Grocery Stores: From Disappointing to Sufficient

When I first arrived here in Tel Aviv, I found that pretty much all the grocery stores in the city were wildly overpriced and were tiny. I had to go through some trial and error to figure things out. My biggest debacle was taking a store's name at face value. "Meatland" had a glorious advertisement in the local paper and it prompted me to make the special trip out to Ranaana to visit this apparent Mecca for meatlovers. When I arrived after our 20 minute car ride out there, my first question from the outside was..."can this be it?" It was tiny. I ventured in and learned that, yes, that was it. It was the size of maybe a studio apartment. Tiny. And, it was Kosher. Not exactly the land of all meats that I had expected. Anyhow, as you can imagine...big disappointment.

I learned from my mistakes, headed out to some other 'burbs, and finally found some good-sized, clean grocery stores. I have now settled into my shopping groove, which is to go to Tiv Taam (a Russian-Israel owned chain that is NON-kosher) and Supersol. Tiv Taam is a little fancier than Supersol, is open on Fridays and Saturdays, and it has a larger meat selection. It's in some ways like Whole Foods compared to Safeway, I guess. Tiv Taam has a whole area dedicated to fresh spices and grains, a flower section, a booze section...in all, it's pretty nice, as you can see below.

Most exciting of all is the Tiv Taam branch out in Ramat Gan (or thereabouts), which has an awesome grocery cart escalator that makes it worth the trip out there. You roll the cart onto the flat conveyor and magnets keep it in place is it makes its way up/down from the parking lot or store. I rode it several times just for kicks.