Thanks to
The entryway doubles as a café and cooking demonstration area, where the lure which brought us out there in the first place was profiled. A guest chef was cooking away, producing sample nibbles of chesnut in puff pastry with a drizzle of truffle oil, and a prosciutto-wrapped asparagus in an amazing balsamic-port reduction with a few shavings of truffle on top. It was all enough to convince the rest of the party to invest in bottles of in-store made truffle oil. I only refrained because I already had a small and endless bottle at home; they got the better bargain.
I spent most of my money on products I'd been hearing good things about for a long time now, or else grocery products I need anyways, including tortilla chips for my enormous pot of chili. Fleur de sel, heirloom "Forbidden Rice", and Liberty-brand yoghurt were all of the long-read-about variety of purchases, picked out from high, densely crowded, well-kept shelves which filled in all the walls on both levels of the store. Here and there were additional samples: I tried a Late Harvest Vidal, the tortilla chips I bought were sampled with guacamole. A man offered me an elegant cup of tea; I had to decline, and he was grumpy.
Finally, we went back to