Wholey's In The Strip

Wholey's in the Strip? I bet most of you thought "boy, that sounds a little dirty!" When I first moved here and someone told me about Wholey's (pronounced "Wool ees") and The Strip, I said the same exact thing. Huh? I pictured some bar on a seedy downtown street. But I found out that it's really a street just a block away from downtown Pittsburgh that includes Wholey's the fish market, a few Chinese grocery stores, a speciality coffee shop, Italian stores including prepared foods and several other unique stores, I loved it. There is such a mix of people from all over. You can go to one store and hear Chinese, the next store everyone is speaking Italian. There are street vendors selling fried foods and Chicken on a stick and tables full of sweets. And let's not forget Steeler shirts, hats, jewelry, scarves, etc. All for pretty reasonable prices.

But Wholey's is one of my favorite. I love fresh seafood but I also love the atmosphere. People are friendly and even if it's like a can of sardines in there (hee, hee!), it's fun. Grab a number and get ready to shout your order! And while you wait, you can watch the train race around the track suspended from the ceiling. My kids hold their noses all the way through the store cause of the seafood smell, but that's just part of the fun. As you wind your way through, you can pick up some fresh chicken or beef and finish up your shopping with the produce section at the end.

This is the front area where you can order your fish or seafood. They have tanks of live fish and seafood that they can cut up fresh, which is what the guy in the first picture is doing. A little too gross for me!

We got some of this crab to save for Christmas. It's one of my husband's favorites meals.

The meat department. It's a lot bigger than this, but the crowds make it hard to get a good picture!

The train, the train....everyone look at the train!

"Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks."

-unknown

"The only kind of seafood I trust is the fish stick, a totally featureless fish that doesn't have eyeballs or fins."
-Dave Barry