Oldest Grocery in North America
Vacationing for a week in Québec City, Québec, Canada, my husband and I stepped into a taste of the 1870s...
North America’s oldest grocery store, the J.A. Moisan Epicerie, was founded in the year 1871 and is still in operation around 150 years later. While I have not come up with a lot of detail about what the store originally stocked, presumably it sold items that would be staples in French Canadian cooking including native foods accessible from the local region and imports directly from Europe to its very strategic Port de Québec.
The grocery store was passed through several generations of the original Moisan family for the first hundred years, and in the last fifty, it was purchased by three people who restored it to its likely Victorian elegance. Currently, a year after my husband and I visiting it in January 2019, it sounds that there is yet another owner after the people who restored J.A. Moisan Epicerie have retired. I hope that it retains it vibrancy and charm for many more decades!
1871 in Old Québec {Ville de Québec} was roughly one hundred years after the province of Québec became the property of Great Britain rather than France; the city has remarkably maintained not only its city walls {also unique as the oldest in North America} but also its heritage as one of the few remaining bastions of French culture in North America. The opening of the store was even 22 years prior to the opening of the famous Chateau Frontenac, the iconic landmark hotel overlooking the St. Lawrence River.
The store would be wonderful to browse for a longer length of time. As it was, I saw carefully-chosen selections of teas, salts, chocolates, spices, and much more, as well as a fine variety of produce, cheeses, meats, and dry goods. There are freshly homemade salads and pastries to buy at the counter and take away for a picnic. There were gifts such as soaps, tote bags, and greeting cards. It was very fun to step into a colorful and beautifully-arranged store, with low ceilings and small nooks, and explore the specialty offerings of an old and French grocery store in the midst of a cold Canadian winter.
For more information, see these articles from two of the
official Québec City “l’accent d’Amérique” websites: