Mediterranean Specialty Foods

I love me my YERBA-​MATE and its not the easiest thing to find in Vancouver. That is the traditional stuff brands like Amanda, Cachamate, Canarias, CBSe, Cruz de Malta, La Hoja, La Merced, La Tranquera, Nobleza Gaucha, Pipore, Rosamonte, Taraqui and Union Suave.
And this place has them ALL!
Jack the store owner is the captain of the ship and runs a great operation. I load up on PITA BREAD, SANGAK, SPINACH PIES, OLIVES and FETA on the regular … but the real prize is the YERBA-​MATE selection and the Gourds, Bombillas and Gift Sets they offer as well.
again if your looking for Yerba-​Mate in Vancouver … this is your mecca!

I’ve walked by this place almost a hundred times while trolling the Drive. I finally came in for the first time to get some cheese and spinach pocket pastry. Pastry was good, however, in the store itself there were only a handful of items that I would come back for. Customer service was awesome. Store is a decent size with lots of items.

It’s a hidden gem on The Drive that you’ve walked past a hundred times.
The Hummus… Ooooohhhhh THE HUMMUS!!!
The Tzatziki… Ooooohhhhh THE TZATZIKI!!!
All made in store, fresh, and guaranteed to leave your breath filled with garlic-​y goodness for the rest of the day.
A great selection of olives, feta, olive oils, tapenades, and of course, delicious pastries (baklava anyone?).
When I went, I received top notch service from Jack.
Next time you’re in the hood, make a pit stop. Your tummy with thank you, but your breath will not.
Ah well.
It’s a small price to pay to the food Gods, right? ;)

The fresh cow feta! The spinach and cheese pastries! Olives! Delicious hummous, too. The owner, a quirky fellow originally from Palestine, may seem challenging at first, but over the past 20 years that I have shopped here, I have found him to be a gentle, kind man. I see Dave M. had problems with things going bad, but that has not been my experience, though now that I come to think of it, we eat everything usually on the same day. I’m not looking for fast service here, I am looking for good products, homemade, «authentic» foods, a good selection of Middle Eastern products, and there they are. Sometimes the staff is busy at the back cooking things up for us, and I am happy to wait.

This place is clean which is a relief as the food stores on their side of Commercial get
dirtier and more neglected these days as you work your way towards Broadway from Santa Barbara. I would have bought my feta at Santa Barbara if they’d had the selection I had expected. Instead I came here despite the fact that on my last two visits I have looked at almost everything they had on the shelves and was never even approached in the store which was otherwise empty of customers. This time I asked a woman for dodonis which they had and was given the weight I asked for with no words from her. So the service was like that of the phoenix-​like Parthenon in Kitsilano but without the extreme disinterest stopping just short of eye-​rolling at customers. It seems like a good place for feta and olives as well as many jarred products and olive oil.

We absolutely love this shop and visit it every time we are on or near the Drive, which is at least once a week. They carry a variety of European and Middle Eastern products at reasonable prices, relative to similar nearby stores.
We particularly love and recommend he jarred vegetable spreads (Ajvar), Macedonian feta cheese and the cheese-​filled phyllo pastry that is loaded with cheese at only about $ 2.50 per piece (unlike some other European delis that sell similar pastries and filling them with dough instead of the filling). The owner and his crew are also very nice, personable and friendly.
Solid.

Love it. I want to give him 5 stars. I desperately do.
Deniz Z and Liza B cover all the great things about it really nicely.
The reason I give it fewer stars is that the fresh stuff such as cheese and olives don’t last. They aren’t the same quality as what you’ll find elsewhere on Commercial at say Santa Barbara or La Grotta Del Formaggio. It goes bad sooner and doesn’t have that «fresh» feeling about it.
If you need something authentic or otherwise hard to find, this is the place to go.

I am in LOVE with the pistachio baklava; hands down the best I’ve had since I visited Hafiz Mustafa in Istanbul.
A billion and a half olive oils, pepper spreads, and tapenades, and loukum means I will be back over and over and over. SO overwhelming.
Services is a tad slow, and even THAT reminds me of eastern Europe so take it for what it is; we are just too damned conditioned to demand snappy service in the rat-​race of Van City sometimes.
Love this place!

I like most of the items they sell here, BUT I had to make a note of this. I bought some garlic stuffed olives and pimento stuffed olives on a recommendation and they went MOULDY in a few weeks. I have never had olives go mouldy before and not sure what’s going on. So I ended up throwing a big batch out.
What waste. BE WARNED!

We love coming up here for a couple of spanakopita roulades and delicious baklava. Same vendors as Yek O Yek. Mmmm authentic.

