Hackney Shops: Food

Continuing on from my previous blogs about local shops and food shopping, I'm going to do a quick roundup of the places I generally tend to buy food from locally.

Firstly, there is the big Tesco by Hackney Central station. However, I don't tend to go here very often at all. It's about a 20 minute walk, the shop is always busy, and I hate Supermarkets. After reading 'Shopped', I'm even more determined to avoid supermarkets, with their food that's mass engineered to look good, have shelf life, but no actual taste. Luckily, I find that I can buy the majority of my food from small shops within 5 mins of my house.

The Happy Shopper on Chatsworth Road is a fairly typical mini-supermarket type shop selling groceries and other essentials. However, it's different from any other Happy Shoppers that I've come across, in that the people who run it really are very happy - always cheerful and friendly. I guess Happy Shopper is some kind of franchise business - however this one seems to sell 'Best-In' own-brand goods as well as Happy Shopper stuff and other brands.

A few doors down the road is a Turkish-run shop which also sells groceries, along with alcoholic drinks, and some Turkish things like feta cheese, hams and pickled chillies. I found tahini here a few days ago (when making houmous). Their olives are good too.

Also on Chatsworth Road is a fruit & veg shop, which is great as it's just around the corner from me, so I can pick up all the veg I need on the way home. Both the Happy Shopper and the Turkish place mentioned above also sell vegetables, however they are not always as fresh. The fruit & veg shop also sells reasonably priced extra virgin olive oil.

Also on Chatsworth Road (which used to be a market road, I'm told) is a butchers and a bakers. The butchers sells chicken feet and pigs trotters among the normal stuff. I've had some good meat from them, but also some meat that went off a bit too quickly. The bakers is a standard Percy Ingle, but does some nice bread and pastries.

Mentioned above are only a selection of the shops on this road. Amazingly, another mini-mart/sells-everything type shop has just opened, in close proximity to two similar shops. I wonder if the local area can support all these shops. Finally, I should mention that there are also at least six off-licenses on the road, some of which seem to stay open all night...