Nuts in Brunswick

The area close to the corner of Sydney Road and Albion Street in Brunswick, in Melbourne's inner North, is an unassuming focal point for interesting and unpretentious food with an ethnic touch. I have written about the A1 Bakery elsewhere on this blog. The Brunswick IGA Supermarket is a quirky cut above the usual franchise member. And the little Brunswick Market competes in a low key but effective way with louder and larger alternatives nearby.

One of the places the tourist is least likely to stumble across in this precinct is the Royal Nut Company, formally at 204-206 Albion St but accessible on foot off tiny William St, Brunswick, between Sydney Rd and Breese St. RNC and the nearby Brunswick Market are among the businesses close to two parking lots (one on William, the other on Florence St - both one way off Sydney Rd, just south of Albion) which demand the hilarious sum of 20c an hour, ticket machine and all, to park in a very crowded area. I have yet to determine whether this is heavily subsidized by the enterprising local merchants, or is some sort of money-laundering scheme. I'm sure 20c an hour won't cover the ticket machine and the rates...

RNC is one of those stores whose fragrance comes to greet you at the door. The allure of spices has your olfactory imagination on its way to ancient Baghdad, but the visuals are less exotic. It is really a wholesaler with a small retail offshoot that rewards the intrepid, but makes no effort to beguile you beyond the merchandise itself.

The relatively small space - three aisles, each 10 metres long at most - are stacked with a range of seeds, flours, spices, snacks and of course nuts, nearly all packaged in "bulk" bags of anything from 250g to 3 kilos or so, labelled in RNC's own livery.

You can't do your regular shopping at RNC; the scope of their produce is narrow. Yet the depth and quality of what is presented are such that you'll feel swamped with variety. And you can hardly read a label without seeing that this good stuff is also, for the most part, a real bargain.

The first aisle includes their own coffee beans, light or dark roast; Leatherwood honey in tubs you'd only ever dreamed about before; grains including quinoa and buckwheat, and prepared versions of them like polenta, mograbieh and burghul. There are many kinds of lentils and dried beans, including the recent foodie favourite, the "puy".

Grains spill into the second aisle and include nut meals and well, heaps of nuts. Go figure, it's a nut shop. But on the way between aisles you're likely to be distracted by the western end of the store and its array of spices. Many of these are expected, others are mysterious or surprising. You realize you're rubbing shoulders with shoppers who really go through 250g of Za'atar or Sumac in a few weeks, and inevitably wonder what's wrong with you. The smell is amazing.

The third aisle has dried fruit, confectionery and various snacks, as well as cocoa. The fruit again starts with the familiar but then leaves it way behind, with three kinds of dried apricots, sun-dried green sultanas from the West of China, but also a great deal on the kilo of fruit medley for your make-it-at-home Muesli.

All in all, RNC gives the impression of a gloriously exotic set of products doing their best to be hospitable to more staid but good old Australian staples. For mine, they're doing a great job.