Southeast Seattle has an irresistibly diverse collection of thriving "small mart" retailers offering a low cost medley of goods from every conceivable source, to supply its culturally diverse community. All that wonderful variety is just sitting their waiting to mystify and reward home grown and adventurous shoppers who are willing to buy the familiar in unfamiliar surroundings, and who are eager to try ingredients and cuisine that take their taste buds outside their familiar time zone.
This is week three of my walking survey of small, specialized grocery markets in Southeast Seattle. For my final installment I'll focus on the valley along Martin Luther King Jr. Way South.
At South Cloverdale there stands a struggling landmark, a crossroads produce street market: the Vegetable Bin Polynesian store. Unfortunately, today it looks like it is suffering at the hands of Sound Transit's traffic disruption. As I go north I am discovering that the incredible diversity of small store shopping along MLK Jr. Way provides a market for every taste and culture, and that variety confronts the curious with a challenge to step out of their familiar groove.
The Sang Taing Heng Supermarket, and Seattle Fresh Meat offers a regional, Middle Eastern community organic beef, lamb, goat, and more, along with prepared Mediterranean meals. These are the real deal, ethnic markets in the manner of their home countries, unpretentious. They offer not just ingredients you can't find at the big box stores, but they also offer a little bit of authentic cultural experience, minus the airplane fare, boarding lines, and the shoe x-rays.
Further north on MLK Jr. Way the variety holds surprises for the adventurous, small market grocery shopper. At King Square in the 7100 block of MLK Jr. Way, Al Nasar Grocery survives with it's access nearly strangled by Sound Transits blockading destruction. This tiny ethnic market, offers Halal Meat and other products along with traditional international money exchanging services, which are essential to their mostly Middle Eastern customer base. Next door, the KS Food Market offers a more conventional convenience store mix.
Just a block away at S. Myrtle St. the King Plaza has everything. There are at least four restaurants, insurance services, video rentals, jewelry sales, beauty parlors, travel brokers, herbalists, dollar stores, money changers, the offices of the area's Vietnamese language news paper, and the Vina Super market.
Vina is a large Asian grocery retailer, offering hot prepared food, fresh produce, big bags of rice stacked high, and thousands of familiar branded products and food stuffs to a population mostly born on the other side of the dateline from me. Vina is meeting the needs of the ethnically diverse Southeast Seattle community while offering a flavor of another culture for anyone to enjoy.
Still farther north, Seng Heng Asian market at 6464 MLK Jr. Way is a smaller yet similar market to Vina, which keeps the competition fierce. Across the street, Espy Sausage and Tocino offers still another unique and specialized wholesale and retail food resource.
Viet Wah Superfoods, just a short hop up the road is an economy sized international supermarket catering to a thoroughly globalized community. They seem in many ways to be what QFC or Safeway might be, if they got around a little more and if their buyers back at headquarters could read more than one language.
Up the road and to the right on S. Edmunds you hit Columbia City and Bob's Meats, which I think may be the best butcher shop in the world. Mutual Fish, still further north, has seafood fresh off the plane from everywhere in the world. I think Mutual Fish easily rivals the Pike Place Market for a good seafood shopping experience. And they are only one of many fresh and live fish outlets on Beacon Hill and in the Rainier Valley.
Near the north end of the valley the staff at Borracinni's Bakery and The Delite Bakery will both bake their brains out to keep you in great pies, cakes, and bread of every conceivable description.
This small market diversity reflects who we are in Southeast Seattle, and I like that. The independent small mart, besides being the retail signature of our fascinating cultural and economic blend, is also being discovered as an important model for a more energy efficient retail distribution network.
Such distribution efficiency will be increasingly important for our community's ability to adapt to the more oil-deprived decades to come. If we adapt personally and intervene effectively in the public realm to guide development toward smaller-scaled patterns of development, we have a lot to gain.
If we encourage our future development patterns toward more, and smaller, retailers located much closer to home, the disruption of urban removal and gentrification that is integral to the development of Sound Transit's Link Light Rail might actually help us emerge into a much more energy efficient, human-scaled, small-mart future, with or without national chains.
Have a comment for George Robertson? Write him at editor@sdistrictjournal.com.
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