Sticker shock is everywhere on rare visit to Fairway Market in Paramus

I'm not ready to pay $31.99 at Fairway Market  in Paramus for a pound of lobster meat -- a price equivalent of four live lobsters. Are you?

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I became a big fan of Fairway Market's Harlem store, which was a convenient place to shop every time I returned to my New Jersey home from visiting Manhattan.

My favorites included Fairway's extra-virgin olive oil, pasta sauces, store-roasted coffee beans and loose mesclun salad mix, which I stuffed into a plastic bag.

When Fairway opened in the out-of-the-way Fashion Center in Paramus in May 2009 -- after years of delay -- I started going there for custom-ground coffee beans, pasta sauce and other items, but the store didn't carry the goat meat that was available in Harlem.

I was puzzled that Fairway picked what is arguably the least popular shopping center in Paramus; the owners must have gotten a great deal on the rent.

And my wife told me she preferred the taste of ShopRite's antibiotic-free Readington Farms chicken to the naturally raised Murray's birds at Fairway.

I started going there less and less, and not at all after I discovered the superior coffee beans available at Starbucks.

I realized I could get just about everything else I need at Costco Wholesale, H Mart, ShopRite and other stores, often at much better prices.

And I didn't have to deal with Fairway's superior New York attitude.

Rotisserie chickens at Fairway Market in Paramus, above, cost more than at Whole Foods Market, also in Paramus, below.

Two rotisserie chickens at Whole Foods work out to about $7.50 each. Organic birds are $12.99 each.

New to me at Fairway are hot and cold food bars, like those Whole Foods Market has had since it opened. The prepared food costs $7.99 a pound. At an olive bar, you'll pay $8.99 a pound. I'm happy with the mixed Italian olives with whole garlic cloves I buy for $3.99 a pound at Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood.

Fishmonger: Clean shrimp yourself

On Friday, after visiting a friend who lives in Paramus, I decided to go to Fairway in search of wild-caught shrimp.

Fairway has a great seafood department, and sure enough I saw jumbo Gulf shrimp for $17.99 a pound (16-20 per pound).

That was a little high, but thought if the store deveined them for me, a job I hate, I would get a couple of pounds. 

But when I asked, the fishmonger just shook his head back and forth in a definite "no."

I moved on to the meat department, and asked if the store now carried goat meat. I was in luck.

I was told I could find packages of cut-up goat meat on the refrigerated shelves with chicken and other poultry and meat.

The previously frozen goat meat was $5.49 a pound, and I bought three packages for a total of $25.58.

Whole-wheat pasta

After a picked up the goat meat, I went looking for the whole-wheat pasta I saw in another shopper's cart, stopping for free samples of bread with extra-virgin olive oil and an intense pesto.

The rich pesto came in a 16-ounce bottle, but was about twice the price per ounce of the 22-ounce jar of Kirkland Signature Basil Pesto from Costco.

Fairway carries several brands of whole-wheat pappardelle, penne, spaghetti and other shapes, including Garofalo from Italy.

But all of them were more expensive than the organic and conventional whole-wheat pasta I buy at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, ShopRite and Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood.

Organic spring mix

Fairway also has a great produce department, but a 1-pound package of Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix was $6.99, compared to $4.99 or less at my Hackensack Costco.

I saw a sign for bunches of peppery arugula for $1.49 each, but when I grabbed one, it was small, about 3 ounces; that works out to a pricey $6 a pound. I passed.

Fairway also refuses to reimburse shoppers for bringing reusable bags, unlike Whole Foods and ShopRite.

Thanks, Fairway, but no thanks. You should have stayed in New York.

Grass-fed beef at Fairway Market

Image via Wikipedia

Naturally raised beef finally has found its way into the sales flier from Fairway Market in Paramus. The store carries a full line of Murray's antibiotic-free chicken, but its selection of naturally raised beef and pork has been extremely limited.


Now, 100% grass-fed beef is available in boneless rib-eye steaks for $14.99 a pound and 100% grass-fed beef burgers are $5.99 a pound. Those prices compare with a sale price of $9.99 a pound on grass-fed New Jersey beef I saw at Whole Foods Market in Paramus, and organic ground beef at Costco for around $4.99 a pound.


The Fairway flier says grass-fed beef is low in fat and high in Omega-3, but contains no information on the origin or USDA grade, both of which suggests it's foreign. If so, it's far more expensive than the free-range, grass-fed Australian filet mignon sold at ShopRite (you have to buy the whole tenderloin).

The Fairway sale starts Friday. 

Food prices go up and down

You can find wild Alaskan sockeye salmon three ways at Costco -- canned, smoked without preservatives and frozen in fillets. I picked up the last two yesterday at the Hackensack store and one pound of the wild lox rang up at $14.79 -- a hike of 80 cents and the first price change in a long while. Even at the higher price, you won't be able to find smoked wild-caught salmon for less at Trader Joe's or Fairway Market.

