“The Feeling of Being Home”
Even as many Asian grocers have adapted to their changing customer bases, they insist that the communities that got them started remain top of mind.
At the Dallas-based chain India Bazaar, for example, organic lentils are on offer, and the bhakri is labeled gluten free — tweaks that not only help bring in non-South Asians, but also keep the store relevant for second-generation South Asians, said Anuja Ranade, the chief operating officer.
South Asians will always be the priority, said Ranade, even as store design or product packaging might evolve.
“It is about the feeling of being home when they walk into my store,” she said. The shops still smell of spices and the employees speak various South Asian dialects and wish customers a happy Diwali — “because when you go to Walmart, they say, ‘Merry Christmas! Happy Thanksgiving!’”
That authenticity is precisely the appeal for many non-Asian customers as well.
“I find it fascinating that there are things on the shelf that I have no idea what they are,” said Jill Connors, an economic development director for the city of Dubuque, Iowa, who started shopping at Hornbill Asian Market this year because she and her husband became vegan and wanted high-quality tofu at a reasonable price.
The sheer variety of foods to explore “brings more joy to the shopping and cooking process,” said Alexine Casanova, a nonprofit operations manager in Hamden, Connecticut, who shops at G Mart and Farmer’s India Market.
Sheil Shukla, who lives in the Chicago area and wrote the cookbook Plant-Based India, said the wide popularity of stores like Patel Brothers has given him more flexibility as a recipe developer. “It has made me not shy away from using traditional ingredients,” he said. “If I were developing my cookbook 10 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have a garam masala recipe in there because I wouldn’t think anyone would actually make it.”
These chains have also paved the way for more regionalized Asian grocery stores, like the Taiwanese shop Yun Hai in Brooklyn or Sua Superette, a Sichuan marketplace in Los Angeles — both run by second-generation Asian Americans.
“We are building on the work that previous people, like 99 Ranch, have done before,” said Lisa Cheng Smith, the founder of Yun Hai. “Without them, we wouldn’t be able to go to this next level of specialization.”
Many customers said they still missed the original stores — the humble community anchors where they hung out as children, or that made them feel welcome in their first years in a new country. But even as they expand, many of these grocers continue to function as so-called third places, spaces for social gathering. Mary Anne Amper, a Filipino American genetics researcher in Queens, said she plans trips to H Mart with her Asian American friends; they catch up as they wander the aisles looking at snacks.
Kat Lieu, the Seattle-based author of the cookbook Modern Asian Kitchen, said she didn’t mind the influx of non-Asian customers into these spaces.
“In an Asian grocery store I feel like a queen,” she said. “If I see a confused white person, I am like, ‘That’s the best soy sauce.’”
Perfect Instant Ramen
Recipe from Roy Choi
Adapted by Jeff Gordinier
Make some instant ramen. Slide an egg into the hot broth, then some butter. Crown the steaming noodles with slices of American cheese. Scatter a bunch of toasted sesame seeds and chopped scallions across the top, if you want to. Hardly a recipe! But for chef Roy Choi, who gave it to The New York Times in 2014, doctored instant ramen is a taste of Korean American straight-from-the-bag soul food. The butter, egg and cheese help coat the ramen noodles and deepen their flavor. “It’s our snack, it’s our peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it’s our bowl of cereal,” Choi said. “It’s something that has been a part of my life forever.”
Yield: 1 serving
Total time: 10 minutes
Ingredients
- 1 pack ramen noodles with flavor packet
- 1 large egg
- 1/2 teaspoon butter
- 2 slices American cheese
- 1/4 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds
- 1/2 scallion, green part only, thinly sliced on the bias, optional
Preparation
1. Bring 2 1/2 cups of water to a boil in a small saucepan. Add the noodles and cook for 2 minutes. Add the flavor packet, stir, and continue to cook for another 30 seconds.
2. Remove the pan from the heat and carefully add the egg. Do not stir; pull the noodles over the egg and let sit for one minute to poach.
3. Carefully transfer everything to a serving bowl, add the butter, cheese and sesame seeds and mix. Garnish with the scallions if desired.
By Priya Krishna, The New York Times
Last year, Americans bought half a billion packets of Shin Ramyun, the spicy, beefy Korean instant noodle. The bold red-and-black packaging feels inescapable: It’s a staple of college dorm rooms, bodegas, middle-of-the-country Walmarts and viral TikTok videos.
But 30 years ago, the noodles were largely unknown in the United States. No grocery store would stock them, said Kevin Chang, the director of marketing for Nongshim, Shin Ramyun’s parent company. Except, that is, for a few small Korean grocers, including a fledgling shop called H Mart in the Queens borough of New York City.
In the 1970s and ’80s, as Asian immigration to the United States soared, grocers like H Mart; Patel Brothers, an Indian grocery founded in Chicago; and 99 Ranch Market, originally focused on foods from China and Taiwan, started in Westminster, California, opened to meet the demand for ingredients that tasted like home. These were tiny mom-and-pop shops in suburban strip malls or outer boroughs with large Asian immigrant populations. They weren’t fancy, but they were vital to their communities.
Now, those same shops have transformed into sleekly designed chains with in-store roti machines, mobile ordering apps and locations across the country — all aiming to serve the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States and the millions of others who now crave flavors like Shin Ramyun, chili crisp, chaat masala and chai.
The H Mart of today is a $2 billion company with 96 stores and a namesake book (the bestselling memoir “Crying in H Mart,” by musician Michelle Zauner, who records as Japanese Breakfast). Last month, the chain purchased an entire shopping center in San Francisco for $37 million. Patel Brothers has 52 locations in 20 states, with six more stores planned in the next two years. 99 Ranch opened four new branches just last year, bringing its reach to 62 stores in 11 states. Weee!, an online Asian food store, is valued at $4.1 billion.
Asian grocery stores are no longer niche businesses: They are a cultural phenomenon.
A refrigerated display case at the H Mart in Little Ferry, N.J., on May 29, 2024. H Mart, started in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens, has become a part of American popular culture, known for its wide aisles of kimchi and tofu. (Tommy Kha, The New York Times)
Turning Specialties Into Staples
Despite their recent growth, Asian American grocers still represent less than 1% of the total U.S. grocery business, which is dominated by retailers such as Kroger and Walmart, said Dymfke Kuijpers, a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey who specializes in retail. But these stores exercise an outsize impact, she said, as they dictate which products the big-box chains stock.
Americans have become deeply enamored with Asian flavors: From April 2023 to April 2024, sales of items in the “Asian/ethnic aisle” in U.S. grocery stores grew nearly four times more than overall sales, according to data analytics company Circana. And more than any restaurant, cookbook or online video, Asian grocers are driving this shift.
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Source:: The Denver Post – Business
