Small Artisanal Food Purveyors Make Really Delicious Food

We ate our way through NYC's Super(Duper) Market, a three-day pop-up artisanal food shop. Lots of sweets and bacon-infused popcorn ahead.

Paper magazine is sponsoring a three-day pop-up artisanal food fair in Manhattan called Super(Duper) Market, with vendors from across the country (but mostly Brooklyn and San Francisco). Here are some of my favorites. I had never tried New Orleans-style Sno-Balls before!

The market runs through Sunday, July 15th.

Nutritional Value cookies!

The illustrator Maira Kalman (who is amazing) has a booth where she was selling her collection of vintage egg slicers for $5. She told me that she just felt like it was time to get rid of them. She was also selling an egg cuber, which is a gadget that turns your egg into a square.

The Liddabit Sweets people looooove bacon. This popcorn is coated with bourbon coffee caramel and has bits of cooked bacon in it. I couldn't taste the bacon, but you probably shouldn't feed this to your vegetarian friends.

More bacon-infused popcorn from Ovenly.

The nice woman at the S'more Bakery booth showed us how she makes a Salted Sailor s'more, which is a homemade marshmallow covered with vanilla bean caramel sauce, between two cinnamon sugar and honey graham crackers. I thought I was fine with the original (a Hershey's chocolate bar + Honey Maid graham crackers + whatever slightly stale marshmallows were in the cupboard, roasted by putting them on the end of a stick and held over an open flame or gas stove — safe!), but this was pretty tasty.

More of S'more Bakery's s'mores. I wanted them all.

The Gefilteria reinterprets traditional Jewish food, like gefilte fish — but also miniature black-and-white cookies.

Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream comes from San Francisco. Owner Jake Godby brought two flavors with him all the way from the West Coast: Blue Bottle Vietnamese coffee and "Secret Breakfast," a.k.a. bourbon and cornflakes mixed in with vanilla ice cream. I was partial to the coffee, but both were delicious.

Jake got these tattoos of ice cream cones on his arm a few years ago.

Taza Chocolate hails from Somerville, Mass., and they infuse their chocolate with things like chipotle chilis and cinnamon. The chipotle chili chocolate was delicious — spicy and smoky and sweet.

Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls are based in NYC, but they're 100 percent New Orleans-style, except for being served in takeout containers. Don't call it a Sno-Cone, though: New Orleans Sno-Balls originated with the Hanson family in the '30s and are made with shaved, as opposed to crushed, ice. (Here's a great primer about shaved ice around the world.) Imperial Woodpecker offers over 30 flavors — everything from standards like watermelon and cherry to Sweet Lou's Nectar Cream, which I tried and which was, obviously, to die for. They are also available for bar mitzvahs! (Seriously.)

Photos by Michael Schmidt.