Three pounds of frozen wild salmon runs about $8.50 a pound at Costco. I put these fillets into a glass dish and place it over a steamer. I cover the fish after adding cheap sake, sesame oil and some fish sauce, and steam them for about 15 minutes for medium. I've cooked them frozen and defrosted.

Also at Costco, small, round Campari hot-house tomatoes were $4.99 for two pounds -- 50 cents less than a couple of weeks ago. These are not herbicide-free, however.

At H Mart, the Korean supermarket near the Little Ferry Circle, five pounds of Earthbound Farms organic carrots were $5.49 on Saturday, according to the sign on the shelf, but mine rang up at $4.99, the old price. Green Swiss chard was $1.49 a pound, according to the sign, but mine rang up at 79 cents a pound. I bought collard greens there in previous weeks that also rang up less than the price on the sign, but eventually the store computer caught up. At ShopRite, my experience often is the opposite -- the register charges you more than the sign price -- and you curse if you don't see that until you get home.

Also at H Mart, I bought 20 pounds of Kokuho-brand, yellow-label, California-grown rice for $12.99, on sale from $19.99. This rice also was on sale a month ago and that's what we've been eating ever since. In the southern United States, some rice is grown in old cotton fields and carries traces of the arsenic used to kill pests.

Chuck, one of my readers, reports that Murray's free-roaming, antibiotic-free boneless chicken breast is on sale this week at Kings Super Markets for $1.99 a pound, a great price.

How safe is that supermarket chicken?

Image via Wikipedia

The latest issue of Consumers Reports (January 2010) discloses results of tests on supermarket broiler chickens  for salmonella and/or campylobacter, the leading bacterial causes of foodborne illnesses. This is a long, informative article, complete with photos, charts and graphs. The headlines:

How safe is that chicken?
Most tested broilers were contaminated

Nature's Promise poultry from Stop & Shop is included, but two brands of chicken available in North Jersey are conspicuous by their absence: Readington Farms' antibiotic-free birds from Shop Rite and Murray's free-roaming chickens from Fairway Market in Paramus.  

One definition caught my eye. When the label says no antibiotics are administered, "don't assume this was verified unless you also see the label 'USDA organic.'" But the article doesn't name brands that do this. It does urge consumers to cook chicken to at least 165 degrees. We eat mostly dark meat and can cook it to 170 degrees or 180 degrees without affecting moistness.

Is there a difference between broilers and fryers? Can you broil a fryer and vice versa? Consumer Reports doesn't say.

The tests found the cleanest name-brand chicken to be Perdue, but the article doesn't discuss the use of antibiotics and possibly animal by-products to raise those chickens, two additives that are harmful to humans. Click on the link below to read the entire article:


http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2010/january/food/chicken-safety/overview/chicken-safety-ov.htm

First-time sale on ShopRite's drug-free chicken

The ShopRite in Paramus looks old and the parking lot is cramped. When I shopped there last week, a large piece of land across from the store was being cleared and my stomach sank as I wondered if all of this had been trees.

The store's sales circular, which arrived with the newspaper, has a nugget buried in the back pages: the first sale I have ever seen on Readington Farms chicken, the ShopRite brand that is antibiotic-free and raised on vegetarian feed. The sale starts Sunday and runs through Oct. 24 at the Paramus store.

The discount is 25%, or $1.11 to $4.49 a pound, compared with the 50% sale ShopRite stores recently had on inferior, drug-filled Perdue chicken. My wife prefers the taste of Readington Farms chicken over Murray's free-roaming chicken, the drug-free brand sold by Fairway Market.

What do "cage free" and "free range" mean?

"The USDA doesn't regulate the use of the term 'cage free' at all," Consumer Reports On Health reported in its February 2009 newsletter. "And it uses 'free range' only for poultry, not other meat or eggs. Even for chicken, the term doesn't mean much -- 5 minutes of open-air access daily is all it takes to qualify."

This raises a couple of questions. Why is Murray's chicken, the drug-free brand sold at Fairway Market, called "free-roaming" and not "free-range"? Shop-Rite advertises Australian beef as "free range," which would seem to be a violation of USDA rules. Or is Australian beef exempt from U.S. rules, even though it is sold here?

Aggressive pricing at Fairway in Paramus

The Fairway Market ad in today's Record shows prices on only eight items, but that may be enough to get me to make a trip to the store, in my least favorite Paramus mall, the Fashion Center.

