Virginia Vinegar and the Temple of Food

Miss Vinegar can't possibly apologize enough for her hiatus from all things gastronomical: rest assured that the review backlog will be filled in grudgingly as she tries to remember what she had at Abuelo's all that time ago. Today, however, Miss Vinegar will shake the cobwebs from her little notebook to discuss a bona fide Southwest Virginia event*: the long (very long, about five years long by her reckoning)-awaited opening of a Ukrop's supermarket in Roanoke.


The History-- Ukrop's is a chain of grocery stores based in Richmond. To many in the mountains, this seems to be the ideal of what a grocery store should be: heaven knows when your entire grocery selection consists of Wal-Mart, Food Lion and Kroger with gusts of The Fresh Market, a craving for variety is natural.

To the few people Miss Vinegar knows in Richmond, however, Ukrop's is both overpriced and overrated.

Roanoke Store--The Good

The Ivy Market Ukrop's sets out to redefine Roanoke's idea of a supermarket in its design, which features an underground parking garage with little escalators for shopping carts. Somewhere deep down, we all believe this to be the way of movie stars and/or George Jetson, and we are impressed.

Inside, the store is enormous, with its own Starbucks, a second-floor dining area with balcony, and a voluminous selection of prepared food to complement the traditional offerings of your basic higher-end grocery. The website will tell you the store is "at Ivy Market," but at the moment it is Ivy Market, and it's hard to see where anything else will fit.


Roanoke Store--The Bad

The chain offers a discount card, but some prices were so absurd that Miss Vinegar laughed out loud--not a thing you want to do while alone in public. Surely a prosperous chain should have better pricing leverage than the local food co-op on the same offerings?

Additionally, the store's very opulence works against it: Miss Vinegar has now been three times and still has only the faintest grasp on how to find anything. The café is intriguing, but many of the gourmet offerings merely echo those of a decent Kroger or the Fresh Market, each of which is a mere mile from Ivy Market. On the structural front, the cart-escalators seem to jam frequently, and Miss Vinegar is afraid of escalators to begin with, which made her first visit something of a trial.


The Verdict:
As a weapon in the arsenal of finding exactly what you want and/or getting someone else to cook it: **** (four out of five stars)
As the end product of supermarket evolution it seems to think it is: **1/2 (two point five out of five stars)


*Yes, yes. She knows.