Handy Guide to German Supermarkets

Rewe and Edeka:

These are nice, normal, typical grocery store chains that you see all over the place.  They are good places to go shopping for day to day things.   Things I have noticed recently are cherry sized bell peppers (not just cherry tomatoes) and an increasingly large number of rabbits.  I don’t know if it’s for Easter, but rabbits are all over the place.  Fresh rabbits, frozen rabbits, whole rabbits, rabbit pieces – and not just the chocolate ones.  I’ve never seen anybody try to sell chocolate rabbit pieces, but I would like to be there when it happens.  I haven’t actually ever seen lamb at a grocery store, but the Turkish restaurants must get it from somewhere. 

Denn’s Biomarkt:

This place is Germany’s Whole Foods but smaller.  Practically everything is organic, or – as the Germans call it – Bio.  This is the store where they are likely to have twelve species of mushrooms, four different kinds of crab, and no chicken breasts.

Penny and Netto:

These are more discount sorts of grocery stores.  The selection can be hit or miss, but the prices are great.  The best part is that the employees don’t really take the food out of boxes.  There are just stacks of boxes of yogurt cartons, for example, and you may have to dig through the boxes a bit to get what you need.  Same goes for flour, eggs, toothpaste – whatever.  It’s usually somewhat soul sucking and busy, possibly with some sort of spilled liquid on the floor.  Penny’s slogan is “Erstmal zu Penny” which I like to translate as “You know you should go check and see if they have that stuff at Penny first.  I mean, there is a 40% chance that they won’t have everything you need – but you know you’ll be kicking yourself if you go to some nicer grocery store and spend way more money on the same can of tomato paste just because you wanted to shop somewhere without the occasional pond of melted strawberry ice cream between the tampons and the vodka.”

Real:

Real is like a Super Target – but it’s a huge pain for me to get to.  It has groceries as well as clothing, bicycles, lawn equipment, books and videos, etc.  It has an entire grocery store aisle only for Haribo candy.  It has a delightful Polish butcher who is happy to help me with weird gram amounts of recipes that I might need after translating from some recipe that used pounds.  I like talking to him because, as a fellow Auslander, I assume he is sympathetic to my inability to speak good German.  Of course, he could just be being nice to me because I’m a customer and really be thinking – to hell with this bonkers American woman and her weird requests for 920 grams of stewing beef.  I also like Real because nobody fussed at me when I dove head first into a freezer for the last packet of frozen stir fry vegetables that was stuck at the very bottom.  You’d think they would have had problems with me when my feet actually left the floor – but they seemed to be cool with it.

I Shop:

I think the idea is like iPod or like iPhone, but I’m not really sure.  This is the Asian grocery store, and there you can buy any number of delightful things, such as peanut butter, tofu, and a large gas can full of soy sauce.  I am an English tutor for a few German high school kids.  One young lady was born in Tunisia, has lived in Germany since she was about eleven, and is uncompromisingly dedicated to Chinese food.  She was worried, a few weeks ago, that we didn’t have Chinese food in the United States – America being so far away from China on the globe.  She was much relieved when I assured her that not only did we have Chinese food in America, we had even had many Chinese-American people, and that she could take a very inexpensive bus from a Chinatown in one American city to a Chinatown in another American city should she ever plan to backpack around the country at the age of 21 or so, which I feel should be mandatory for everyone who is 21 or so if at all possible.  (Thanks so much to the wonderful college friend of mine who suffered the youth hostels of the Europe with me in 2002)

Galleria Kaufhof:

Galleria Kaufhof is actually a lovely, multistoried department store full of middle aged women buying nice pink silk pantsuits to wear to spring weddings, but the basement is the most beautiful and awe inspiring grocery store this side of Harrod’s food halls.  As you step off the escalator, a choir of cherubs descends from the ceiling and flies from the hand dipped chocolates counter, to the pyramid of perfectly ripe exotic fruits and emerald green broccoli, over the exquisitely aged prosciutto, to the dry goods section containing all of my favorite foods from the United States and from that one semester I spent in London.  The chips, the BBQ sauce, the taco seasoning!!  The first time I went in, I saw food I hadn’t seen months and then wandered aimlessly in a daze as my eyes drifted from Campbell’s Soup to the tortillas to the 35 different brands of Earl Grey tea.  Of course, it is cruelly and insanely overpriced.  Seriously.  That can of Campbell’s soup is like $5.

Kaufland:

This place is like a grocery store combined with a Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  You can get all kinds of Swiffers and then buy a bottle of wine and thirty chicken wings.  They also have a tremendous produce section, although all the sweet potatoes in Germany are imported from the US and cost more, per weight, than most meat.  This was a bit frustrating for me when I dropped a large chunk of sweet potato on the floor where it was snatched up by my friend’s dog, and I said, “Jeez loueeeze dog, I could have just given you pork, and it would have cost less.”

Indische Gewuerze und Spezialitaeten:

This little corner Indian grocery store is my favorite.  I have always loved eating and cooking Indian food, but the very best part of this grocery store is the fact that everything, aside from a few German language Indian food cookbooks, is in English!  Yay!!!  The prices on spices, lentils, and rice are just amazing!  They know who I am and are happy to chat with me in English.  Good times.