Post face-lift and lengthy major remodeling, there's only thing that's the same about the Safeway on Wisconsin Avenue. It's still the one that's known as 'the Social Safeway' for the well-dressed diplomats and hostesses who greet each other in the aisles as though the supermarket were a cocktail party. If you look for it online, you won't find it immediately if you click Find a Store because it won't accept Washington DC as a valid address. But that's carping.

So let me carp some more...

I'm thrilled there's an alternative to Whole Foods for supermarket shopping in central DC. And what this vast store offers is comprehensive. Along with its meat, liquor, fish and produce counters, it has a bakery, a deli, flower shop, pharmacy, sushi bar, olive bar, with a place to buy nuts and seeds, an eating area and wifi. According to the web site it also has: "Starbucks, Video, Fuelstation, DryClean, Digital Photo, DVDPlay Kiosk, Coinmaster, Jamba Juice, Adult Immunizations, Travel Immunizations, 24 hour PayPump." But the place was so immense, I don't know if I ever found them. Anything you want from any of these, Safeway will home deliver. Apart from the last five in the list, I suppose...

So why am I carping? Because I was hoping for a Wegman's. If you don't know this supermarket in Sterling and Falls Church, it understands what Whole Foods has nailed: make the place you want soccer moms shop in so design-edgy they don't feel like they're soccer moms. Bring a little Manhattan to the food stock-up experience. Better still, beyond that concept Wegmans doesn't dictate what you can eat. The new Safeway meat counter offers the familiar yards of bright vermillion cuts primarily based on beef every which way, and chicken breasts. There are a few other options, of course. But not much. There's a game I play at Whole Foods if I've been lucky enough to have been on vacation in France shopping at their regular supermarkets. I ask the butcher if he has rabbit,. Or game. Or pheasant, partridge, kidneys, liver, oxtail, pork trotters, pork belly (though that's now become acceptable), duck legs. I do it individually. It takes forever. And each time he says, "No, we don't do that." Wegman's does. Along with ostrich, buffalo, and other oddities. And it puts all its organic produce in one place so you don't have to be alert, as you have to be at Whole Foods, to whether you're buying 'conventional' or 'organic'.

On the three occasions I went through Safeway, a good deal of the produce looked tired. From a distance, its seafood counter is impressive. But the fish I bought from it didn't have the tight flesh that squeaks 'fresh, fresh!'.  Still, it's early days. And I do appreciate having a wider choice in supermarket destinations. I just wish it wasn't one that made me feel like a soccer mom, especially when I'm not one. But as a friend said, "Come on. It's a Safeway! It only got bigger. Why would you think it would change? You want Wegmans? Drive out to Dulles Airport!" He's right. And I'm done carping...

Safeway, 1855 Wisconsin Ave NW, 202 333 3223

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