Okay mustachians, we have just (two weeks ago) relocated to Oakland from the South Bay. One thing I'm finding to be a challenge is the options (or lack thereof) for getting decent fruits and vegetables. So far my explorations have yielded the following:
-Whole Foods and Berkeley bowl are both nice, but 2-4x the price of the produce place we used to frequent in the South Bay
-Monterey Market in Berkeley is slightly less expensive and does have a great variety, but still kind of $$.
-Safeway: either rundown, limited selection, and middling prices, or fancier, larger selection, high prices.
-Grocery Outlet: cheap, but insanely limited selection and very so-so quality.
-Chinatown: good prices, medium selection and quality, requires some aggressive shopping behavior
When we were living in Mountain View, we used to frequent a place in Sunnyvale that had all sorts of fancy stuff at really good prices: fancy apples (pink lady, honeycrisp, braeburns) for <$1/lb, zucchini for 30 cents a pound, random occasional stuff like 2 lbs of fancy mixed salad greens for $2, etc. We were spoiled. I realize it may not be realistic to expect to duplicate that everywhere, but it seems like there has to be some option other than paying out the nose at the fancy organic oriented places, scrounging around the sidewalks in Chinatown, or having grocery shopping turn into an optimization routine that involves visits to 8 different stores.
I have seen some references online to a super-early morning wholesale produce market near Jack London Square but it's not clear if it's open to plebby individuals or just mass bulk buyers. Anyone been to that and have insights?
Anyway...if you live in Oakland (or, I guess, Berkeley), where the heck is all the good and reasonably priced produce hiding?
