Putting culture on the grocery list
| Saturday, Oct 27 2007 07:25 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Mar 28 2009 01:24 AM
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Gursinder Randhawa, right, and Narinder Sidhu shop at All India Sweets & Groceries on South Real Road, just off Ming Avenue.
There's plenty of variety at the Bakersfield Ranch Market on Niles.
Imported tobacco from the Middle East, and the water pipes used to smoke it, are some of the most unique items found at Al Huwda Market on Kentucky Street in Old Town Kern.
Amarjit S. Sidhu, who is from India, is a regular at All India Sweets & Groceries on South Real Road. The store offers Indian foods and goods as well as an all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet.
People of Bakersfield: The world is your oyster -- and you can eat it, too.
That's because the city's metro area is blessed with a variety of ethnic food stores and supermarkets that offer the tastes of the world for you to serve on your table: from Indian sweets to halal meats, permissible under Islamic law, to vegetarian frozen fish to blue corn tortillas.
These stores -- which often buy from Los Angeles- or Bay Area-based importers -- also sell the cookware, tableware and utensils for preparing and serving ethnic foods, and offer exotic decorative and fashion goods, foreign-language literature, music and DVDs, even religious books, statuettes and other items.
And some have dining areas for those who may not like to cook ethnic foods but still love to eat them.
Prices at these stores can be lower than at large supermarket chains, too.
"I always come here. I save on some things maybe 70 percent," said Bakersfield resident Blanca Short, 27, who shops at No. 1 Supermarket at the Little Saigon Plaza on Union Avenue.
"I get all my flours, and a lot of the produce is really cheap here," she said. "I'm also allergic to gluten, and they have a lot of snacks and other things made from rice flour."
We went to some of these ethnic food stores and found each visit to be a true cross-cultural adventure.
Invariably, the sound of foreign music streaming from speakers, or of a subtitled film playing on a television set, added to the experience.
So did the smells of anything from fresh-baked bread to teas, spices and flavored tobacco.
Language was never a problem: Foreign-born merchants spoke English, and most product packaging included English labels or translations.
Owners and managers at these stores said that while they cater to a specific clientele -- for example, Hispanics, Indians, Muslims, East-Asians or others -- at least one out of every four or five shoppers is from a different ethnic or cultural group, a testament to the ever-expanding diversity that exists in the local community.
So read on -- but better yet, travel to one of these little slices of faraway lands right here in our own metropolitan living room.
Bon voyage!
No. 1 Supermarket: A Global Food Store
Location: At Little Saigon Plaza, 333 Union Ave.
Hours: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. with shorter hours on some holidays
Telephone: 323-8883
Specialty: Asian foods, some Latin American foods
Most popular items: Live seafood, according to Diyarina Motta, 29, an Indonesian native who has worked there since last year and whose husband is Mexican.
“They have a great variety of seafood,” said shopper Ana Angel, a Bakersfield resident who moved here from Los Angeles two years ago and is originally from El Salvador.
Angel said she has shopped at #1 Supermarket since last year for herself, her husband and their three children. But when she needs Salvadoran food items, Angel said, such as certain types of beans and chicharrones (fried pork skins), she shops at Vallarta Supermarket on Niles Street near Fairfax Road, which caters primarily to Mexican and Central-American shoppers.
Most unique items: The noodle selection and frozen food variety, according to Motta.
• Noodle choices include: chow mein, vermicelli, Canton-style egg noodles, rice flour noodles, noodles with names like “Long Life Chinese Noodles,” extra-thin, hairlike noodles, even Japanese Kotashima-brand macaroni made in China.
• Frozen foods include: red-bean-filled buns and an assortment of vegetarian fish, including haddock fillet, tuna roll and ribbon fish.
Other unique items: A wide assortment of cooking pots and steamers priced from around $10 to $80, coconut sugar, fish sauce, cashew nut crackers, sour tamarind vegetable soup, black grass jelly, pickled mango slices, milkfish in oil and Chinese music CDs.
Al Huwda Market
Location: 600 Kentucky St.
