What would you pay to have a great fishmonger, butcher, and fromagerie under one roof? And a Pastaworks, complete with gourmet items, flowers, and wine? Now round that figure up and you have what you’ll be dropping at City Market.

The cheese selection here is diverse and wonderful, and properly wrapped and stored (it’s a living thing, people—you can’t strangle it to death in shrink wrap); the staff is usually quite helpful, if a bit condescending at times. The wine list at Pastaworks is brief, but brilliant—mostly small-production Italian and Spanish wines which are also, as it happens, among the best bargains on the market. A gorgeous display of cured meats, pâté, and sausages from locally raised meats are also wonderful, even if only to look at. And a glittering show of live shellfish is hard not to linger over.

City Market is a reasonable lunch stop, too (lunch and entertainment, perhaps?), with a pretty good sandwich counter. Only avoid the muffuletta, which falls into that frequent muffuletta trap of inedible saltiness. The other sandwiches are pretty good, but pricey. Again, it’s about where you are.

It’s fun to peruse the prettily packaged ingredients in preparation for a special meal you are making; you certainly couldn’t do this all the time, although the farm-fresh eggs are something that, once you’ve had them, you can’t live without. Be prepared for some pretty unfriendly hipper-than-thou attitudes, though, and if you show up too close to closing, scoot around the corner to Trader Joe’s, which is no match for this selection, but good in a pinch, and open a full two hours later.