Aubut Distribution Alimentaire
3975 rue Saint-Ambroise

This place makes me uneasy.

Nestled just a short walk behind the Atwater Market, walking up to this building really starts to feel like you're on the wrong side of the tracks. Wait, you are. Like you're in a horror movie and you know you shouldn't be wandering away from the group, or that girl's head shouldn't be rotating more than 180 degrees, or that nobody should really be buying anything in this store.

It's actually my neighbourhood, so I have nothing against the area itself, but the store freaks me out. This food wholesaler is not really a horror movie, but films like "Food, Inc." certainly make it feel about the same. Aubut Distribution Alimentaire is really a big warehouse, open to the public, but mostly serving restaurants, caterers and other food service industry people. They drive up to place orders and have them loaded into their car, or walk on in, grab an enormous cart and wind through the factory-style grocery store. Full service or self-service, for convenience. The scary part is that tons of companies and individuals in the city actually buy from this place and we, the unknowing consumer, are only a few degrees of separation away from the purchase.
For the most part things come in bulk, like the huge containers of pickled peppers you see at shawarma places. Huge bottles of salad dressings and soup bases line the walls. Think that restaurant with the $3.00 vegetable soup appetizer is a good deal? Maybe not so much. There a more than a few non-soup ingredients in these. Think your warm dinner roll was made fresh in the restaurant kitchen? Nope. "Freshly baked" does not mean "home-made". The roll could have even been partially baked before it was frozen and packed into a box. That way the restaurant has even less work to do to warm it up and get it into your table's bread basket or onto your cafeteria-style tray. Chicken a la King? Not so royal...
That's what Aubut is - relatively affordable convenience. There aren't sales, really. Things might be priced slightly lower than retail, and when you buy in bulk that may make a difference for a restaurant, but the box of cereal you can buy here may not even be less expensive than at Provigo. You need to pick your purchases carefully.
I came here for duck fat to make duck confit. I needed a whole lot of it. Sure, I could get it at any butcher in the city, but it costs the same amount everywhere - $5.00 for 500mL (a small container). I'd heard that Aubut had imported duck fat from France (not fresh like at the city's butchers), that this fat came from the "correct" duck for duck confit, so would give a better result, and cost significantly less. How? Who knows, but I could save myself a small fortune (about $10) by buying it there. As it's my neighbourhood, I walked on down. I did find the duck fat, and it was cheaper than the market, but I wasn't expecting the rest of the frozen meat section to be so distressing. If there's a television-sized box of chicken breasts in the freezer, then in some factory somewhere the rest of those chickens were divided into more boxes, some for people food and some not for people food. That makes a whole lot of chickens.
There is actually a section of the store that sells only specialty products. A small selection of organics, honeys, mustards, paté, cutely wrapped up in Grandma-style packaging (at full price, of course), but you turn around from this short shelf to containers upon containers of "Alfredo" powder, or "Modified Cognac". Cheese and cream are not naturally powders, and cognac...well, the only things added to the "modified cognac" are salt, pepper and sulfites. That's not a lot, so why not use the real thing? Yeah it's more expensive, but you'd think a restaurant that would use cognac in a sauce (this is not drinking cognac) would have enough self-respect to use something decent, or at least could add their own salt and pepper. They probably wouldn't think to add sulfites to it. Generally, when I cook with cognac I don't think, "Hey, I bet this would taste better with sulfites." I'm also thinking the powders get bought a whole lot more often than the small-production, local patés and jellies. There are other, less home-made patés in the refridgerated areas, however, that have a crazy amount of preservatives and things that have nothing to do with liver (but lots to do with fat and preservation), and therefore cost a whole lot less.

There is an area with fresh produce ("fresh" being open to interpretation...) where you can get enormous blocks of cheese, over-sized vegetables, and nothing organic. Much more money is being made through imports of frozen fish and meat at good to average prices, but that blue marlin is endangered, and the duck legs were pulled from an overfed, extremely reluctant duck.

So the store gives me the creeps. Like walking into a place where food goes to die. To think that all these enormous packages of processed junk end up in stomachs, and the owners of those stomachs pay for the privilege! On the one hand, this is a magical store; it forms the beginning of delicious recipes at many of the city's respected establishments who pick and choose their products carefully from among the more respectable options. On the other hand, I never want to eat anything pickled that comes in a jar or can or plastic container that big again. Ever.

This place is the best justification for the entire local food movement. Aubut Distribution Alimentaire should go the way of the blue marlin. See how it feels to be bullied.

Distribution Alimentaire Aubut
Hours: Mon-Fri 7am-6pm, Sat 7am-5pm, Sun 10am-5pm
514-933-0939