The Orchard, a specialty produce store, has exotic fruits, vegetables, nuts, preserves and chocolates. Like a boutique, The Orchard is intimate, and has careful arrangements of breathtaking fruits and vegetables. (You won’t seeing large, precarious pyramids of watermelon halves in plastic wrap here). It’s the only produce store I’ve ever visited where someone offered up their assistance. In fact, the staff at The Orchard was probably the friendliest I’ve encountered in all of Midwood. I had heard that a small bag of fruit can easily run you sixty dollars in this place, so I thought I’d select just a couple things to try.

My first selection was a purple Florida passionfruit. This egg-shaped tropical fruit has a brittle, wrinkled purple-brown rind enclosing flesh-covered, edible seeds in a gelatinous goo. It is supposed to be eaten at its sweetest when the skin is wrinkled and ugly. (It was). However, while the yellow-orange passionfruit pulp generally has an intensely aromatic flavor, it was as tart as a lemon and not as sweet as I was hoping for. Hey, fruit can be a crapshoot.

The pomegranate, a cousin of strawberries and raspberries, is the primary ingredient in grenadine and represented abundance and fertility in ancient times. It is probably one of the oldest fruits known to mankind. Pomegranates are normally eaten with a spoon and appear throughout Middle Eastern and Arabian cuisines. Sweet and enormous, The Orchard’s pomegranate was one of the best I’ve ever had.

The Orchard isn’t the place to stock up for your juicer. But for their fruit platters, (which have appeared on the table at Presidential inaugurations) to try something new and unusual, or simply to check out produce with people who really know the business, Orchard Fruit is worth the trip.

The Orchard
1367 Coney Island Avenue

Originally published on Until Monday: Brooklyn