Cheapskate's Highlife

Eisenberg's Market
170 E. 10th St., St. Paul
651.227.0634
www.eisenbergfruit.com

Bill Kelley

Livin' large: Broders' Southside Pasta Bar serves up an upscale mid-week feast for two for an unbelievable $20

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Solo Vino

517 Selby Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55102

Category: Retail

Region: St. Paul (Downtown)

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Patrick's Bakery & Cafe

6010 Lyndale Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55419

Category: Restaurant > Bakery

Region: Southwest Minneapolis

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More About

• Clovis
• Bartlett
• Fruits and Vegetables
• Foods

Solo Vino
517 Selby Ave., St. Paul
651.602.9515
www.solovinowines.com

Broders' Southside Pasta Bar
5000 Penn Ave. S., Minneapolis
612.925.9202
www.broders.com

Patrick's Bakery And Café
6010 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis (inside the main Bachman's)
612.861.9277
www.bachmans.com/retail/business/patricks_bakery.cfm

What is wealth? Is it the ability to dry your hair with a 600-thread-count towel appliquéd with oyster Rolexes? Of course it is. Is it the chance to use uncut emeralds as pie weights? Again, yes. Duh. But is it also the ability to know where in this city one can find a shockingly good $4 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a date-worthy dinner for two for $20, a romantic orchid-strewn interlude with Parisian chocolate mousse for less than $10, and enough peaches to bathe in for the price of a fast food extra value meal? Isn't true wealth the ability to live abundantly without mortgaging your future? If you've answered yes, then read on, for I am ready to share secrets of living luxuriously, in the high style to which you have become accustomed, without spending much at all! If you have answered no, you would rather have the towel with the Rolexes, I say: Plums to you, buddy! Go suck on a peach.

I mean, from the Bible on down, hasn't the very definition of wealth been living a life surrounded by lots of ripe fruit? Ripe, fresh fruit. Meanwhile, if you read any kind of health news, it becomes clearer and clearer that the more fresh fruits and vegetables you can eat, the healthier you'll be. Meanwhile, fresh fruit in the upper Midwest is darn, darn expensive--unless you go to Eisenberg's. Now, Eisenberg's has been a Minnesota fruit institution for 70-some years. They buy fruit from produce brokers, and sell it to the public at low, low prices. They can do this for too many reasons to get into, but it largely has to do with the way that supermarkets are ungainly behemoths unable to respond to small events in the marketplace. So, little Eisenberg's buys fruit that's too ripe to sit in a supermarket central distribution warehouse and wait for further redistribution, or they buy fruit that's too sophisticated for regular supermarkets, or they buy fruit that's come in too small a quantity for a big supermarket to trifle with.

This means that, on a visit last week, I went in and bought two full grocery bags of beautiful cherries, plums, pears, nectarines, and melons for $10. You could have bought an entire crate of peaches from Clovis, California for $7.95. A 14-pound case of delicate, red-blushing Bartlett pears cost $6.95. A whole watermelon cost $2.59. I brought home golden Rainier cherries; at 99 cents a pound, they were perfectly sweet, firm, and fragrant. Unusual Italian plums, egg-sized with a hint of toffee-almond caramel to their sweet flesh, cost 69 cents a pound; I got enough for a whole pie for just a few dollars.

A lot of Eisenberg's customers are bakers, canners, and other practitioners of those once-thrifty and now oddly upscale arts. Is that why the free parking lot at thrifty Eisenberg's held a new Lexus and two fancy BMWs on my last visit? With all the recent news that keeps associating fruit and vegetables with health, and soda and convenience foods with disease, it's hard not to conclude that the rich get thinner (while supping on Italian plums) and the poor get diabetes. Actually, when I think about it like that I feel terribly guilty for not writing about Eisenberg's more. Fruit, people: keeping humans alive since before recorded history.

Well, that and wine, of course. Golly. Why, after a few hours poring through recent news reports I have become deeply afraid of how really gosh darn-dead you're gonna get if you don't drink more. Hypertension? Cardiovascular disease? Unsightly bulging bank accounts? Stave off all of them by consuming at least two glasses of wine a day. That said, I'll point out that you might even get to keep your unsightly bulging bank account if you shop at Solo Vino, where they've been amping up their selection of low-dollar Spanish gems: Why, when I was in there last week there were a solid half-dozen great Spanish options for under $6.

I especially liked the two Casa Solar wines. (They call them Casa Solar because the grapes are grown in hot Spanish highlands way above sea level, right close to the sun.) The 2002 Casa Solar Red ($5.99) is subtle, peppery, and well balanced. It has blackberry flavors and a nice tannic dustiness, with plenty of acid and none of the flaws that distinguish cheap wine: It isn't lopsided, or boring, or flabby, or insipid. It's bold, forthright, and full of cherry Tempranillo character. It's going to be great with pizzas, or anything in the red-sauce home-cooking vein. The 2003 Casa Solar Blanco ($5.99) is a classic Spanish table wine, with extras: It's lemony and brisk with a white-chocolate nose and a notable creaminess and weight in the mouth. It's got both plenty of acid and plenty of body, and it nigh cries out for a companion of cleanly presented seafood or summer fruits.