There’s a game I play in my head when I am standing in a long line at the supermarket: If I were to leave Chicago tomorrow, with the promise of returning now and then, what food would I miss the most? What hole in my stomach would I struggle to fill? Pizza? I’ve consumed enough deep dish for six lifetimes (sorry, local boosters, but Chicago holds no great claim on pizza quality). Not bread, not ice cream. A Depression Dog at Gene & Jude’s? Probably. I’d mourn the simple pancakes at Lula Cafe, and that $10 burger special at Vincent.
But I would dream about the orange juice at Mariano’s.
I dream about it now.
It is liquid gold, citrus sunshine, fresh-squeezed comfort and joy in sticky plastic jugs that every decent brunch place in this city should be serving surreptitiously. It’s unpredictable in quality, and that quality ranges from supernatural to sainthood. And yet, at a glance, it’s also no different from other fresh-squeezed OJs. The ingredients label for Mariano’s OJ reads identical to the ingredients label for the same thing at Whole Foods Market.
It says: “Oranges.”
That’s it.
Mariano’s orange juice is not magical. But the other day as I was standing at the juice case, a woman in a business suit sighed in relief as she grabbed a jug. At a Mariano’s downtown, I once overheard a pair of tourists trying to decide if this was “the one” — the OJ they’d heard about. Which didn’t surprise me: The Cult of Mariano’s Orange Juice engages in an ongoing whisper campaign. Its troops occupy your home and office and probably sit in seats of power, ever eager to break up the tedium of an Uber ride with a random, “You know what’s amazing? Mariano’s orange juice.” Not surprisingly, the cult’s rhetoric gets nuttier online. Among the comments on Twitter: “What drug is in Mariano’s orange juice that it is so good even though I don’t like orange juice,” and “Mariano’s freshly squeezed orange juice was probably squeezed by Jesus Christ himself,” and “GONNA SHOTGUN MARIANO’S ORANGE JUICE UNTIL MY GUMS BLEED.”
That’s right, an all-caps level cult.
Like others, I was a child of Tropicana, though not an undiscerning one: I go “Lots of pulp,” ride or die. I avoid the “Some pulp” middlebrow nonsense, and “No pulp” is an abuse of photosynthesis — a single monotonous neon acridness without texture or soul. But like any mass-produced food, there’s consistency. I learned to love Tropicana, and to think of any competing orange juice as an unpalatable, saccharine orange-colored syrup in disguise.
At the other end of the spectrum? Raw, freshly squeezed juice. But it was often perversely and prohibitively expensive — $10 and $12 for a small plastic bottle is still not uncommon. A jug of the stuff was a seasonal treat, something to serve with brunch at home on Christmas.
As John McPhee wrote in “Oranges,” his landmark 1967 profile of the fruit and its production, “Fresh oranges have become, in a way, old-fashioned.” He was thinking mostly of frozen concentrate — “with a laboratory-controlled balance between its acids and its sugars; its color and its flavor components as uniform as science can make them” — but the point remains true. Many of us have been conditioned to accept that real fruit is a luxury. Besides, as McPhee described, the orange is ancient, and honorable. It is steeped in more history — beginning with a long migration from its origins in the South China Sea, “down into the Malay Archipelago, then on four-thousand miles of ocean current to the east coast of Africa, across the desert by caravan and into the Mediterranean basin, then over the Atlantic to the American continents” — than we allow.
Who can afford gravitas at the breakfast table?
And so, the first few times I ventured into the produce section of Mariano’s, I paid no attention to the juice case. And then I noticed the price — “3.99,” for a large 64-ounce jug of orange juice. And looking closer still, I noticed the display: At some Mariano’s stores, the juice section appears in a permanent state of chaos, as if every day were a snow emergency and our OJ resources were dwindling. Their OJ never appears alone; it lives alongside fresh-squeezed jugs of grapefruit, beets, carrots and limes. I once bought a small bottle of Mariano’s fresh celery juice — and frankly, it tasted exactly like celery, minus the bloody mary. (Sadly, it contained no additives.) Their fresh-squeezed watermelon, though better, seems to come from the least-flavorful curls of the watermelon rind, tasting a little wanting and frail.
The OJ is the star.
The first indication that it was different was its cloudiness, its pulp that swamps the sides of jugs in citrus strings and mash. The color is often more pale than typical orange juices. It pours in a frothy torrent, and oddly it often seems a touch warm, as if it were standing at room temperature just long enough to burn away the frost of its refrigeration. Bitterness is there, but faintly, in hints and slimy chunks of orange; a tartness is there too, but again, just barely. And yet, depending on your OJ jug, none of that may be true.
Because orange juice, handled properly, as McPhee describes, is as varied as wine, its aroma, flavor, color and sweetness reliant on season, species, country, street, farm — did you know oranges pulled from the south side of a tree taste a little sweeter than oranges from the rest of a tree?
According to Amanda Puck, director of strategic brand management for Mariano’s — yes, the same Amanda Puck who hosted “Check, Please!” on WTTW — the oranges (which are often Valencia, and not organic) originate in Florida and Texas, with California stepping into that mix during summer months. And of course, the key to the orange juice was always in the sourcing. Yet it’s unlikely that sourcing is so radically different from other Chicago supermarkets. For instance, the fresh-squeezed OJ at Whole Foods: Like Mariano’s, it’s also squeezed in-house, at each location, but it’s way more tart — and $10 a pop (for that same 64-ounce size).
Could it be the genius of Mariano’s orange juice is partly in its sourcing and partly in its lack of fussiness, its simple jugs stripped of logos, additives, pretension and big prices?
It’s $3.99 because the supermarket “loves to offer customers significant value,” Puck told me. Which is nice, though I suspect the juice is also something of a loss leader, underpriced to get regulars in the door, squeezed by near-minimum wage workers, using non-organic oranges to lower the price. And unlike at juice bars, there’s no lifestyle tax, no sense that you are paying extra for a bit of moral certainty or the self-satisfaction of doing right by your body.
At its best — with the froth on top, the room temperature chill, and the brightness just shy of sharpness — Mariano’s OJ is a time machine back to the OJ I sipped from thimble-size glasses on my first trip to Disney World, a revelatory taste that instantly explained how orange juice should taste.
You’re buying juice. Perhaps you’re buying memories of how an orange first tasted. But you’re not paying for virtue.
Just remember: Shake well.
Twitter @borrelli
