Warning: Some of the images contained herein might be upsetting, particularly to any vegans/vegetarians. I don’t know. Just felt like I should disclaim it.

There’s more than one Market in the East. On a recent Saturday afternoon, I ventured over to Florida Avenue to check out the Capital City Market. Roughly bounded by Florida Ave. NE on the South, 6th St. NE on the east, Penn St. NE on the north and the FL Ave. Metro on the west, the Market was originally located on the National Mall (somewhere near around Federal Triangle) and was relocated after World War I to make way for the Mall we’re all familiar with today.

I started my journey at Obeng International Wholesale, one of the few places still open so late in the day. (Things get rolling over there before dawn. If you’ve eaten in a restaurant in DC or grabbed something at a corner bodega in town, you’ve likely eaten something with a Cap City Market pedigree.) I was greeted with long lines of folks purchasing sacks of rice, dried fish, smoked goat meat and other West African specialties.

They also have hard chicken, which I swear I’m going to make my best efforts to stew this fall, but my ambitions this time of year don’t run quite as rampant as they’d need to for me to take on West African cooking for the first time. That said, I wonder if I could use a hard chicken in my paprikás, particularly if I slow cooked it for a day or two (obviously before adding the requisite sour cream)? I digress of course, but this is what I love about the Market – it always gets me to thinking about things, whether I like it or not. And it always makes me nostalgic for the markets of my past: the Strip District back home in Pittsburgh, the Nagycsarnok next to my apartment in Budapest, Lexington Market up the street from my office in Baltimore and the docks across the street from my place in Half Moon Bay, CA (which, when the boats came in, was the best fish market you’ve ever seen). I seem to gravitate to these places without ever really meaning to. Some people get excited about a new Harris Teeter; I get excited about someplace where I can get rabbits for 4.99/lb. Story continues after the jump with tons more photos. Read Full Post
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