On our way out of work yesterday I was talking to the woman in the next cubicle about Indian food. She’s never been to Greater India and we thought it might be fun to go during lunch sometime next week. While on the subject of food she mentioned a grocery store up the street called “Assi Plaza.” I’d driven by the store a hundred times, it claims to be an International Food plaza and I was always vaguely interested, but afraid it was going to be a dive.
“Oh no, it’s very clean, and they have lots of fresh fruit, fresh fish, a whole aisle of seaweed for making sushi. Oh you’d love it. Let’s go!”
Let’s go? OK.
She drove the both of us through the traffic of rush hour Lansdale, and we soon arrived at the North Wales Assi store. I was still skeptical until I walked in the store – it’s a real supermarket! The vegetables and fruit were shockingly inexpensive (left with 4 bags of very fresh fruit and veggies for about $10). And the fish, oh the fish! We’d always gone to Whole Foods for the freshest fish, and knew that downtown Philly is really where you go when you want the super fresh stuff, but my co-worker explained that the excellent selection and freshness meant that she doesn’t make that monthly trek down to Philly for fish anymore. The fish is priced quite reasonably, and they had lots of great looking squid. Mmmm! I got so hungry.
Then there were the huge bags of rice, the curry being sold by the pound. All sorts of brands of soy milk, almost an entire aisle devoted just to seaweed. Tempura flour. A whole lot of sesame, ginger and soy marinades, soy sauce by the gallon! Anything I could imagine needing for my Asian food cooking needs, including dishes, woks and other cooking tools. I almost felt bad that my co-worker had driven me, I could have spent hours in there, but I also wanted to show Michael. In addition to all the groceries, they had a separate part of the store with little cafes that made sushi, korean and chinese foods, and little stores that sold other asian products.
Wow.
The culture shock was quite something too, I felt so white. Almost everyone else shopping in the store was Asian (including my co-worker, she is from the Phillipines). The music was certainly not in english, they graciously labelled most things with the english names as well as the native language equivalent. The whole store just felt very non-american, with perhaps the exception of it’s supermarketness. My co-worker explained that it’s the only such market in the area, so people come from all over, often as far as New Jersey, to shop there. Gosh I’m lucky to work only a few miles from there.