Raw Burmese python fillets are surprisingly pink.

Adventurous cooks can find them at Southwest Portland's Barbur World Foods. Look for them in the meat fridge near the cuts of alligator, ostrich and kangaroo.

The python, imported from Vietnam, is expensive: $35.99 per pound.

"For that price," says store owner John Attar with a laugh, “it had better not taste like chicken.”

He's expanding the store’s meat selection, and python fillets are the newest addition. He doesn’t believe he has sold any yet but notes that alligator, venison and rabbit are selling well.

Had customers asked him to stock the python? "No, we will special-order things for people but I’m always looking for something new, asking myself, 'How do I want to be different?' ”

Take the produce selection:

“Taste this,” says Attar, handing over a sliver of sweet lime. It looks like lemon but tastes sweet, with not a hint of tartness. “It’s very popular with Iranians,” Attar says. The sour orange (looks like an orange but is face-puckeringly tart) is, he says, “wonderful in salad."

Also for sale are guavas, cherimoyas, star fruit, chayote squash, plantains, red bananas, mandarinquats and many other hard-to-find fruits and vegetables.

And unlike the python fillets, most of the delicacies at Barbur World Foods are very reasonably priced.

“I buy directly from producers and importers and I pass the savings along,” Attar says. "Our motto is, 'We bring the world to you.' ”

It’s a formula that seems to work. Attar and his wife, Mirna, bought the store at the busy intersection of Southwest Barbur Boulevard and Southwest Capitol Highway in 2004.

Take a trip

Barbur World Foods

9845 S.W. Barbur Blvd.

503-244-0670

Hours: 7 a.m.-10 p.m. daily

www.barbur

worldfoods.com

The couple, who are Lebanese American, already owned

restaurant in Southeast Portland and the small international grocery store that adjoins it.

The Barbur store, at 13,000 square feet, is “too small for a supermarket and too big for a convenience store,” Attar says, describing his reaction the day he went out to look at what was then called Barbur Foods.

There had been a store at that location for about 70 years, he says. “I wondered what I was going to do with it, but sometimes your heart gives you a signal.”

He changed the name to Barbur World Foods, and stocked it with goods from all over the globe with a focus on Europe and the Middle East. And customers came. The business has gone from strength to strength.

The store had 14 employees when the Attars bought it. Today they employ 41 people.

“You can hear customers speaking about five or six different languages every day,” says Attar, who notes that regulars come from the neighborhood and also drive from all over the region. People love to get a taste of their homelands or to reconnect with the flavors of their childhoods.

As well as meat and produce there’s a dizzying array of candies, cookies and spices. The enormous beer cooler contains more than 650 kinds of beer, local microbrews as well as brews from farther afield such as Morocco or Armenia.

There are 1,200 kinds of wine, including Lebanese and Georgian varieties, and a huge selection of olive oils. "To me it's food, not something you use just a drop of here and there," Attar says.

The delicatessen featuring Mirna Attar’s Lebanese recipes is at the heart of the operation. The store is famous for its huge, puffy rounds of pita bread. They emerge fragrant and warm from the deli’s wood-fired pizza oven, and toppings run the gamut from pepperoni to zataar and lamb.

“It gets crazy here in the afternoons” when customers stop by to pick up their dinners, Attar says. On our tour of the store he stops constantly to address customers by name, ask after their families, shake their hands. Many of them know his name.

“We can’t afford big advertisements,” he says. "So we’re very interactive, we have wine tastings, an email newsletter, seasonal parties, and we rely on word of mouth.”

And he is always making changes.

"Right now," he says, "we’re expanding our range of gluten-free items." In the longer term he plans to add a juice bar, an olive bar and an espresso bar.

And one day soon, he says, "maybe we can host an exotic-meat tasting."

But first, he needs to track down a good python recipe.