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Store Mon Mar 26 2007
Olive Branch
I have a little girl that eats olives the way other kids eat candy. She eats candy the way other kids eat candy as well, but in a contest for her heart, brine would win out over fructose. So she and I both got pretty excited when we heard about the opening in Andersonville of City Olive. As we made our way up Clark Street to check out the shop, we had visions of giant vats of olives, marinating in different oils and brines: some of them green, some of them black, some of them with spicy red peppers, and some of them mixed in with pickled cloves of garlic, a favorite for after-school snacks.
Turns out, City Olive isn’t the olive mecca we were hoping for. It’s a lovely shop full of imported oils, vinegars, tapenades and hand cream made from olives. There are colorful packages of pasta, serving dishes for olives and olive oils, artisanal salts in different shades of pink and brown, and Greek cookies made with olive oil and wine. But they don’t carry a lot of olives. The people in the store were nice enough to refer us to a Persian market a few blocks south (closed the day we were in the neighborhood) with some vats of olives, and in the meantime offered us samples of olive oils. Instead of offering bits of bread to soak up the oil, they were pouring oil into small cups to be sampled in a sip. My son was the only one brave enough to take more than a sip. He seemed to enjoy it, going back repeatedly to refill his little cup. We made our way around the store, picking out ingredients for a nice pasta dinner, and a jar of olives mixed with gherkins and pickled cloves of garlic. We still haven’t made our pasta dinner, but my daughter served herself the olives and garlic cloves for breakfast the next morning.
City Olive, 5408 N. Clark St., 773-878-5408
Julia Kim / March 28, 2007 3:10 PM
i love olives and garlic cloves for breakfast! add a little hot sauce for fun.