FAIRHOPE, Ala. — “Let the food be your medicine and the medicine be your food.”
That motto hangs above The International Goat, a booth inside the Piggly Wiggly at 100 Plantation Pointe in Fairhope. Owner James Tarabay says everything he sells is all-natural, with no preservatives and nothing synthetic.
Tarabay, a native of Beirut, Lebanon, spent 40 years running Four Winds International Market in Pensacola, Florida, before selling the shop and retiring. In 2021, Danny Manning, owner of the Fairhope Piggly Wiggly, convinced him to come back into business with The International Goat.
The Name
The name comes from Tarabay’s family. His granddaughter had trouble pronouncing “jidi” — grandfather in Arabic — and her attempt came out sounding like “little goat.”
He is also “the GOAT” in his family, in the sports sense: Greatest of All Time.
What He Sells
The menu carries the influences of Tarabay’s background. It includes several types of feta cheese dips, freshly baked baguettes, and tabbouleh — the Lebanese salad of parsley, diced tomatoes, garlic and olive oil — alongside muffulettas, gyros and sandwiches.
The dessert case runs from cheesecake and German chocolate cake to his own baklava and cannoli. He roasts his own coffee and stocks an array of internationally sourced items, including dozens of imported cheeses.
Customers unsure where to start are handed samples. The mango almond feta dip and the pickled piquanté peppers are frequent starting points.
The Philosophy Behind the Counter
Tarabay returns consistently to ingredients, and he frames the subject in terms of what food does rather than how it tastes.
“We changed a lot of people from being unhealthy to become healthy because of what they’re eating, what they’re drinking, and that’s what we have been doing for the last seven years,” Tarabay said. “It’s very important. What you eat is very important because our body is made from food and water, not made from chemicals and preservatives, so what you eat, let the food be your medicine.”
The motto he quotes is commonly attributed to Hippocrates, and it has become a fixture of Mediterranean culinary tradition regardless of whether the attribution is historically firm.
What is well documented is the dietary pattern itself. The Mediterranean diet — heavy on olive oil, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, herbs, fish and moderate dairy, light on processed food and red meat — is among the most extensively studied eating patterns in nutrition research, with a substantial body of work associating it with cardiovascular and metabolic benefits.
Lebanese cuisine sits squarely within that pattern. Tabbouleh is essentially an herb salad. Feta is a moderate-fat cheese used in small quantities. Olive oil is the primary fat. The traditional structure of the cuisine — many small dishes built around vegetables, legumes and herbs — produces meals in which vegetables are the substance rather than the garnish.
A Booth Inside a Grocery Store
The arrangement itself is worth noting, because it reflects something happening in independent grocery retail more broadly.
Independent and regional grocers compete against national chains with enormous purchasing advantages. Price competition on commodity goods is a difficult strategy for a single store. What an independent can offer that a national chain cannot easily replicate is something specific to that location — a prepared foods counter, a specialty department, a vendor whose product exists nowhere else in town.
Bringing in an operator with 40 years of specialty food experience gives the Fairhope Piggly Wiggly a department it could not build from scratch and could not staff with conventional hiring. For Tarabay, the arrangement removes the burdens that make an independent shop hard to run — a separate lease, separate utilities, separate foot traffic — and places him where customers already are.
It is a structure that has become more common as grocers look to prepared and specialty foods for margin that commodity groceries no longer provide.
Forty Years in Pensacola
Tarabay’s four decades running Four Winds International Market in Pensacola represent the kind of business that anchors a region’s food culture without ever becoming widely known outside it.
International markets serve a dual role along the Gulf Coast. They supply immigrant and first-generation communities with ingredients unavailable in conventional groceries, and they introduce those ingredients to everyone else. A shop that stocks imported cheeses, olives, spices, grains and preserved goods becomes the place local restaurant cooks source what they cannot get from a broadline distributor.
Retiring from a business like that after 40 years and then returning to run a counter in another town suggests the work is not primarily about the income.
Samples and Advice
Tarabay describes his role as extending past the transaction.
“I’m happy all the time and we’re helping our customers and people,” he said. “They can come to me for advice, and I tell them and they see the difference. We’re here for a short time on this earth we’re passing through. Help who you can help and bring people up.”
The sampling practice is a deliberate part of that. Specialty food sells poorly by description. A customer who has never eaten a mango almond feta dip has no reference point for what it is, and a label will not supply one. A spoonful will.
It is also how a specialty counter builds the repeat business it depends on. A customer who tries something unfamiliar and likes it returns for it, and eventually tries the next thing.
Where to Find It
The International Goat operates inside the Piggly Wiggly at 100 Plantation Pointe in Fairhope.
The location sits in a Baldwin County food scene that has expanded considerably in recent years, from the restaurants of downtown Fairhope to the seafood houses along the bay and the growing dining districts in Foley and the beach communities.
A Lebanese specialty counter inside a grocery store is a particular kind of addition to that landscape — not a restaurant, not a conventional grocery department, but a place where someone with 47 years in the business hands you something to taste and tells you what is in it.