Photography by Jaelyn Molyneux
We know Superstore and No Frills, but Calgary is just now being introduced to Loblaws CityMarket.
If you have been to the store in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens or one of the handful in Vancouver, you understand what it is about. For the rest of us, it is essentially a regular grocery store with aisles of all the canned, boxed and refrigerated goods you would expect, but the emphasis is on the fresh food sections.
There is a patisserie with all sorts of confections. The Meals to Go section has more than 75 items on rotation and 24 types of take-and-bake pizzas. There are hundreds of cheeses, fresh meats and a 16-foot-long counter of fresh seafood on ice. There is an entire mushroom section with dried and fresh varieties. This is the store where you can get some of the fancy things you have been looking for.
It’s in the northwest in Sage Hill, roughly near where Shaganappi Trail and Symons Valley Parkway intersect. Folks in Kincora, Nolan Hill and Symons Valley know exactly where it is.
The store itself is 43,000 square feet, so there is plenty to explore. These are the 10 things that caught our eye.
T & T Supermarket is owned by Loblaws, which mean the CityMarket gets to tap into the delicious sushi from the Asian supermarket. The Sage Hill store makes sushi fresh daily. You can grab a just-made tray or put in a custom request, shop the rest of the store and come back to have it ready for you.
At the prepared meals counter there is a section dedicated to curries created by Vikram Vij for the grocery store. You can buy meal combos that come with naan and rice or get a container of just the curry for $2.49/100 grams.
At the back of the store is where you will find the butcher’s counter with all the fine cuts of meat, as well as the seafood section. All of the seafood is sustainably sourced, which means it will change seasonally. Like other areas of the store, you can purchase the simple ingredients to prepare at home or you can buy them prepped for you. Here there is halibut and salmon wrapped in banana leaf, candied salmon, kebabs and salmon pinwheels.
The juice and salad bar that takes advantage of all of the store’s produce, which includes 100 organic products. The juice comes in flavours such as watermelon lemonade, orange-pineapple-spinach-kale and orange-strawberry-banana.
Look for local products sprinkled throughout the store and featured at the end of aisles. Stoked Oats was created by a group of athletes in Calgary.
The patisserie is the first thing you’ll see when you enter the store. It is filled with cupcakes, macarons and other treats, but the most delightful section is the Indian dessert section with perfectly stacked confections.
The Meals to Go counter has a rotation of 75 items that continues to grow and change with the help of the store’s executive chef. Included in the roster are five items that have received awards from the International Taste & Quality Institute.
Fruit tarts are, like most of the prepared products, sold in individual portions so that you can buy one for yourself or several for a crowd.
You’ll walk past these mini cupcakes, doughnuts and chocolates on your way to the ACE Bakery where bread is made in a stone oven and fresh Montreal bagels are available.
The store has a cheese program and a cheese specialist. The 12-foot-high wall of cheese is where some of the more than 300 varieties of cheese are stored.
10 Sage Hill Plaza N.W., 587-755-6966, loblaws.ca