Seafood City
17540 - 100 Avenue NW Edmonton, AB
Even if you know nothing about Filipino food, and speak not a word of Tagalog, you can still order lunch at Seafood City. Just peruse the mile-long cafeteria counter, find something that looks tasty, and point. It’s a convenient style of service for the uninitiated. There’s even a term for it: “turo turo”, which means “point point”.
And there is plenty to point at in Seafood City. The breadth, regional specificity, and sheer volume of the offerings at the West Edmonton supermarket’s cafeteria are stunning. For both native Filipinos and curious outsiders, it’s a wonderland.
The cafeteria has three sections: Noodle Street, Crispy Town, and BBQ City.
The principal offering at Noodle Street is mami, Filipino noodle soup. A typical bowl might include a clump of instant noodles, some braised beef, chunks of tofu, pork and shrimp wontons, and shredded cabbage. A pint of hot, pale broth is served separate in case you are taking the soup to-go and want to preserve your noodle integrity. It’s a serviceable lunch, if not quite the most exciting noodle soup in the city.
Sidle over to Crispy Town and things start to get interesting. The king of Crispy Town must be bagnet, bricks of deep-fried pork belly that are stacked for display, ordered by the pound, then hacked into thick slices by the counterman. The hollow crunch of a cleaver shattering bagnet crackling is one of the most satisfying sounds in gastronomy. Below the crispy skin are alternating strata of tender meat and unctuous fat; the bottom layer of meat has a leathery chew. Whole fried smelts and puffy, curly chicharron are mounded like autumn leaves. For sweets there are butchi, ping-pong balls coated in sesame seeds and filled with red bean paste, and turon, banana-filled spring rolls the approximate length and heft of a billy club.
Grill City is stocked by three grills the size of twin beds. At all hours of the day they are filled with skewers of meat, joints of meat, slabs and slabs of meat, as well as whole fish, and other delights.
The grilled pork skewers and liempo (pork belly) are good starting points. The western way of cooking pork shoulder and belly is “low and slow”, until all of the connective tissue has dissolved, the fat is fully rendered, and the meat is soft and yielding. The pork at Grill City gets a much quicker treatment, giving the meat a wonderful brawny texture that reminds you why we eat meat. The footlong grilled pork skewers are given a final dunk in their sweet glaze sauce before being served. The sooty liempo carries a strong char flavour, from fat flair-ups.
The happy, plump longanissa - sausages that radiate a colour of light straddling orange and red - have snappy casings, juicy, candy-sweet filling and an insidious, persistent garlic note. The chicken inasal is fine, with a mild lemongrass marinade and grill flavour. And if all of these somehow sound pedestrian, there are accordion-like skewers of folded pig’s ear, chopped pig’s head hash, and balut, the infamous fetal duck eggs.
Some of the items at Grill City are available as a lunch combo, served with two tidy hemispheres of white rice, and a tiny cup of the pickles called achara. The combo is a good route if you are eating solo, but the best way to try this food is in a group, with each person ordering one or two meats and then swapping and sharing.
Make sure to grab a cup of kalamansi or honeydew juice: they taste sweetly and innocently like their source fruit.
And this is just the cafeteria. Seafood City is, after all, a grocery store. The namesake seafood section is a marvel. I could spend an afternoon looking through the rainbow menagerie of whole fish, partly buried in chipped ice: flashing silver sardines, blushing red fusiliers, yellow perch, blue parrot fish.
The pantry aisles have what must be the widest selection of canned luncheon meat in Edmonton: several brands and flavours of Spam, Vienna sausages, and corned beef. You can stock up on the cane and coconut vinegars essential for authentic adobo and kinilaw. The rows and rows of imported Filipino snack foods like Jack ’n’ Jill potato chips and Choc*Nut Bars will have you nostalgic for a Pampango childhood, whether you actually had one or not. In the bakery half the items are stained ube purple, the exact shade of Grimace, the old McDonald’s mascot.
