LINA'S ITALIAN MARKET

The smell of baking bread and simmering tomato sauce washes over you like a warm bath when you step through the door. To your right, skinny shelves stacked with fine kitchenware: miniature espresso cup-and-saucer sets emblazoned with the Illy coffee logo, knives, colanders, pestle and mortars. To your left, a bustling cafeteria cordoned off with a demi-wall. More on that later. Many come to Lina’s Italian Market just to eat and run, but the time-gifted should allow themselves a little bit of foreplay—a slow perusal of the dried pastas and pickles; the produce table with baskets of hazelnuts and rows of quince and nespole; the cookie shelves displaying mouthfuls like “Quadratini” and “Napolitanke,” perfectly shaped for dipping into those teeny espresso cups.
All aisles lead to a white-tiled horizon and the whine of deli-slicers cutting salamis into paper-thin rounds to be layed out and wrapped in butcher paper. Beside that, blocks of cheeses with names like “Sardo,” “Pecorino Rustico,” and “Crotonese.” Around the bend are the olives—all manner of shapes, sizes and colours, pitted and non-pitted, spiced and non-spiced. And beyond that, the chocolate-dipped desserts dusted with powdered sugar.
Just try to bypass the cafeteria: the pizzas, the pasta of the day, the panini sandwiches served in oblong rolls sawed off at each end. Your default order is the panini calabrese—a trio of hot salami, creamy provolone and briny eggplant tucked into crusty white bread. You pay on the other side of the retro-styled Elektra espresso machine and shimmy through the lunch-rush crowd of golf-shirted business guys, retirees, yuppie couples with baby bumps and moms out for some “me time,” looking for a spot at one of the tightly arranged tables.
For the next few minutes, it’s just you and that sandwich. Eventually, you dot your lip with a paper napkin and turn your gaze to the picture windows, certain that on the other side lies a lush cobblestone courtyard packed with beautiful couples wearing Ferragamo shoes. What you see instead is the utilitarian causeway of Centre Street. Beyond that, graceless stripmalls feature pawnshops, insurance brokers and the Vanishing Rabbit Magic Shop. You’re not in Italy. You’re in Calgary. But that’s okay, because it tastes like calabrese heaven.