Thursday, November 11, 2010

A visit to Jungle Jim's

Having heard of Jungle Jim's grocery store in Cincinnati, we were pretty excited to finally get there. And... my goodness, what can you say? You need to get to their website for good pictures of the place, but... Jungle Jim's really is a food landmark, and worthy of a field trip.

Now, that said, I will say that while our local Saraga Interanational Market (south of 38th Street on Lafayette Road) has an awful lot going for it, too. It may not have mastered as much of the marketing pizazz that Jungle Jim's has, but... Saraga is pretty nice and has a tremendous amount of food diversity.

Oddly, the way we entered Jungle Jim's, we started at what I'd call is the "normal" grocery area and went towards the coffee and wine area. Yes, both wine and coffee sections were expansive, but... I was confused about all the fuss... I mean, yes, the bathrooms are quite humorous.....



But, then we got directed into the larger area... Wow... what a fun place to wander.... crazy amount of cheese.... neat dry and frozen products..... and the aisles and nooks devoted to various countries and ethnic foods is just food splendor... next time, we'll have to be be much more wise and take a cooler, but we picked up some dry good and some fun items. I focused on items like chocolates, chips and soda... the Better Half was more interested in organic type items (dried fruit and nut combinations)... in either case, lots of great stuff, fun things to try, easy to run up a huge bill.....

I had a lot of fun with the soda aisle...



You can assume that the "Grown Up Soda" flavors were the Better Half's choice... I was looking for things less grown up.... Now, it shouldn't be that hard to drink soda, but... I'm trying to save these, so.. I can't give reviews yet as I'm not wanting to overload on liquid sugar, but... just the bottles and names are cool enough.....



The chips from England were kind of interesting... I especially liked the Worcestershire Sauce chips, which was a surprise. But, man, I think those would be a hit here.



Anyhow, lots of fun all around.... Definitely make Jungle Jim's a place to visit if you head to the Natti.

2 comments:

Tom H said...

nice - sure makes me look forward to going back. I've *love* to live right down the road from them. I agree with everything in your post... I was also very impressed with the produce section. Hot and BBQ sauce selection was pretty insane. As a beer lover, it was pretty hard to contain myself from buying everything that isn't distributed in Indiana.

-tom

lorand said...

check out dorothy lane markets in dayton...why we can't support a grocer like that in a much larger market is beyond my comprehension