Bundles of lemongrass, mint and Thai basil.
Water chestnuts still wearing their bark-brown husks.
Chinese, Hawaiian and African yams.
Dragon fruit, fresh lychees and their Malaysian cousins, hairy hot-pink fruits known as rambutans.
Live lobsters and lumbering blue crabs. Giant squid, flat golden pompano and silver-skinned mackerel on ice.
Fresh pork belly, pig feet, tripe and other offal.
Hot sauces, curries, ghee. Coffees and teas galore. A wall of dried mushrooms.
Dozens of varieties of rice, noodles and beans. Forty-five feet of shelf space devoted to soy sauce. Fourteen kinds of rice wine.
That's just a fraction of the 8,000 to 10,000 items available at Asian Market, a new Asian and international grocery that opened Thursday at 321 N. 76th St.
Located north of Chuck E. Cheese's on 76th Street between Cass and Dodge Streets, it's no tiny ma-and-pa shop.
It's the biggest Asian market in the Omaha area, in both size and range: 15,000 square feet filled with fresh and frozen produce, fish, meats, frozen dinners, snacks, desserts and dry goods from Asia and beyond.
“We have all the Asian foods: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Taiwanese, Malaysian, Filipino and also some Mexican, European, Indian and African,” said co-owner Hong Zheng.
A native of China who moved to Omaha in 2000, Zheng knows the Asian food business. He owns four China Buffet restaurants in the Omaha area, and he said he had long dreamed of opening an Asian megamart.
“Me and my friends, when we travel we see the big Asian markets on the East and West Coasts; they're like supermarkets. We say ‘We need one — a really nice one — here.' We've got quite a lot of Asian people. We've got diversity. I think we can bring this to Omaha.”
While workers labeled produce and unloaded trucks Thursday morning, the store bustled with activity and intrigue.
Preeda Joynoosaeng — owner of Mai Thai restaurant and manager at Asian Market — handed out samples of longan, a small round fruit with a leathery husk, a nutlike pit and mildly sweet, white flesh with the texture of a skinned green grape.
A tall black woman in bright clothing considered the curries. An elderly white couple stacked rice noodles and dried mushrooms in a shopping cart. A little Asian girl peered at the lobster tank. A Latina picked up and puzzled over a lump of alum, a kind of salt used for pickling.
Zheng admitted even he wasn't sure how to use some of the ingredients in the store.
“No idea,” he said, shaking his head at a packet of an African nutmeg called ehiri.
He said he's been asking friends of all ethnicities what kinds of ingredients he should stock. “I'm going to learn a lot,” he said.
Asian Market is open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. The number is 391-2606.
Contact the writer:
444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com
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