Get to a produce market at six and you catch the handover. The restaurant buyers have been there since four and are leaving with the best of it. The home cooks arrive as the light comes up and negotiate over what is left, which is not worse so much as different — smaller, riper, meant for today rather than for a section that has to hold until Friday.
Read the piles, not the signs
Volume tells you what is in season more reliably than any menu. If something is stacked chest-high across six stalls, it is at peak and cheap, and every kitchen in the city is about to put it on. If it is arranged in careful single layers, it is scarce and expensive and you will see it garnishing things.
Whatever the market is drowning in this morning is what you should order for dinner tonight.
The stall nobody photographs
Somewhere near the edge there is a woman selling four things, all of them prepared: soaked beans, a cut herb, something pickled, something fried. She is there because the cooks buying at four do not have time to do those four jobs. That stall is the most useful thing in the market and it never appears in anyone's photographs.
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Comments (4)
Stood at my local market at six the morning after reading this. The shift change is real — around 6:40 the entire crowd swapped over and so did what people were buying.
"Read the piles, not the signs" is the most useful sentence I have read on this site.
My grandmother has done exactly this every week for forty years and would find it very funny that it now has a name and a method.
Went at seven instead of six and missed all of it. Six means six.