The wondrous Spice Bazaar in Istanbul, you take the door that faces the water to outside, or Halic as we call. If you turn left and walk 200 meters, you will end up in a restaurant called Hamdi, which is the ultimate restaurant for kebabs in this universe. However if you keep walking straight and cross the bridge and ask around, it will lead you to the original store of Gulluoglu, the baklava masters’ –again in this universe– original store.
In my opinion the 3 top bitch pastries are to master would be; croissant, danish and baklava. Each of these bad boys are extremely surrounding and craft sensitive. You can not grab a recipe and start producing perfect forms of these wonders. The simplicity behind them makes it even harder, there are no sauces, nowhere to hide, either you are hot or not, no chocolate coverings, softening with pastry creams. You mess up –and slightly!!!- one single step, 2 day of process ends up in a mediocre note. The moister in the air, temperature of your hands, little tear at the laminated dough, perfect butter temperature to be enrobed that it does not crack to create even rising, proofing, the components of your egg-​wash even… etc etc When all this comes together masterfully, the finished product is simple and divine.
Very few things are mind boggling as a biting into a fresh, still warm, oozy baklava out of the wood burning oven topped with clotted buffalo’s cream. First things first; this wonderful desert’s history is not defined very well, but it is widely believed, it was crafted first in Ottoman Palace kitchens. The stretching part of the dough is a very daunting process. 200 layers of dough, corn starched in between (which the reminiscent creates the unique chew in an original baklava), layered on top of each other and rolled out all at once. The true baklava consists of only and only pistachios (hand chopped for the sharper edges to a certain consistency), sugar (never honey, simple syrup, again with a certain viscosity), dough, clarified butter. That is it. Other nuts, flavors, this, that… Flush. So, unfortunately I am not going to agree with the baklava aspect of this store, just because of personal reasons, knowledge and the love I have for baklava.
But what he has is everything else. You would like fermented carrot juice, a staple from south-​east turkey, check. Crumbled sourdough, which again another staple in Turkish cuisine –Tarhana, the word refers to small house hold-​, to cook the poor man’s soup, check. Wonderful canned products; such as, sun-​dried pepper paste for kebab occasions, very good tomato paste, sumac, dry mint, under-​ripe melon pickle, traditional pastrami w/​fenugreek, wild cucumber pickle, sour cherry juice, harissa, cracked bitter green olives, baby okra (the brand Tam-​tad), killer chilie pickles, sour grape juice for tweaking a new form of acid to finish your dishes, dried edible chickpeas, black turkish chilies, yufka for boreks (stuffed pastries of Ottoman Palace cuisine)… and the list goes on, strangely no good yoghurt. The ready to go dishes looks okay, but never tried them to be honest.
My pantry shopping is from this store. You rock Jack!

This is a fantastic specialty food shop and deli. It features a lot of Greek and Turkish items that I just have never seen anywhere else in the city. They have well priced choice selections of cheeses, olives, olive oils, flat breads, Turkish delight and meats just to name a few.
If you do go it will be difficult to resist the freshly baked savory or sweet filo treats. The low priced delicious filo always draws me in the store and then I end up leaving with all the ingredients to make killer dolmades. Or even worse a big slice of sheep milk kefalotyri cheese I can fry until it is bubbly and douse with some fresh lemon juice. Really it is very tragic, I live a hard life.

Have a craving for home-​made spanakopita or baklava? THIS is your place. Hungry on a Saturday, we stopped by to grab some olive oil & came out with more butter-​covered phyllo than two people should eat. Baklava in pistachio, walnut and almond? sign me up for all! The spanakopita was so good we’re revamping our home recipe in the hopes that we can get somewhere close to their buttery goodness.

I have now tried the baklava. Is is superb. It comes in pistachio, walnut and almond varieties. All were good, I found the pistachio particularly divine. I also tried the walnut kadayif, which I didn’t like nearly as much. The string pastry struck me as soggy, compared to the lovely crispy baklava. That said, it was neat to get to try it. But I probably won’t do a kadayif repeat, whereas I’ll be hard-​pressed not to get a piece of baklava every time I pass!

I’m going to start off this review with my favorites about this place in case you don’t read on. First, the spinach pies located right in the front of the store are to die for — absolutely fantastic. They make them rolled or folded (I know some people don’t like the rolled ones because they get a bit doughy but I love ‘em!). Second, go to the back counter and order 200g of Basturma, seasoned, air-​dried cured beef. This stuff is a unique flavor with which you can make sandwiches, chop on salads, or fry in the morning with your eggs in place of bacon.
OK now that those two items are out of the way — this place has a spread of Mediterranean and middle eastern foods. They have an unreal olive oil selection spanning nearly the entire entrance of the store (see photo). It can be overwhelming but the owners are very helpful and friendly and can quickly focus you on what you are looking for. The deli includes a vast array of feta and other types of cheeses, olives, meats and sausages, hummuses, baba, the list goes on. A lot of the prepared foods like the hummus, baba, spinach and beef pies are prepared on premises. The prices are reasonable for the prepared food and the deli and downright cheap for a lot of the canned or dried foods on their shelves.
Next time you’re on the Drive and you’re about to get lunch at one of the many pizza places with different names serving identical crappy slices, stop, turn around, head to Mediterranean Specialty Foods and grab a spinach or meat pie — you won’t be disappointed!

As soon as I spotted the sticky goodness that is walnut baklava, I had to have it and I was enthralled! I haven’t had baklava this good since I was in Santorini, Greece and that is no lie. In fact, I still have a piece left and as soon as I’m done this review, its mine!
Moving on from my apparent baklava obsession, Mediterranean Foods also carries a massive selection of unique and tasty olives in giant pails for you to try and choose from, homous, red pepper spread, tapenades, baked in-​store filo pastry pies and a plethora of Mediterranean imported specialties. You could spend some serious time in here, I had trouble deciding what to buy this trip around, and I already know what I want to get when I go back… tomorrow!