Hours: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. However, the market closes briefly for about 15 minutes at around 1, 4 and 6 p.m. for Muslim prayers.
Telephone: 861-9520
Specialty: Halal (permissible under Islamic law) foods and other products.
Most popular items: Halal meat and cheese, honey and, during the holy month of Ramadan, dates, which are popular among Muslims as the Prophet Muhammad used dates to break his fast.
“In Ramadan, we sell almost 200 cases,” said owner Abdulla Sharafadin, who runs the store with his son, Omar.
Another popular item, Sharafadin said, are fava beans, which are native to North Africa and Southwest Asia, where Islam is a prominent religion. Sharafadin sells cans of the beans prepared with Lebanese, Egyptian, Palestinian and Saudi Arabian recipes.
Most unique items: Halal marshmallows made with halal-certified beef gelatin rather than any pork, and halal soap, which does not use pig’s fat, but is made from olive and laurel oils.
Other unique items: Religious goods, including prayer hats for men and head coverings for women that sell for $5 or less, and audio cassette copies and picture-framed verses of the Quran; enormous serving pans that can hold an entire goat during celebratory communal meals, according to Sharafadin; and an assortment of hookahs — water pipes for smoking — and the tobacco for the pipes, which comes in various fruit flavors.
Sharafadin likes the fact that the market is across the street from the Al-Farooq Islamic Center mosque in Old Town Kern.
“I can do my prayers and run my business instead of having to run from my house in the southwest,” he said.
All India Sweets and Groceries
Location: 1715 S. Real Road
Hours:
• Store — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday.
• Buffet — 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; closed Monday.
Telephone: 832-3900
Specialty: Indian foods
Most popular items: Samosa (fried triangular potato and vegetable pie), Indian sweets and a $3.99 all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet.
Most unique items: Paneer (unaged, unsalted Indian cheese that does not melt during cooking), ghee (clarified butter that comes in a jar and can be stored without refrigeration) and Bollywood movie DVD sales and rentals.
Vinod Khamboj, 54, who co-owns the store with his brother, Babbu, said he sells “no eggs, no meat, no fish or seafood.”
Khamboj, who has been in Bakersfield since 1992, said he, like many other members of Bakersfield’s Indian community, is from the Punjab region of India. There is a good reason why Punjabis like Bakersfield and other cities in the San Joaquin Valley, according to Khamboj.
“This weather is the same as Punjab. A lot of farmers and a lot of trucking companies (are) here” as in Punjab, much of which is rural, he said.
Pro’s Ranch Markets
Locations: 2705 S. H St. (with three other stores in Kern: one each in northeast Bakersfield, Arvin and Delano)
Hours: 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily
Telephone: 397-4490
Specialty: Mexican and other Latin American foods at all stores, with Filipino specialty foods and baked goods at the Delano store, to cater to that city’s large Filipino community.
Most popular item: tortillas.
“We sell literally millions a week. I wish we could have a sign outside like McDonald’s saying, ‘More than 30 million sold,’” said bakery director Alex Raffta, who also highlighted the popularity of baked goods.
Raffta said each Pro’s Ranch Market store has its own tortilla factory, bakery and sit-down eatery that serves tasty Mexican and Central-American dishes made from the same meat, produce, tortillas and other ingredients that are sold to the public.
Most unique items: Tortilla presses, for shaping one tortilla at a time, and comales (griddles for cooking tortillas); large steamer pots for cooking tamales; molcajetes and tejolotes (traditional Mexican-style mortars and pestles made of stone) for grinding spices and salsa ingredients; and, in the meat department, whole cow heads and the parts thereof, such as lips, cheeks and tongues.
This retailer, whose corporate office is in Ontario,, is a kind of “Who’s your papi?” among ethnic food store chains: It also has four stores in the Phoenix area and a newly opened store in El Paso, Texas, and business is booming.
Raffta, a Los Angeles native who has lived in Bakersfield for 15 years, just returned from the El Paso store’s opening. He said consumers actually cross the border from Mexico just to shop there.
