“Meal replacement” was the rallying cry of grocery and takeout futurists during the ’90s, with newcomers like Eatzi’s in Houston blazing a path toward the future of dining. Everyone in the industry was talking about this place, where people could pick up anything from sandwiches to full-blown five-course gourmet meals on their way home from work. Quick, but vastly better than fast food, Eatzi’s catered to people who had better things to do than cook or eat out.
Now, more than a decade later, Eatzi’s has ballooned into a nationwide empire of — just five locations? We don’t have one here in the Bay area. We don’t need one. Turns out, it isn’t that hard for places to jump on the “meal replacement” bandwagon, from the corner deli to the butcher shop to the crunchy organic market down the street. Even corporate bastions like Sweetbay and Publix have thrown their hats into the pre-cooked ring. Everywhere you turn there are bowls and platters lined with tasty food ready for a quick trip home.
Wait a minute. Did I say tasty? After a week of eating out of retail refrigerators, I’ve come to a few conclusions that now seem rather intuitive. First, food that sits in a cold case waiting for the right person to come by and pick it up is rarely going to be as good as fresh-from-the-kitchen restaurant fare. Second, depending on your skills in the kitchen, prepared foods may not be as good as what you can whip up yourself if you have an hour to spare.
Not having that extra hour to spare, either in the kitchen or at the neighborhood restaurant, is really the point here. After a hard day in the corporate trenches, you deserve whatever free time you can wrangle. You also deserve sustenance better than a McRib or microwaved hot pocket.
For less than $20, you can kit out a meal for two with just a brief stop on your way home. Sure, it may not be real gourmet cooking, but it’s amazing how much better food tastes when you’re watching last night’s Colbert Report in your loose jammies. Beats most restaurant ambiance, hands down.
So when approaching store-bought prepared foods, remember what you are buying — convenience and comfort, not culinary excellence. Also, there are some easy rules to remember that can make for a more rewarding meal. Here’s a rundown of some of our local providers, along with the rules.
Chavez At Home
1350 S. Howard Ave., Tampa, 813-251-1500.
Denise Chavez opened this quaint little spot last year with restaurateur mom Helen, partly to take advantage of her mother’s die-hard fan base and partly to take advantage of the immense quantity of busy professionals in SoHo. Chavez stretches the boundaries of what is typical at prepared foods joints. Sure, there’s quiche (Rule No. 1: Everyone’s got quiche, but no one makes it well), but they also have shrimp pie — an unlikely combination of cream, huge crustaceans and a mess of parmesan cheese that tastes much better than it sounds. One platter is filled with gigantic one-pound burgers topped and stuffed with creamy blue cheese and sweet sautéed onions, big enough for an entire day of eating, and huge twice-baked potatoes loaded with cheese and cream.
There is also a concern here for the meal, not just the dish. The staff will suggest pairings of veggies and entrees, and almost every dish comes with a separate sauce to be applied just before eating. Here, meal replacement covers the whole experience, from apple slaw to coconut cake. 3.5 stars
Integrity To Go
1117 Fourth Street N., St. Petersburg, 727-209-2380.
Susan Huff tried to get out of the retail business, but it kept pulling her back in. She sold the first incarnation of Integrity a few years ago and scaled back to just the occasional catering. Her customers and friends wouldn’t let her stay away. “Everyone was always calling me and asking to me make them dinner,” she explains.
After operating out of the kitchen of the Unity Church on 46th Avenue N. for a couple of years, where she still runs a catering business and sells meals-to-go, Huff recently opened an outlet on Fourth Street closer to downtown St. Pete, where the core of her clientele work and live. The space is just big enough to hold a few tall refrigerator cases and an immense amount of baked goods.
Really, it’s hard not to start with dessert. Cookies manage to be huge, crisp and chewy at the same time, while gingerbread cake is intensely fragrant and Huff’s “Mid-Town Munchie” granola is good enough to rival the granola lady at the Saturday Morning Market.
Entrees aren’t generally the star here — pumpkin risotto has texture but hardly any flavor, pork tenderloin can be tough, and quiche is nigh flavorless (see Rule No. 1) — but the soups are routinely stellar, especially Integrity’s roasted red pepper, or bean and kale. Sandwiches and spreads are also consistent bets, especially the simple but rich chicken salad wrapped with fresh veggies. In fact, that brings us to Rule No. 2: Sandwiches are always a good bet for a take-home meal. In all the places I covered, bread stacked with filling is routinely the best thing served.
