Growing up in a Bengali South Delhi neighborhood in the ’80s, my daily adventures were visits to the open-air market with my father. Vegetable sellers hawked cauliflower, spinach, and carrots. Fishmongers caught Baba’s attention with the freshest hilsa, pabda, and rohu. As we visited each stall, my Baba taught me how to select the best eggplant, the softest pumpkin flowers, the crispiest beans, the freshest shrimp.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived, as a graduate student, in America—the land of plenty—to find grocery stores with harsh lights, smells of disinfectant, neatly arranged produce, and packaged meats transported over many time zones.
International grocery stores offered an experience a little closer to the markets I knew. Za’atar and sumac from Balboa International Market were familiar, yet unknown. The Mexican flavors of Barrio Logan’s Northgate Market offered a taste of my new home. I’ve converted banana flowers into a traditional mochar ghonto (banana blossom curry) and used swai fish from H Mart to make a Bengali mustard fish, desi dishes from Korean ingredients. All of these markets bring their own flavors to the San Diego culinary landscape.
Tucked alongside furniture, car repair, and furniture stores on Miramar Road are warehouses emblazoned with “Cash and Carry Grocery Store” in forgettable fonts. The term is a holdover from days when more shoppers had accounts at specific grocery stores. Cash-and-carries were the opposite: outposts where you could pay cash and leave with your goods instead of having them charged and delivered.
Forty-four-year-old Nitin Patel runs the Akshar Cash and Carry store, perched next to a temple, a few Indian restaurants, and a yoga studio. “I started here a decade ago, coming straight from Mumbai,” he says. “My family missed home, holidays, and our people. But we made this space our home.”
The store is amazingly vast. The smell of incense and aromatic spices—garam masala, rasam, chaat masala—lingers in the air. To the back of the warehouse, large deli cases hold frozen rotis and samosas, while bags of okra, tindora, and lotus root jostle for attention next to dhoklas, chapatis, and frozen naan packs. Akshar employees, mostly immigrants, stack fresh produce: radish, bitter melon, ash gourd, chilis.
And soon, more is coming, with the intention of drawing new kinds of shoppers to the store. “We’re bringing in more produce, even non-vegetarian frozen snacks,” Patel says. “I have big plans to make sure non-South-Asians also feel welcome. We’re expanding the frozen section and packaged foods, so it’s easier for the younger generation to experiment.”
A few blocks away is a larger warehouse, Miramar Cash and Carry. I usually visit to pick up store-made coconut and tomato chutneys. There, I bump into 21-year-old Amna Shafi, a UCSD student. She stands with her friend Mihika Gokarn, debating whether she needs a mint-coriander chutney or just a coriander one.
“Do you need help?” I offer.
Shafi nods, her eyes relieved behind her glasses. “I’m making gol gappas for a potluck,” she explains.
I give her a quick rundown: how to mix the tamarind-date chutney with spices, how to make a hole in the gol gappas—fried semolina balls—to fill them with green coriander water. Shafi, from Pakistan by way of the Middle East and LA, loves going to international markets. “It just reminds me of home,” she says. “The smells, the spices. I learn familiar recipes that my friends enjoy. Balboa Market has other Pakistani spice brands—I’m there at least once or twice a month.”
It’s not lost on me that she has Pakistani roots while Gokarn is from India—two countries engaged in multiple wars since 1947—and yet, they bond as friends over food. “Community eating makes food taste so much better!” Shafi adds.
Later, she sends me photos of her get-together: gol gappas, the watery spiced chutneys, stacks of Indian snacks lined on a makeshift buffet table. It reminds me of when I was their age, alone in America, connecting with other immigrant students over plates of food that made us think of where we came from.
It’s a sentiment shared by many shoppers at these stores, regardless of their background or culture. At the crema counter in Northgate Market, I meet Sol Cruz, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in San Diego for nearly a decade. She sums up what so many immigrants feel. “This store’s the best,” she sighs.
“It’s got home here.”
