Barbur World Foods

Have been on kind of an olive kick lately, and have been wanting to try different kinds of olives.  Most places you wont find much beyond Greek and Italian, but they're actually grown all around the Mediterranean (and beyond).  I was looking to see if I could find dry-cured Moroccan or French olives, and having failed at the usual gourmet food stores I figured it was time to take a visit out to Barbur World Foods, which specializes in Mediterranean cuisine.

No go on the French olives, but they did have a nice selection of Moroccan olives at a good price.  I picked some up and while I was at it took a look around for other things I could find.

I was able to restock on some of my favorite staples that aren't common at regular groceries - Lychee juice, spaetzle, Dusseldorf mustard.  We got two kinds of giardinera - they had a local variety which, no offense, I don't quite trust, and also a hot variety from Chicagoland.

Their beer selection was decent but unspectacular.  I picked up a six pack of a Trippel by New Belgian, just to have a beer around for everyday drinking.  The soda section had some surprises.  It wasn't super extensive, but they had some flavors of Fentiman's I'd never had before (though not the burdock and dandelion, which is too bad) and a local marionberry flavored cola.  The big shocker to me was that they had an Afri-Cola.  I've never actually seen a bottle of it in the flesh before, and I kind of thought they had stopped making it - perhaps they brought the brand back.  Anyway, that's one of the colas at the top of my wantlist, along with the elusive Zam Zam Cola and the long-gone Nesbitt's Lemon-Lime.

A good deli, but most of the stuff was Lebanese - as there's a top-notch Lebanese deli closer to where I live I gave most of it a skip.  We got a pound of British bangers.  They also had frozen blood sausage, in the same freezer case as their frozen ground camel, but just having had the blood sausage at Ox last week I didn't feel the need.  The place also had a pretty wide cheese selection, including cheese curds.  Only yellow, no white, but getting any kind of curds out here at all is so rare that it was great to see it.  I was going to pick some up but forgot.

A surprise hit was the coffee.  My wife got a medium-dark roast, the medium being gone.  Coffee here in Portland generally comes in one style: Burnt.  So it was a surprise that this coffee, despite being medium-dark, was not burnt, was in fact really flavorful.  Anybody in Portland who's not already a confirmed bitterness junkie should seek this place out.

They had a really nice variety of spices.  We picked up a container of berbere, which is again something that's not super common.  We're looking forward to using it, maybe in some kind of lentil stew.