Shopping in LA

Where I shop in Los Angeles and why.

For me, grocery shopping is a bit of hobby or at least a challenge, in addition to being a necessary errand and often a chore. In this post I will outline the places where I often shop and a few others that I visit from time to time, especially when I’m looking for ethnic or out of the ordinary food and ingredients.

Von’s (as Safeway stores are known in Southern California) is my main local supermarket. I live in an old neighborhood between downtown LA and Hollywood. I shop a Von’s once a week. At least at my local Von’s I like the meat department and appreciate the quality of their “house” brand products, and I commend their organic “O” brand to you, especially the catsup which is very good with a zippy tang and fresh tomato taste. While there is a sameness to all the Von’s/Safeways there is a real variance between individual stores, for example, my regular market gets at best a C+ for its produce and a B- for its in store bakery. There is one Von’s store that is far above the rest in service, wide selection and quality. That is the Montecito branch in that very special suburb of Santa Barbara. I’ll write about that one in a separate post.

Trader Joe’s is a place I go primarily for dairy products and light shopping, averaging not quite once a week. TJ’s has very good prices on dairy and bakery items and has a great selection of frozen fish.

On a monthly cycle I hit Costco for paper goods, pet food and pantry staples like pasta and canned goods. Then I also recommend Smart & Final for some meat items, restaurant grade coffee, especially high quality Peerless Coffee from Oakland, imported vinegar's and condiments, restaurant brand salad dressings, cleaning goods and occasionally bread. The gallon cans of chili, tomatoes, gravy, beans and pickles come in handy if you are having a barbecue or a big dinner.

When I want a lot of fresh produce I shop, two maybe three times a month at my local Jon’s Market, part of an Armenian owned chain with a very good large produce section and a wild selection of ethnic food: Armenian & Middle Eastern, Latino, and Eastern European items. They also have a particularly well selected and large Deli section with fifty kinds of ham, sausages and cold cuts, a lot of smoked fish and ethnic dairy items including Moskowskaya Smetana -- a Russian Sour cream that is to American Sour Cream like turkish coffee is to a watery vending machine cup of joe. They now carry Bobak’s traditional Polish sausages and cured meats from Chicago. The veal sausages are a revelation in how rich and subtle sausages can be when made when made with care and pride. Polish immigrant friends assure me Bobak’s products are authentic and z’dobsha -- it’s good. They also tell me that in Chicago they still make many traditional things that haven’t been seen in Poland since WW II. This is not surprising when you consider that more Poles live in Chicago than in Warsaw.

At least once a month or more I also shop at one of the two former Mayfair Markets, long been part of the Gelson’s chain, but in Hollywood they long maintained their original name. Gelsons is a high end market chain, like Raley’s in the Sacramento area. The Silver Lake store has a spectacular if expensive produce section while the Franklin Avenue Branch has a better Deli take out & Bakery section and a wider variety of up scale frozen items including frozen meat from wild game and some very special desserts. The store on Franklin Avenue is always full of faces you see at night on your TV set. Some other places I shop on an irregular basis are very ethnic stores like the Latino Vallarta Markets which have a very good panderia (Latino Bakery) and in summer super prices on a huge selection of local and tropical fresh fruit.

For Chinese and Vietnamese products of all kinds I have been going to 99 Lucky Ranch Markets. My favorite today is on Atlantic Blvd. in Monterey Park, but they have branches all over southern California. Started by a Vietnamese Chinese family that ran markets in Cholon, the Chinatown of Saigon, they came as boat people in the 1970’s and began with a small market on the edge of LA’s Chinatown. In addition to a large produce department with a huge selection of Asian fruits and vegetables, they have a large collection of tanks with many kinds of live fish and shell fish including lobsters, crabs, carp, catfish and often Striped Bass, a great tasting fish otherwise only available if you have a lucky day fishing in the San Juaquin Delta. It is known as “Rock Fish” in the Chesapeake Bay and a specialty of fine restaurants in Washington and Baltimore.

Other places I like are Filipino bakeries that make traditional products like Pan Espanol and the island nation’s specialty Pan Sal -- it is a chewy bun somewhere between a Mexican Bolio and a very big American Biscuit. They are sold hot by the dozen and locals wait for them. They also make buttery cinnamon pull apart “Monkey Bread” and custard and pineapple tarts that are a nice treat.

Three or four times a year I will drive down to the Alpine Market in Torrance which is a gold mine for German & Central European meats, sausages, cheeses, breads, Dutch, German and Norwegian packed herring and pickles. It also carries Scandinavian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Balkan and Baltic meat, cheese, bread, pickles, beers and schnapps, aquavit, vodka and many fruit and herbal liqueurs . The market has a very good if spartan lunch cafeteria with wide variety of “Old Country” dishes and sandwiches at very fair prices: Weisswurst with sauerkraut and german potato salad, big roll mop herrings, fat juicy knockwurst, spicy paprika flavored hungarian sausages and very good liverwurst on rye. You get a choice of yellow American mustard or a sharp European brown mustard with real zip.

