BLOOMFIELDS, the sparky-new, heavily-touted food hall in Dun Laoghaire, is the lively offspring of a number of different unions.
It is in the corporate sense, what happens when you marry Quinnsworth with the English supermarket giant Tesco.
From a practical point of view, it's where a life-style experience meets the basic need to shop for food, while its culinary emphasis is a clever concoction of supermarket-does-a-line-with-traiteur and its intellectual focus is where corporation seduces artisan.
That's a whole lot of dating.
Where Bloomfields marks a step forward in terms of Irish supermarket shopping is with its concentration on cooked foods, and foods-to-go. It is, seemingly, the supermarket designed for people who don't like to cook, marking an advance on the Marks & Spencer style of selling you cooked food in a box, by selling you cooked food you can see.
The first thing you encounter - once you get past a low-slung courtesy desk, cleverly styled like a solicitor's reception, and not the Starship Enterprise Control capsule of most supermarkets - is the Deli Express, where you can pick up a salt beef sarnie, should you so wish.
There is then a conventional avenue of fruit and veg - which, astonishingly, had not a single organically-grown vegetable or herb the evening I was there, although their literature suggests that this is perhaps waiting to happen - before you move on again to a salad bar. This offers an extensive range of salads including, count 'em, no fewer that five varieties of coleslaw: regular; no onion; low cal; with cheese, and Bombay. Bombay coleslaw. We live, truly, in surprising times.
Just past this is the pasta, cheese and olive counter, and it is here we begin to find the interesting Bloomfield signatures. The pasta and sauces are made for them by Pasta Fresca, the Chatham Street restaurant and shop, and right next door to this you will find the bread counter, where you can buy bread from Cooke's bakery, from Bewley's bakery, and from Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud.
Some might suggest that having a few high profile lines from local people is little more than tokenism in a shop which sells thousands of lines, but I reckon this is a good idea. If you want the conventional stuff it is there also - there is a hot bread counter, even KVI sliced pan - but the presence of these lines is encouraging.
Even more encouraging is the presence of Ballybrado organic beef and lamb, and an entire shelf of Rosarie and Kevin O'Byrne's West Cork Herb Farm mustards, relishes and oils (if you do buy some lamb, don't leave the shop without some Herb Farm rose jelly: together they're a peach). Sadly, for me, my Tuesday evening visit meant I missed out on the sushi prepared for Bloomfields by the Ayumi-Ya restaurants, which they sell between Wednesday and Saturday.
Behind the olive stand is the Chef's Kitchen, as they grandly call it, which sells stuff like roast potatoes and chicken legs and so on. This, and the counter of cooked ethnic foods beside it, with its Thai dishes and Indian curries, which marks the start of a lengthy deli counter, is the bit about Bloomfields which is really the focus of the store.
This part of the store shows the assimilation of ideas by which supermarkets move steadily forward. You can buy 20 varieties of olive in Bloomfields. Would they have had such a variety before Toby Simmond and his Real Olive Co made olives a staple of the Irish diet by selling them in every market from Castletownbere to Temple Bar? Hardly.
There is nothing new about foods cooked on the premises and sold from a hot cabinet - butchers such as Sean Loughnane, of Galway, have been selling cooked food, including roast potatoes, for years now - but the new spin here is the addition of ethnic foods to the roll-call of what you can buy.
Their search for the exotic finds its zenith in an enormous fish counter with a fine range of wet fish and prepared dishes. The other Bloomfields branch in Ireland, outside Bangor in Co Down, also has a good fish counter, and there was red snapper and shark for sale alongside more familiar varieties.
What Bloomfields is attempting, then, is to coalesce the experience of shopping for artisan and specialist foods and to bring this, with cooked food to go, and all the other stuff we need to run the house, under one roof. You align this with some a visit to other stores in the centre - a hair cut in Peter Marks, a new pair of shades in Eyecon, a cafetiere of java and a focaccia in Ernest's - and there is the experience.
This is a good idea, of course, but the important question is not why are they doing it - the commercial reasons are obvious - but just how well are they doing it?
At this point, the Bloom fields experiment seems to me rather cautious. The number of Irish farmhouse cheeses on the cheese counter, for example, is small, and all the cheeses are tightly wrapped, which does them no favours. The paucity of organic foods, when I was there, was disappointing. The pizza counter, where you request a variety of toppings for your base, offers nothing new over the Superquinn model, and the deli counter is largely similar to deli counters elsewhere. The wine shop has a conservative list.
There are, as yet, few surprises throughout the store. Some innovations, of course, but few surprises. I would have imagined that a supermarket of the style of Bloomfields, catering for a food-loving and sophisticated clientele who are pretty well-heeled, could have afforded to be more daring. Superquinn in Blackrock are not too far away, offering something largely similar, while also offering a tree car park and a free creche. (in Bloomfields, you get one hour's free parking if you spend over £3, thereafter it's 60 pence an hour. The creche costs £2 an hour for one child, then add on £1 for each extra child.)
Indeed, it is a tribute to the high standards of Irish supermarkets and shops that Bloomfields should be unable to leave them in the shade, and that its developments should seem almost more cosmetic - wide aisles, slick trolleys, a cosy wine area, lots of household goods and videos - than substantial.
The denizens of Dun Laoghaire will continue to support the magnificent Cavistons and the brilliant Hicks of Sallynoggin for their true specialisation in foods and their personality - though it must be said that all the staff I came across in Bloomfields were charming. They will buy food to go from the Butler's Pantry in Blackrock as they drive home southwards out of the city. On the weekends, they will head further south for the great country markets of Kilternan and Wicklow.
I myself bought some olives, some tagliatelle and pomodoro sauce, and then fine Ballybrado lamb chops with some salads for a main course. With a decent bottle of Menetou Salon from the wine shop, it made for a convenient, easy, late dinner, the sort of thing that can be picked up at 8.15 p.m. with a minimum of fuss. As such, I imagine I behaved like the model Bloomfields shopper.