The Manhattan-based market seems intent on being perceived as the price leader, undercutting the traditionally low-price supermarket, ShopRite. Fairway is offering Maine lobsters for $4.99 a pound from Aug. 1-7 in Paramus, matching ShopRite's lowest price for lobsters this year. I bought two pints of Jersey blueberries this week in Fairway's Harlem store for $4, or $1 less than I paid at ShopRites in Hackensack and Rochelle Park.

Fairway in Paramus also is offering whole Murray's free-roaming, drug-free chickens for 99 cents a pound, cut from $2.49 a pound, and Fairway-made baguettes for 99 cents each. The Murray's sale is rare and Fairway doesn't often cut prices for organic or grass-fed meats. At Whole Foods Market, you usually can count on discounts on naturally raised pork, beef and other items. And ShopRite regularly has sales on free-range, grass-fed Australian beef and lamb.

Chicken taste test: Murray's v. Readington Farms

Opening day at Fairway Market in Paramus. Image via Wikipedia

Since Fairway Market opened in Paramus in March, I have been buying and preparing Murray's free-roaming, drug-free, bone-in chicken at home instead of ShopRite's Readington Farms brand, which is also antibiotic-free and fed an all-vegetable diet. Murray's is priced a bit higher.

I usually get leg quarters and roast them with cinnamon and allspice, serving the pieces with rice or pasta cooked in the chicken fat and chicken broth. 


Or I bread the pieces in chili spices before baking them. My wife prepares jerk chicken wings or legs or chicken in a brown sauce. 

The other day, she said she doesn't like Murray's chicken as much as the Readington Farms poultry.

So now I'm buying Readington Farms again and will conduct a side-by-side-comparison sometime in the future. 


Last night, we had Readington Farms wings and leg quarters coated in chili spices (you take breadcrumbs, combine them with the spices and salt in Wick Fowler's 2-Alarm Chili Kit, except for the masa flour, and add sesame seeds and any other spices you might want, then wet the chicken before breading). 

I make a lot of the spicy breading at one time and keep it in the fridge.

Besides tasting better and being better for you than ordinary supermarket chicken like Perdue, drug-free chicken cooks faster.

--VICTOR E. SASSON

Paramus food smackdown: Whole Foods Market v. Fairway

The fresh seafood counter at Whole Foods Market in October 2016.

Editor's note: When I wrote this post in 2009, I couldn't have seen how Fairway Market turned into a terrible place to shop. Prices rose dramatically over the years, and keeping with the staff's New York attitude, a Fairway employee refused to devein the jumbo wild Gulf Shrimp I wanted to buy. At Whole Foods in Paramus, they gladly devein your shrimp.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Food shopping will take a giant leap forward when Whole Foods and Fairway open supermarkets separated by only a few miles in Paramus. 

Whole Foods will get the drop on Fairway, with its grand opening set for Thursday, March 19 (and it's only 1.2 miles from my house); Fairway's opening is scheduled for March 25.

I shop at Fairway's Harlem store just about every time I return from doing something in the city, loading up on Murray's free-roaming, drug-free chicken; inexpensive 32-ounce bottles of Fairway pasta sauce, great fish, goat meat and other items. 

I've visited the Whole Food stores in Edgewater and Ridgewood only sporadically; they are just too inconvenient for someone who lives in Hackensack. I remember going to the Edgewater store when it opened and being disappointed by the selection of tomatoes and the high price of the organic salad mix, but Whole Foods does have great seafood and a wide choice of drug-free poultry and meats.

Whole Foods has the better location, and not only because it's closer to my home. The Fashion Center has always seemed to be in last place in a borough with great malls. Now, it will be interesting to see how the prices compare at the two supermarkets.

One caveat about Fairway's organic, grass-fed beef. Admittedly, I bought the cheaper cuts, but the shoulder steak I prepared last week was one of the toughest I ever ate. My wife couldn't finish her portion. I have another package, a different cut, but will have to find a way to tenderize it.

I'm looking forward to the drug-free pork and ribs available at Whole Foods and the high quality of produce at both stores, a welcome alternative to the crappy stuff sold at other supermarkets.

How many times have I brought home produce from ShopRite that either rotted overnight because of improper refrigeration or never ripened? I have to commend ShopRite for selling Readington Farms chicken, which is raised on a vegetarian feed and never receives antibiotics, and free-range Australian beef and lamb.

A couple of years ago, I asked a Fairway official in the Harlem store why the company initially hesitated in opening a store in northern New Jersey. He said Fairway felt it couldn't compete with the low-price supermarkets like ShopRite. 

But ShopRite is no competition for Fairway, unless you are shopper that judges all food by its price; then you deserve the low-quality of many items and the questionable freshness of fish there.

Here's a shout-out to my friend, Sue. Your husband, Jay, who as you know thinks organic food is a scam, is being careful not to mention the Whole Foods opening this week in Paramus. See you there, Sue.