PFC Natural Grocery & Deli
507 Harrison StreetI’ll tell you. I’ve eaten more salads since I started working downtown than I have in the last ten years. I end up at Irving’s Market & Deli quite a bit. It’s close to where I work and it’s a quick, simple, delicious lunch to just either hit up the salad bar or the hot bar for the day.
I started to do the same thing last Thursday but when I got there, a salad didn’t really sound good and the hot bar was pretty picked over since it was closer to 3:00. I ended up just grabbing a couple of Pepsi’s and coming up with a new plan.
I remembered seeing somewhere that People’s Food Co-Op has a deli and Thursday is taco day. I checked their website to see if that was the case and sure enough, it was. I walked back to my car to head to the east side of downtown.
PFC Natural Grocery & Deli is on Harrison Street between Michigan and Ransom just north of the railroad tracks. This new, larger building opened in the spring of 2011 after moving from a much smaller location on Burdick Street near the State Theater.
This store is like night and day from the old one. I only went in to the old location once looking for something specific. It was so cramped. This store is much more like a traditional grocery store with large, wide aisles and a huge selection of products that aren’t available in the big grocery store chains.
The deli is located in the front of the store near the cash registers. It’s just one small buffet bar with the salad on one side and the hot bar on the other. The day I stopped in was taco day, but the selections rotate every day. Everything is made fresh daily using local ingredients.
I grabbed a plate from the top of the sneeze guard and picked up four hard corn taco shells. The protein filling choices were chicken or lentil’s. They also have veggies, beans, Spanish potatoes, and cilantro lime rice. At the end of the bar, there are a number of toppings for the tacos. I chose to keep it simple with cheese and a homemade salsa on top.
You don’t have to be a member to shop at People’s Food Co-Op but it is cheaper at the register if you are. The hot bar runs $6.99 a pound and my four tacos came out to just a little over $8 which I paid for with cash.
I waited until I got back to the office to eat which was hard. The chicken smelled delicious and I found that it tasted as good as it smelled when I finally got a chance to eat. The chicken was so tender and so juicy. It was heavily seasoned with cumin being the flavor that really jumped out. The salsa was also quite delicious. It was fresh tasting and not too spicy adding an almost right off the vine flavor to the tacos.
I know it seems weird for me to be writing about PFC six years after the opened this location but in all honesty, it just hasn’t been on my radar. I have passed it a lot more now that I’m working in Kalamazoo most days, so I got curious about it and stopped in one afternoon to check it out. I don’t remember what was on the deli that day, but I waited to blog until I did grab something to eat.
PFC Natural Grocery & Deli is delicious. I’m a pretty big carnivore so I’m not quite their target clientele but if I can find their food tasty, I’m pretty sure anyone can. They’re geared toward the vegetarian/vegan crowd and they make sure to label whether everything is vegan, vegetarian, or wheat free. This is a great option for something different and for people that choose to eat a certain way.
SW Michigan Dining 