From homemade donuts with glazes from seasonal fresh fruit (apricots and strawberries to name a few), to gourmet chocolate, Sicilian-style street pizza, Oysters and Manhattans (the cocktail), Long Island-borne pears and Hoboken mozzarella that has inspired Yo La Tengo, needless to say there were a dizzying amount of offerings from “The Island”.

Lines began sometime around 6 as eager eaters lined for samples of meticulously roasted pork with horseradish cream sauce and cheese sticks from Murray’s, and later, to finish up with lavendar and ginger artisanal-flavored ice creams.

As a Brooklynite, my own borough’s sustainable and foodie renaissance has left me (I’m ashamed to admit) a teeny bit jaded, and I couldn’t help but feel it as I approached the market — I figured this whole time that we were one step ahead of our neighbors to the west since Edible Brooklyn was launched in the Spring of 2006 and have been a culinary and sustainable food tour de force ever since. But a whirl around the venue softened my indifference, and a gander at the mag left me even more impressed.

Who knew that there is a bookstore in the Upper East Side devoted to cookbooks alone (over 1K titles in French and 2-3K out-of-prints in the basement)? That somewhere in Gramercy wasabi is served grated on sharkskin as opposed to copper so that more surface is exposed to oxygen, hence a more powerful flavor? That Isaac Mizrahi started cooking because he loved the word sauté?