Review 6/28/20
Fresh Market continues their downward spiral of ideas; they've allocated 4 of of the best spaces to the supermarket to "curbside pickup"; I come here quite often and I've never seen anyone parked here. Who wants someone else to pick out their food at a supermarket?
Imagine being dumb enough to drive around the lot looking for a space when these spots are open? How stupid are you? These are not illegal parking spots; they can't give you a ticket or tow your car if you park in these spots; so why should people too timid or lazy to go inside the store get priority?
I went in for tomatoes and a chicken; but once again, they burned all of the chickens to a crisp. Every one of them.
They overcook the chickens here regularly (the only thing keeping Spatch viable), but this was worse than usual. The oven is on a timer; the only way this could happen is 1) someone set the temperature too high or 2) they neglected to take them out of the oven for 1/2 hour after they were done.
You'd think that they'd discount burned chickens; who is going to pay $7.99 for a chicken that is only half edible. The wings, legs and outer layer of the bird would have to be thrown out. They really need to clean house in this place. The last couple times I've come in here for a rotisserie chicken I've left without one.
Review 1/11/14
After the salad I had at Italio yesterday, while I was picking up a few things at Fresh Market I started to wonder how much a supermarket salad might cost. The stuff they had on the bar was relatively fresh, but they only had lousy grape tomatoes and the only cheese they has was cheddar, so I couldn't really make a good caesar. But they I saw that they had Hellman's salad dressings, something you can't buy in a store. The caesar was empty, but when I spotted the chunky blue cheese, it made up my mind.
I loaded up a small container with romaine lettuce, spinach, turkey, red onions, cucumbers. a hard boiled egg and the blue cheese dressing.
A pretty good haul I thought, but I had no idea how much it was going to weigh. The salad bar is $7.99/lb. This ended costing me $5.84; more than $1 less than Italio. Of course you can't get meatballs or linguine here.
The salad was excellent; the Hellman's dressing was as good as I expected; a chunky blue from a bottle that actually is pretty chunky.
Review 3/18/13
When Fresh Market opened, it was a pretty big deal. The parking lot was full all of the time, and there were always tons of people milling around. Over time, the interest has worn off, and it's now a place where people go to pick up some specialty items that they can't get at Publix. The place is very expensive; identical items that can be purchased at Publix are usually about 30% more here. So this isn't a place to do your general shopping unless you just don't care about how much things cost.
I've never been a fan of Whole foods; and this place is designed to compete with that market. This place reminds me more of Fairway up in New York, although Fairway has much better prices and more general selection. You can easily do all of your shopping at a Fairway.
I'm not impressed with their beef at all. They have a nice beef counter, and they sell what they call "Premium Choice" beef, which is likely just a marketing term. I haven't seen any well-marbled beef in the store; it all seems too lean to me, and I don't care for lean beef. They also sell Hereford Beef, but again, it doesn't look any better than the beef at Publix and it's more expensive.
The fish counter is pretty impressive; not cheap but not as expensive as Whole Foods either. I spotted some nice big fresh flounder filets for $12.99 a pound; they get $25 for sashimi grade tuna, which is about twice wholesale. I have found a fish item that I really like; they have vacuum packed Flounder; nice big filets are that turned out very nicely every time. They're 9.99 frozen. The fresh ones often don't look so good, so frozen is fine.
They do have a nice cheese counter and I'll often pick up some danish blue cheese or some aged cheddar. It's pretty expensive, but if you know what to buy, it can be worth it. They have various salad bars and olive bars, and they sell chicken wings 6 ways. I picked up some buffalo wings, and I'd have to say that they're good enough to convince me not to bother making them myself if I was wanting some.
They're rotisserie wings, so they're very moist. It's difficult finding whole wings as they tend to fall apart. $7.99 a pound. 6 wings were like $4.
Deal Day Tuesdays
While their BOGO offerings aren't going to worry Publix, every Tuesday they have special on a few items. Each month it's different; last month it was coffee. This month it's sirloin steak, crab cakes and shredded cheese. They call it Surf and Turf, but I don't usually have sirloin with a crab cake. As I said, their meat doesn't move me, so I picked up a couple of crab cakes. They're 3.99 each, so on BOGO day you get 2 for $3.99. When you consider that restaurants are ridiculously charging $30 for 2 of these with a bunch of french fries, it seems like a pretty good deal.
They're 3 ounce cakes; the same size as Philip's crab cakes. I cooked them in olive oil and butter,
And had them with cole slaw and tartar sauce.
There was more filler than if I were making them from scratch, but if I made them from scratch I'd spend more time trying to keep them together than eating. These were pretty easy, and as good as what you get in most restaurants.
Plus it's 68 degrees; leave the dog in the car for 10 minutes.
Relax people, it's not smallpox. The real distance is 3 feet, so if someone gets 4 feet from you there's no need to panic. People standing still and not coughing or sneezing are not going to give you a virus.
Go to Winn-Dixie; they have Certified Angus Beef for about $9/lb.
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function getUser() on null in /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php:267 Stack trace: #0 /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php(75): threadedComments->formatComment(Object(stdClass)) #1 /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php(100): threadedComments->printParent(Array) #2 /usr/local/www/insideftl/comments.php(74): threadedComments->printComments(Array) #3 /usr/local/www/insideftl/single-post.php(208): require_once('/usr/local/www/...') #4 /usr/local/www/insideftl/post.php(22): include('/usr/local/www/...') #5 /usr/local/www/insideftl/index.php(170): include('/usr/local/www/...') #6 {main} thrown in /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php on line 267