Observer photo by Grace Verhey
A worker packages seafood for a customer at the Grand Mart fish counter.

Four reasons you should expand your culinary horizons

by GRACE VERHEY

If you think home-cooked Asian food begins with frozen vegetables and ends with a soggy teriyaki sauce nightmare, think again. Good cooking always starts with the right ingredients, and your problem may not be your kitchen skills, but your choice of supermarkets. Here are five reasons why you should skip Safeway and try out your local ethnic grocery store.

1. To strengthen a friendship
If you’re unsure of venturing out to an ethnic supermarket alone, invite a friend to come along. I first heard about ethnic grocery stores from my friend Peggy Tsai, a first generation Chinese American. We went to Grand Mart, an international supermarket in Falls Church, Va., that caters to Southeast Asian, Latino and Korean customers. To my surprise, it was just down the road from my usual grocery haunts: Safeway and Harris Teeter.

Grand Mart was a whole new world for me. Though its size and layout looked like a conventional supermarket, the shelves were filled with many unfamiliar products. Peggy kindly overlooked my cultural ineptitude and introduced me to the ingredients of Asian cuisine. In each grocery aisle, I learned more about her background and found new appreciation for her family traditions.

In the produce section, Peggy explained the differences between the wide variety of leafy, stemmy greens that anchor the Asian diet, including Bok Choy, Napa Cabbage and Yu Choy. As we examined the packages of pork ears and feet in the meat section, Peggy told me about the Asian practice of eating all parts of an animal.

She pointed out her favorite delicacy: beef tendon. It looked like three ivory-colored lumps on a meat tray covered with cellophane. Peggy said her mom always makes beef tendon as a special treat when she goes home to visit. Stewed for hours with soy sauce and star anise, the tendon tastes chewy, gelatinous and delicious, Peggy said. We laughed together as I grimaced.

Observer photo by Grace Verhey
Chinese eggplant is used in many Asian dishes

2. To expand your horizons

When you visit an ethnic supermarket, don’t expect the sanitized Safeway experience. There will not be a Starbucks counter, an on-site florist or an ATM machine. Shopping at Grand Mart challenged my definition of a “normal” grocery store. People weren’t there for lattes and balloons, but to get the ingredients they needed to prepare food from their ethnic homelands.

Unlike the scant “ethnic foods” section at Harris Teeter or Safeway, Grand Mart helped me learn about foods unfamiliar to many European Americans. Instead of being squeamish, I tried to embrace the shopping trip as a cross-cultural learning experience.

Pungent smells of produce permeated the air — onions, garlic, fresh herbs and fruit. Lettuce leaves lay strewn across the floor. Shoppers picked through piles of carrots, summer squash and brightly colored peppers. Large crates of leafy greens stood at the ends of aisles, slightly wilted and without protective plastic coverings. The food seemed fresher and closer to the source than at a conventional supermarket. The floors didn’t gleam, but the store was clean.

I fought the urge to shudder at the sight of packages of chicken feet (a specialty in dim sum, a Chinese meal made up of a series of small dishes) or the Southeast Asian Durian fruit with its sweet, custard-like flesh that “smells like garbage,” according to Peggy.

Observer photo by Grace Verhey
Grand Mart sells packages of chicken feet, a dim sum specialty

3. To shop with an ethnic community

As a white European American, I had the unusual and refreshing experience of being a minority among the Asian American and Latino American customers at Grand Mart. I realized that the products so unfamiliar to me were used by others every day inside homes in my own neighborhood.

In the dairy section there were large tubs of kimchee, a spicy pickled cabbage appetizer Peggy said is served at every Korean meal. Alongside the chicken eggs, there were tiny brown-speckled quail eggs used in stews. There were also duck eggs, the yokes of which are baked inside sweet pastries for Chinese New Year.

The Grand Mart shopping experience had much more of a community feel, which might seem crowded if you’re accustomed to the spacious aisles of a conventional grocery store. In the seafood section, customers sifted through bins of raw shrimp with their bare hands, while rows of glassy-eyed fish lay dead on beds of ice.

Peggy reminisced about shopping trips with her mom in Oakland’s Chinatown fish markets. There, fish for sale swam in tanks and fishmongers netted and “whacked” them to death upon a customer’s purchase. At the Grand Mart fish counter, there were also a few fish swimming in a tank, and a net hung conspicuously on the wall behind the counter.

Selected ethnic supermarkets in the D.C. metro area
District of Columbia
Bestway Supermarket, 202.265.3768
Glover Park Market, 202.333.4030
Orient Foods, 202.265.7100

Maryland
Bestway Supermarket, Silver Spring, 301.587.5262
India Grocers, Rockville, 301.340.8656
Kam Sam Supermarket, Rockville, 301.315.9558
New Asia Market, Rockville, 301.762.0938
Thai Market, Silver Spring, 301.495.2779

Virginia
Afghan Market, Alexandria, 703.212.9529
Bestway Supermarket, Falls Church, 703.560.2101
Grand Mart, Alexandria, 703.941.1177
Grand Mart, Falls Church, 703.533.1700
Super H Mart, Fairfax, 703.273.0570

For other locations, visit: http://localdc.com/ethnicmarkets.htm

4. To save money

If the three first reasons don’t motivate you much, you should still consider shopping at an ethnic grocery store for the sake of your pocket book. Chicken feet and beef tongue may never make it into your grocery cart, but you will likely find many of your favorite products for less than you’d pay at a conventional supermarket.

This is especially true in the produce department. Sugar snap peas cost $2.99 per pound at my local Harris Teeter, but only $1.99 for two pounds at Grand Mart. You’ll pay 69 cents per bunch of cilantro at Harris Teeter but you can get four bunches for $1 at Grand Mart. And that’s just sampling of the savings.

In exchange for that savings, you’ll have to adjust your standards about the way food is packaged. Grand Mart greens require a bit more washing to remove residual silt. You must be more discriminating about produce quality, and you may have to pick through wilted, insect-nibbled or wrinkled vegetables to find fresh ones. Grand Mart meat spoils faster [any idea why? Fewer preservatives?], Peggy said, so you should watch for expired “sell by” dates.

But Grand Mart’s advantages outweigh its disadvantages. In addition to cheap produce, you will find a large selection of Asian cooking sauces and condiments — far more choices than you’ll get at Safeway.