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Picking up more than groceries

BY JULIA ALLISON | SPECIAL TO amNEWYORK

January 9, 2006

The hottest new pick up joint isn't a single monikered bar or a club, like Marquee or Stereo. It's a little grocery store called Whole Foods.

As the self-proclaimed "World's Leading Natural and Organic Foods Supermarket," they attract a certain sort of New Yorker: Hot, Healthy and able to describe the taste of "Tofurky."

Maybe Whole Foods has secret guards who kick out fat, ugly, Dorritos addicted married people. Or maybe the population, much like Manhattan or the audience for The Bachelor, is self-selecting.

After all, Whole Foods isn't the cheapest, but it's the grocer of choice for young, personal-trainer having, calorie counting, vitamin loving, incredibly good looking shoppers. In other words, the people you want to sleep with.

Unfortunately, the grocery store is completely underrated as a hot spot for getting a date. In fact, there's no place more perfect for meeting people and/or discussing wheat gluten.

Why? Unlike a bar

1) It's pretty easy to tell who's single. After all, no one "takes off their ring" just to go to the grocery store. We hope. And women in serious relationships tend to drag their significant others with them "for support." Always lagging a few feet behind, the boyfriends/husbands look frantically at their Blackberries and wish desperately they were single and could just buy Captain Crunch (definitely not sold there).

2) Converse for free! That's right, no need to purchase an alcoholic beverage to talk to some hottie. Just lean over in the grains aisle and ask whether she prefers sugar-free Muesli or steel cut oatmeal. Throw in a reference to Flax seed oil and you're in.

3) You can hear them and they can hear you (Muzak, unlike Limp Bizkit, never requires shouting). This could be a disadvantage if you're conversationally inept and/or can't speak English, but it's distinctly useful if you've had one too many hookups whose names you can't recall, because you never actually, uh, heard anything they said.

4) You'll remember the encounter. Unless you go in there with your own whisky flask and take shots while perusing goat's milk cheese, you'll probably be sober. Which means you'll remember exactly what you said, and what she said, and then what you said after that yeah, basically everything. Which is how memory works when you're not obliterated. Awesome, right?

5) You can have a dinner date right there. Every Whole Foods has a dining section, so just hop into an aisle where a young lady is buying her dinner, offer to pay (Sweet! You got out of a wallet breaking trip to Nobu), escort her to the table and woo her like you're the raw diet Casanova.

Of course, the possibilities for sex in the bathroom are greatly reduced, but I'm sure you'll figure something out.