-truck salsa favorite. Once I found“pot-ready” spaghettiat HEB—it was pasta that had been broken in half. You know, to fit the pot. Just the other day I encountered a trove ofcharcoal infused with garlic and onion flavors.
最好和最差的事情来,每一个年代ingle one is different. The company prides itself on customizing each location to the neighborhood: in Austin, where I live, there are HEB locations in college neighborhoods (heavy on the cheap beer and frozen pizzas), up-and-coming neighborhoods full of families with young kids (organic produce and craft beer), neighborhoods populated largely by one culture (Mexican cookies and an aisle full of Goya products) or another (fish sauce and rice noodles).
Which means you might end up near an HEB that suits your tastes, or one that decidedly doesn’t. Moving back to Austin, I ended up in a great house in a great neighborhood that has a notoriously bad HEB. Despite a recent remodel, it is lacking in things most other HEBs have: no in-house bakery, no butcher counter, and, worst of all, no store-made fresh tortillas. “My new HEB doesn’t make tortillas in-house,” I wailed onTwitter. “What was even the point of coming back to Texas?”
But the other day I was standing in line, holding four pounds of skirt steak destined for the grill, behind an older gentleman in a suit. He saw what I was buying and gave me a thumbs up. “I worked in the cattle industry for 60 years,” he told me. “Glad to see you’re buying beef.” Which is pretty much the most Texan thing that has ever happened to me.
I’ll keep going back to my HEB, tortillas or no. For one thing, the traffic is too bad in Austin now to go much farther. But also because HEB is Texas. Where else can I getThat Green Sauceand a thumbs up from a retired cattleman in a suit? And besides, they always, always, always have butter.
