Get your salted duck eggs here

The 88 markets catch on with non-Asians

by Dorie Clark

THE GREAT UNKNOWN: self-serve bins of ingredients that most Stop & Shop patrons never dreamed of.

To hear manager Rudy Chen tell it, there's a bit of destiny in the 88 Supermarket mini-empire. The original 88, located on Herald Street just past where the Mass Pike slices Chinatown off from the South End, opened in 1994. "Eight is a lucky number for the Chinese," he explains, "so it's doubled with 88. We were already going to name it the 88 Supermarket when, on the first day, we started digging and discovered a manhole cover that was number 88."

Last September, the original market was joined by a gargantuan sibling, the Super 88, in Dorchester. The 88 has been a mainstay in the Asian communities of metro Boston (as Amesbury resident Heming Jiang says, brandishing a container of Chinese pickles: "You can't get this anywhere else"). But now, especially since the Super 88 opened in the accessible-from-the-
highway South Bay Center, growing numbers of non-Asians are moving from Chinese take-out to making it themselves.

The original market is still patronized almost entirely by Asians, and it's slightly intimidating for a novice. The aisles are cramped and small; the grocery carts are miniaturized to about a foot and a half long. The smell of fish pervades the store, and bags of rice -- some weighing up to 50 pounds -- are stacked by the entrance. It's sensory overload, with self-serve bins of dried fish, aisles of candy in psychedelic multicolored bags, and frequent announcements in Chinese over the loudspeaker. You're on your own if the merchandise isn't labeled in English as well as Chinese. "It's 100 percent wonderful, but you can't figure out what 90 percent of it is," notes one white customer. When I ask the manager for an interview, she insists, "I can't, I can't, no one here speaks English," and directs me to the Dorchester branch.

But the 88 is precisely the authentic splash of China that some local Sinophiles are looking for. The Super 88 in Dorchester, meanwhile, packs a different kind of cultural wallop. It's a full-
service supermarket, huge and glossy. With its far more diverse clientele (manager Chen estimates that 30 percent of customers are African-American, 20 percent are Latino, a smattering are white, and half are Asian) -- it's hard to figure out at first glance how it's different from any local Star Market or Stop & Shop. The small confines of the Chinatown market dictate a focus on Asian goods, which means that six-pound tubs of water chestnuts and salted duck eggs add up to a uniformly exotic onslaught. But the huge Super 88 stocks the same goods in the midst of culinary Americana such as Velveeta, Hershey's syrup, and Frosted Flakes. The market even sells products geared to Latino customers -- like Coco-Rico, a Puerto Rican coconut soda.

ONE FISH, TWO FISH, RED FISH, BLUE FISH: Super 88's selection of fish is uncommonly large.

But that's just the beginning of the Super 88's riches. The selection of fish is uncommonly large (more than 60 varieties), and there's a Chinese medicine shop with 800 herbs available and a traditional Chinese doctor on duty daily except Thursday. Finding Asian products in a traditional American supermarket setting is a boon for customers like Barry Faye of Danvers, who brought a cookbook with him. "We have a lot of Chinese cookbooks," he says, "so we look at the ingredients of what we want to make, and come here for things like spices that we can't get in regular supermarkets." He likes the user-friendliness and the English labels, which are more prevalent here than in the Chinatown branch. "The nice thing for a Caucasian person coming here," he says, "is that if we went to Chinatown, we'd have to walk though the small aisles and ask what things were. Here, it's just like a regular supermarket; you can pretty much figure it out."

Non-Asian customers such as Faye are becoming more prevalent. "If you go back to five years ago, it was all Chinese," says Heming Jiang. "Now you see more white people, more of all types of people. It's a good thing -- they're starting to really appreciate Chinese culture." But wooing whites, blacks, and Latinos away from traditional supermarkets has a price: the wrath of competitors. Rudy Chen describes extremely tense relations with the Super Stop & Shop next door.

Yet the supermarket chain that bears the lucky number won't be deterred: plans are under way to open a food court serving Asian cuisine within the next few months. To maintain good fortune, the Super 88's doorway is guarded by two stone lions facing Super Stop & Shop. "You know feng shui?" asks Chen, referring to the Asian art of placing objects strategically to ensure harmony. "We talked to a feng shui expert. At night, the red light from Super Stop & Shop came through our window and overwhelmed us. The reason we have two ugly lions facing this way," he half-jokes, "is to face the evil."

The original 88 Supermarket, open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., is located at 50 Herald Street, in Boston; call (617) 423-1688. The Super 88, open daily from 8:30 a.m. to midnight, is located at 101 Allstate Road, in Dorchester; call (617) 989-8895.