Porto's Bakeries in Glendale and Burbank are a bit of old Havana, with great Cuban sandwiches. My favorite is Ropa Vieja -- a tangy Cuban take on Beef Pot Roast on half a loaf of Cuban bread. They serve Cubanos, Medianoches and other traditional Cuban sandwiches and a huge selection of cakes and pastries, many of them with exotic tropical fruit charlotte or pudding fillings. They have “Cubanos” -- a wide circle of puff pastry with a layer of cream cheese and intense guava preserves in the middle, the traditional Cuban Breakfast special eaten with strong coffee. They also make wonderful ham and potato croquettes and serve them with plantain chips.

In my neighborhood is a small Mom & Pop Japanese Market called Fuji-ya that carries Japanese items and beautiful Japanese cuts of beef and pork plus some Hawaiian products including Maui Onion pickles and brewed in Hawaii Aloha Soyu and their line of their low salt and teriyaki sauces and marinades.

For Indian cooking there is India Sweets and Spices, a chain with stores in Los Feliz and across West Los Angeles and the South Bay. They carry a huge selection of Indian spices and food items and most have a cafeteria serving simple vegetarian food at modest prices. My Hindu friends tell me it like a second rate Indian Railway station buffet, but they all go there for a authentic cheap lunch. For me, their Tikka, a potato and onion pancake is a standout. I also like their lentil or bean soups (Dal), curry chickpeas & various vegetable stews especially their curried cauliflower. Indian sweets are for me hit or miss, you will like some of them and not others depending on your own taste. They also make something that is like an Indian take on a Chili Relleno, only hotter than the Mexican one.

Finally, I will tell you about a place that is worth a visit. Super King Market on San Fernando Road just south of the 2 Freeway and the Glendale city line. They also have markets in Altadena and Anaheim. This is “diversity central” and far and away the most multiethnic multicultural food store I have ever seen. It serves Gringos and Latinos, Chinese and Armenians, Vietnamese and Pakistanis, West Indians and East Africans, Koreans, Filipinos and Eastern Europeans. Everybody shops here -- from right off the boat immigrants to proper “ladies who lunch” from very affluent La Canada-Frintridge a few miles up the 2 Freeway. The produce department is huge and covers everything from topical fruits and vegetables like plantains and yuccas, all sorts of citrus including varieties I’ve never see before like sweet lemons and three kinds of limes.

The cooking oil section carried various grades of olive oil from France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Lebanon. I think they also had some from Argentina too. The pickle section had jars of cucumber and other vegetable pickles from the USA, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Iran and India. These include the red pickled turnips that come with falafel, okra, green tomatoes, peppers of all sorts including the long “pencil” peppers form Turkey and short very hot Turkish “Fefferoni.” They also carry Balkan Ajar which is puree of peppers used in cooking. It comes mild or spicy.

The deli and meat section is huge and as wide ranging as the rest of the store. Domestic and imported cheese, Bulgarian Sheep milk Feta, Polish Cheeses, Swiss and Dutch cheese, English and Irish cheeses, hams from France (the Parisian Jambon is ethereal in its subtle perfection), Poland, Romania, Hungary, Spain, Italy and domestic ones. Also cold cuts ranging from twenty or more kinds of salami, baloney's, mortadella's, head cheese and many once common but rarely seen American items like German style midwestern hard salami and old fashioned veal and pork “Olive & Pimento” loaf. This was a favorite of my father and I had not seen it in a long time. I bought a sliced pound and my daughter liked it, “It’s like an American mortadella.” She had never see or eaten it before.

They also carry Mexican and other Latino meats and sausages. One thing to remember is every Iberian region and Latin American Republic makes its own unique kind of chorizo. Basque or what the Cubans call Bilbao Chorizo is a kin to Portuguese Linguiça while Argentine chorizo is very much like semi spicy Italian sausage. Mexican Chorizo is a spicy soft sausage that makes a great breakfast of Huevos con chorizo. In Mexico little hard chorizos are common but for some reason almost never seen here anymore. In Central America they make chorizos that are more like American pork sausage than the Mexican variety. Morcella is a hardy blood sausage like French Boudim Noir or English and Irish “Black Pudding.” The Argentine blood sausage like much Argentine food is close to an Italian original with pine nuts and raisins.

In the fresh meat department Super King has all the usual cuts of meat plus “butcher’s offal” including tripe, liver, kidneys, the tongues of various animals, beef shanks, lamb shanks, fresh hams and picnic hams, and ground beef, pork, lamb and mutton. Mutton is available, either mature sheep or goat and is popular with Mexicans and with Indians and Pakistani’s for Mexican Birria (goat stew) or curries of every kind.

The freezer cases are as eclectic as the rest of the store with frozen Pirogi’s and gyoza, peleminy, ravioli alongside meat cheese and fruit blintzes. The fruit and vegetable selections that include many varieties rarely seen in American supermarkets. It is worth a visit, if you have patience and avoid the weekends when the place is thronged.

Super King is worth a trip and I can guarantee you will find things you have never seen before, a lot of stuff you will not like, like sheep and pig heads, and a lot of things you will love. A deli counter with over two dozen kinds of ham and the same number of salami’s is worth a close look.

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