On the same visit, I walked to the butcher area in the back and immediately spotted a pile of merguez sausage coiled high and available for $9 a pound. I met the owner, Rana Redfield, and found out that she has been slowly introducing foods such as those advertised outside over the last five years, stocking up on things like baked pea crisp snacks and special vintages of certain wines per her regular customers' personal requests, as well as her personal culinary favorites. It wasn't until after perhaps my 100th time driving by their multiple colorful signs touting "we now sell organic milk and eggs" and "Grass fed beef" that I finally stopped by to re-investigate their offerings. I started stopping in whenever I could, and would find occasional goodies like organic butter lettuce with the roots still attached, but still never really thought twice about it.
I first realized that La Tropicana was not your average Highland Park corner store earlier last year, when I stepped in to buy an $11, obscure dark craft beer from Ipswich, Massachusetts. But, it just seems that the new businesses opening up around Highland Park seem to be doing a slightly better job at respecting the older residents' food customs, at least in the case of my neighborhood convenience store, La Tropicana.
I'm not saying Highland Park isn't rapidly changing as well: it is. In the former area, the speed of gentrification was too fast for me, pushing my girlfriend and I out, tired of paying the area's rapidly increasing rent. Like many of Highland Park's new young residents, I happily moved out of the ever-pricier Echo Park/Silver Lake area about a year ago and found my dream home a little farther northeast, in Highland Park.
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