Where I live in Philadelphia, I am about five blocks for the Italian Market. It’s a great resource for meats and cheeses from purveyors who take serious pride in their products. Often when I am working from home I will journey down there to get some fresh cheese for panini or pastas to make a salad for lunch. The only real drawback is that a lot of the shops seem to close before four in the afternoon.

At some point I am sure it was a very Italian neighborhood, but over time a strong Hispanic presence has taken residence. Really, the best Mexican food in the city is located in or around the Italian market. All this makes for a great diversity of food and culture that is available in one place, which leads me to this last weekend’s event—the Italian Market festival.

I had walked not even twenty feet into the festival when I spotted a booth with two men shucking raw oysters! I have never had raw oysters at a street festival, and it really put me in a good mood (as oysters always do) to go taste some of the offerings of the festival. The oysters had a fresh sea odor and had an abundance of oyster liquor spilling over the half shell. I downed four of them with lemon and moved on to do more exploring.

A couple of storefronts down I found a stand that was selling sausage and peppers on a fresh Italian roll, in addition to an assortment to pastas and antipasti. I can’t say that the sausage and peppers was the most attractive food that I saw, or that it will make a good photograph, but it smelled so wonderful I had to have some. Sausage and peppers has always been a favorite of mine. They were offering it with a red sauce if you wanted, but I decided to go minimalist (or purist perhaps…) and just eat it as is. I grabbed an Italian beer and a shot of limoncello and hunkered down against a wall to eat. Somehow the peppers had absorbed so many flavors in the cooking, that they may have actually outshined the sausage, which was fantastic on its own. It was really wonderful. My only regret is that I had a bigger stomach.

With my stomach full I decided to just walk around and take a few shots of what else was available. There were pastries, every configuration of pasta you could imagine, and many meats and cheeses to pick from. As we moved towards the Mexican side of the market, mangoes on a stick cut to resemble flowers and some kind of corn on a stick started to pop up everywhere. One of the markets even had the tastespotting favorite—purple artichokes!

Even though I was only there for an hour or two, I had a great time and some delicious foods. I will definitely return next year.

May 21st, 2007 by John (Cho-Tabetai)