Was around the neighbourhood and my significant other needed some supplies, that to make some…read morehome-made broth for her pho. We already passed up a few other locations and I remembered this place, I haven't been here in years, so I didn't know what to expect. Most people who live in the Lower Mainland might not come to this place, as it literally is in the (as my friend use to say) "armpit" of Canada. From the amount of beggers, crack whores, drug dealers, drug takers, let's just say this is not the rainbow and unicorns neighbourhood of town. I found parking a block up, and once we exited the car, a person asked us if we had any change.... yes... this is a stones throw away from Hastings and Main!
We entered, and the guy working here was unloading, and putting things away, as well as setting up the front display of food items, and my dear went off in her world to look for items. This place is spacious, no overloading of shelves, no narrow aisles, no short store, this place is pretty wide, and pretty long. We started on the left side, walking down their open refrigerated section, you see very clean, and packaged vegetables. Anything from Thai chili's, Thai basil, mini limes, coriander, green onions, bean sprouts, just to name a few, everything had their own packaging where you could see what your buying, and everything was, as I said, clean! Through the aisles we noticed stuff like shrimp paste, sections of Sriracha sauce, fish sauce, cane sugar, brown sugar, cans of bamboo, powdered soup broth for your favorite pho dishes, laksa sauces, a variety of different rice noodles, even labelled by the width of the noodle.
This place is a specialty store, and one I wouldn't hesitate on sending anyone too, sure you have to actually get out of your car, or go down there with public transit, and open your eyes to a different part of society. Sometimes part of the journey of making your dish at home, is the journey less spoken, that of where the hell you got your ingredients. The words, "you can't believe where I went to get this stuff" may come out of your mouth the next time you actually decide to prepare a Thai, Viet, Cambodian, Malaysian, Indonesian, etc..., dish... but if your working through some cookbook that is telling you things you need for a particular dish that you have no clue where to get cause your normal supermarket wouldn't have a clue what it is.... you maybe surprised here by finding it.
The one thing we were looking for.. which they didn't have was freshly package pho noodles..... as all of the noodles we saw were dry, can't win them all!