Fancy Food Stores
After a recent visit to Greenville, I realized that I have quite an obsession with fancy food stores. Greenville is a charming city in South Carolina with a lot of local shops and hipster chain companies. Downtown Greenville has a wonderful fudge shop, plenty of ice cream shops and tons of exciting restaurants, like Takosushi. While strolling through the downtown area with my brother, we stopped by two stores selling specialty salts, olive oils and more. There are all kinds of different products for cooking and eating in these two stores alone.
My two tea packets!
The two fancy food stores we visited were quite interesting. The first one was full of gourmet spices and flavored salts. It was called the Spice and Tea Exchange. You can find anything from lime flavored salt to bacon infused salt. They also had premixed seasoning blends that were all made with fresh, organic seasonings. I even found some lovely herbal teas to try. This store was unique because everything was sold in different sized bags and even in grinders. A perfect stop for small families who don't use much. Inside the store, they had jars full of every salt or spice and you could open each jar and smell the product. I sniffed various seasonings and fancy teas before choosing. This really made picking out which tea I wanted super easy. I ended up taking home some Ruby Oolong tea and a tropical green tea blend. I bought the smallest bag which held an ounce of tea and costs around $4-$5 per packet based on which tea you picked.
The various flavors of oils and vinegars and the surprise bags available.
The second store was called the Oil & Vinegar Gift Shop. They had all kinds of flavored olive oils and vinegars, as well as some premixed sauces and seasonings. They also sold things like pasta and dipping crackers that go along with their oil and vinegar products. One cool thing this store sold was a surprise bag. Each surprise bag costs $20 or more and contains a random assortment of products that are sold in the store. My brother and his wife purchased one of these bags and lucked out with some oil, a vinaigrette, fancy pasta, a huge black pepper grinder and more. The workers told us each surprise bag is worth double the cost of the bag. Based on the items that my brother got in the surprise bag, it seemed this statement was absolutely true.
Inside the Oil and Vinegar store again. Mostly showing all the other products and a sampling station.
I also enjoyed this store a lot because they had most of the products out for sampling with little bread cubes. The workers even took the time to mix different oils and vinegars for us to personally try. I ended up purchasing 250mL of pomegranate vinegar in a reclaimed glass bottle. They have a large selection of bottles to choose from. You simply pick out a bottle and then fill it with whatever flavor oil or vinegar you want. They had about 20-30 flavors of oil and the same for vinegar. I enjoyed sampling all of the flavors beforehand and picking out a fancy bottle for my chosen flavor.
I love to cook and try different recipes so these stores were a lot of fun to explore. I know that when I have a kitchen of my own it'll be filled with random products like the ones sold in these two stores. I'd definitely recommend checking out these stores. I can't wait to go back and try some new things in the future. If you love cooking too, be sure to look out for my favorite recipes and other store reviews like this in the future on this blog!
#food #foodie #foodstores #spices #spricestores #salts #flavoredsalts #oilandviegar #oliveoil #vinegar #vinegarettes #foodshopping #foodstoresfancyfood #fancyfoodstores #greenville #downtowngreenville #exploregreenville #downtown #downtownstores #hipsterkitchenstores #kitchenstores #kitchen #cooking #cookingstores #spicesandsalts #tea #herbaltea #thespiceandteaexchange #oilandvinegargiftshop