Yeah, the food’s pretty good at Integrity, but the real draw here may be the name and what it implies. “It doesn’t signify the food, but I wanted this to be more than that,” Huff says, referring to her reliance on organic ingredients. As much as 80 percent of the food is organic and Huff grows her own herbs and some of the lettuces. Here’s Rule No. 3 for you: It’s easier to eat organic when someone else does the work. 3.5 stars
Minor’s Market
2511 W. Swann Ave., Tampa, 813-872-9565.
What I like best about this SoHo staple is the selection — there isn’t much of it. Besides the extensive sandwich (see Rule No. 2) and salad options, Minor’s offers just a select few heartier items for your convenience. It’s like a college meal plan, but good.
Pasta Bolognese isn’t really Bolognese — instead of smooth and silky, the sauce is dominated by giant chunks of ground beef — but it’s still better than what you’d whip up with a can of Ragu and a frozen pound of burger meat. Still, I prefer slices of pink pork tenderloin (yeah, everyone has pork tenderloin), or tender, perfectly cooked salmon filets covered in a mixture of basil and ground pecans. Rule No. 4: Go on, try a nice piece of salmon. Everyone serves it and the pink plank can be very forgiving, especially when eaten cold, straight from the container.
This day, there are two sides — crisply steamed green beans or roasted potatoes — as well as one dessert. After they give me a sample, I really don’t need to buy any for the purposes of this column, but it’s hard to pass up a huge section of bread pudding that is more like pudding than the fancified stuff you find in restaurants, along with a side of thick caramel sauce. Minor’s also has a damn fine beer selection for an even more relaxing evening. 3 stars
Wild Oats
1548 N. Dale Mabry, Tampa, 813-874-9435.
It’s curious to note that many of the most prominent prepared foods houses are in some way connected to the organic or natural food movement. Not that everything in the cases at Wild Oats is organic. Some is, some isn’t.
Wild Oats does veggies right. Cinnamon and orange yams are slices of candied joy, cooked just enough to retain a little chew and infused with an intense amount of sugar and spice. Green beans are crisp and nutty, and brussel sprouts are crunchy and paired with plenty of whole cloves of roasted garlic.
Wild Oats also introduced me to prepared foods Rule No. 5: Thou shalt not find good sushi at a supermarket. The problem is — no surprise — the fish. Inevitably, the salmon, tuna and hamachi is grainy and waterlogged, exactly as you might imagine mediocre frozen fish to taste after a quick thaw and a wait in the cold case. If you must have sushi, stick to veggie rolls, rolls with a lot of spice, or cooked faux crab or sweet eel. If you must.
Pizza at Wild Oats is attractive — mainly because it’s one of the few piping hot items available — but the doughy, dried-herb blandness reminds me of high school cafeteria fare. Same with dense lasagna and even denser chicken meatballs, which are almost impossible to cut with a fork and taste of only some pungent parmesan substitute. 2.5 stars
The Fresh Market
3722 Henderson Blvd., Tampa, 813-875-7400.
Fresh Market recently opened a new location on Henderson and, just after lunch on a weekday, it’s full of French manicures and expensively coiffed hair. Really, these housewives, usually with kids in tow, look eerily perfect. Maybe that’s why they shop here. Because style definitely triumphs over substance at Fresh Market.
There’s nothing particularly special about the place — it doesn’t concentrate on organic or natural foods and it doesn’t have an especially large selection of gourmet items. Essentially, Fresh Market is a fancy grocery store with little fancy food.
The prepared foods cases are filled with positively downscale faves: spinach artichoke dip, egg salad and no less than five different varieties of potato salad, almost all of which are drowned in mayonnaise. There are trays of pedestrian lasagna and pre-made sandwiches. It’s like a Midwest family-reunion picnic, especially when I turn the corner and see a giant case devoted solely to cooked meats.
Cold carcasses of rotisserie turkey, chicken, pork tenderloin, ribs and salmon line a space a dozen feet long. Seasonings are extremely simple and tend toward the sweet, especially the candy-like glaze on Fresh Market’s overcooked salmon filets. Pork is better, just a little salt and pepper to accent the lean flavor and attractive since you can pick up a small loin for less than $5. There is something to be said for cheap meat on a weeknight, but don’t expect anything gourmet out of Fresh Market. 2 stars
Other Places Of Note:
• Rollin’ Oats Café, 2842 Ninth St. N., St Petersburg, 727-895-4910. Specializing in organic, vegetarian and vegan cooking.
• Nature’s Harvest Market & Deli, 1021 N. MacDill Ave., Tampa, 813-873-7428. Call it politically and environmentally conscious soul food.
• Village Health Market, 3225 S. MacDill Ave., 813-831-6065. A well-stocked health-food store with a large takeout selection, including Best of the Bay-winning muffins.
Creative Loafing food critics dine anonymously, and the paper pays for the meals. Restaurants chosen for review are not related to advertising.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2006.
