Bend, Ore. – This town is said to be an outdoor paradise, with a smart population, a Boulder-like downtown and superior golf courses. On a trip there a few weeks ago, all this turned out to be true.
Mount Bachelor is only a half-hour away. After snowboarding, you can consume everything from high-end Thai to New York pizza to 80 wines by the glass. And there are brewpubs. And there are young, fit people everywhere. And it’s crammed with hip furniture stores, all the better to fill up the thousands of new houses being built in concentric circles around town at warp speed; but the humblest hovel starts at about $500,000.
Thus I was ambivalent about Bend, until I went to a grocery store called Ray’s Food Place. I didn’t happen upon Ray’s – I sought it out as part of an ongoing quest. At home and abroad, I haunt grocery stores, because what people eat and cook interests me more than their aquariums, dinosaur museums and visitors bureaus. Little organic gourmet shops are fine as a tourist attraction too as well as for lunch – because even at Whole Paycheck prices, they’re way cheaper than just about any restaurant, and twice as good.
But for sheer love of humanity and food, give me a sprawling market.
This has meant Your DeKalb Farmer’s Market in Decatur, Ga., with its produce heaped unpretentiously in a giant Quonset hut, and enough variety to make you swoon. Fifteen kinds of yams, 14 of okra, tomatoes in a rainbow of colors and peanuts, raw, boiled and roasted. More is better.
This has meant Austin’s Central Market, with a low-budget interior clearly designed to pass the savings on to the customer, and again, piles and piles of the freshest vegetables. And seafood and flowers and cheese and homemade tortillas. At every intersection of aisles, someone is wokking something up on a gas burner, and if you think Costco has a lot of free samples, you should see this.
This has meant Wegmans, a western New York mini-conglomerate known for its snooty produce buyers who regularly refuse shipments, thereby promoting excruciatingly high quality. Wegmans even has a playground for kids, which frees their frazzled parents to peruse the limitless selection of dinners, cooked while you wait and packaged to go.
So, back to Ray’s, which is right across the street from a Safeway and doesn’t seem to care. It’s a beautiful supermarket, with almost romantic lighting and polished concrete floors. Crisp Washington state apples glow in produce, and the deli includes Ray’s High Desert Café, which serves blue-plate-special main dishes, such as meatloaf, mashed potatoes and fried chicken. (Nothing cures even homesickness like a good meatloaf. Isn’t it comforting to know that even if your own mother never made it, someone else’s did?) Over in meats, you can choose among homemade sausages and jerkies. All this is a lot less expensive than it sounds.
And then there is the civilized matter of booze, which, in many states that are not Colorado, is sold in grocery stores, because what complements a good dinner better than a bottle of wine? Ray’s also offers five shelves of brewpub beers in single bottles. Where else would you get the chance to try Melbourne Brothers Apricot Ale? I counted 36 different kinds of champagne, on ice. Basically, it’s picnic heaven, the kind of picnic that lasts all afternoon and sometimes results in a proposal of marriage.
Ray’s Food Place isn’t located in the arty center of Bend, but in a faceless suburb and a few neighboring small towns. But one man’s row of art galleries is another man’s overabundance of howling coyote tchotchkes. Either way you feel about it, noon rolls around eventually, and you gotta eat.
At that point, find a supermarket, and don’t settle for mediocrity. You don’t have to, at Ray’s.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen.
The details
Ray’s Food Place, 210 SW Century Drive, Bend, Ore., 541-318-7297. Five other locations in neighboring towns.
