Grocery Stories of My Life
This week it was announced that our town’s beloved historic grocery store which sat empty for a few years will reopen as a Whole Foods the day before my birthday. I’m both excited for all the specialty cheeses and wistful for the many small businesses with character which have been lost over the years.
Today I was shopping at my go-to local Southeast Asian shop when it occurred to me that I could pay homage to the places that have fed my loved ones and me throughout my life by writing about them. I got the idea from a submission from a St. Charles Writers Group member who wrote a creative piece on bars he’s visited and the mark they’ve made on him.
In that spirit, here are five grocery stores that have played a role in my life.
CHILDHOOD: Thai Grocery, 5014 N. Broadway, Uptown neighborhood, Chicago, IL
My father, a young Thai immigrant living on the north side of Chicago in the 1970s, would get familiar ingredients here long before I existed. It was run by an older Thai immigrant. When I was a kid, Apa would drive my brother and me in our station wagon from the suburbs to the city where we’d pick up my uncle Pintu at his apartment on the 3600 block of N. Sacramento Ave., head east on Addison past Wrigley Field, turn up Sheffield to Broadway, pass the Uptown Theatre all papered over with X-rated film posters, and finally end in an area nicknamed “Little Saigon.” I didn’t know it was called that, I just knew it as the place where we’d get Chinese duck from the old Sun Wah BBQ under the El tracks on Argyle. We’d park down the street at the grocery store, where inside the familiar musty, yet piquant smell of Thai spices would hit my nose. To the left, the owner would be standing behind the counter. He’d greet my Apa and uncle, and they’d chat and catch up. In the back room, hot-food counters ran along both sides with delicious ready-to-eat Thai dishes that you couldn’t get elsewhere for takeout.
The store was still there decades later when my husband and I lived in Uptown, after my uncle passed away and my parents moved out of state. When it closed in 2008 because the original owner retired, I cried. A relic of my past was gone.
TEEN YEARS: Blue Goose Supermarket, St. Charles, IL
My first job was here, at 17, at the former location on the corner of 1st and Illinois Streets. A cool girl I knew worked in the bakery, my good friend Dave worked there, and my now-husband Anthony was a bagger, too. So I applied to work in the bakery, and I absolutely loved it. It was the mom-and-pop shop in the heart of town where generations of families worked. They treated us so well! We got overtime on Sundays, and we felt like part of a family. Those were formative years for me, my first taste of independence. I especially loved talking with Baker Joe and his clerk wife, Norma, telling them all my grand ideas and receiving sage advice from them. Joe taught me how to frost pastries, pipe icing around to form rose petals, and write on cakes, which I still enjoy to this day. The manager at the time, Jim, even took Dave and me to the National Restaurant Association convention at McCormick Place in Chicago, and it was a new level of fun. I was in awe of the food world!
Eventually, Dave became my supervisor, which was neat. We all worked there until after graduation. The Blue Goose eventually moved to a new location across the street but existed in St. Charles until 2022. Before it closed, Dave (who was Best Man at our wedding), Anthony, and I went back to say our goodbyes. The most special part about the Blue Goose is that the three of us have it as a shared experience we get to keep forever as lifelong friends.
ADULTHOOD: Hoogvliet, Leiden Centrum, The Netherlands
The first time I ever lived on my own was when I went to school in the Netherlands for my graduate degree. I lived in the university town called Leiden, and just blocks from my dorm on Hooigracht 15 was a modest (by American superstore standards) grocery store called Hoogvliet. (Click here to hear how it’s pronounced in Dutch!) It was really the first time I shopped for myself as an adult. I can remember the smell of fresh baguettes, the wonderful kaas (cheese) section—oude kaas, jonge kaas, shredded kaas, blocks of kaas. The aisle of Indonesian ingredients we had fun experimenting with. The wine section, so affordable, so different from what you could get in America! Not only that, but chickens were free range, you brought your own bags, and you returned your thick plastic liter bottles of water and pop to get your deposit back. All these things clued me in to a thoughtful society which could be more responsible with how it interacts with the world.
The best, silliest part of this otherwise sensible grocery were these animatronics around the store, where if you pushed a button, they would sing a song in Dutch in a herky-jerky way. It never ceased to amuse me, much to my friends’ embarrassment. Think about it: the products I became familiar with, items I purchased and cooked with as an independent person, were all Dutch-based. What was “foreign” was actually what I was used to. So much so, that when I came back to the US and grocery shopped with Anthony, I’d ask him, “Do you have that in America?” That sort of irked him, but it makes me laugh even still!
MARRIAGE: Jewel-Osco, locations throughout Chicagoland, IL
Our first jobs were at a mom-and-pop shop, but since Anthony and I have been together it’s been all about this major Chicago chain. We lived within walking distance of the Sheridan & Montrose location in Uptown, Chicago. The first few years I lived with my friend Robyn, blocks from Anthony and his friends, and I remember us walking back with armfuls of white plastic bags. Then when Anthony and I got engaged, we moved in together, a little nearer to the same Jewel—the first place we shopped as husband and wife.
When we moved out of the city, we rented a townhouse in Naperville, and at the end of the subdivision was a Jewel. We drove there to buy beer despite six-foot snow drifts after Snowmageddon in January 2011. Our first child was born at the end of that year, and that Jewel became her first grocery store.
In 2013 we bought our first house in Yorkville, and the Jewel was kitty-corner from our neighborhood. It was so convenient for one of us to run out for an ingredient and be back within minutes when our kids were little.
Finally, here in St. Charles, we live down the street from a Jewel. It’s our go-to store which we frequent several times a week, and to this day it delights me how close it is, especially since I grew up in the country and a trip to the store was always an excursion.
FAMILY LIFE: A & T Asian Market, South Elgin, IL
We’ve been settled in St. Charles for seven years now, within walking/biking distance of a Jewel, but it doesn’t have my heart. Blue Goose closed years ago. Whole Foods will open, and it will be convenient and bountiful, but not meaningful. The place that I hold dear now is a little shop in a worn-out strip mall on McLean in South Elgin called A & T Market. The same family has been selling Southeast Asian staples since my parents still lived here, and now I go often enough that they greet me with a friendly nod and ask about the kids. The stuff I can’t get unless I brave the traffic and venture out much farther away to Aurora/Naperville. They reliably have packed bags of fresh white bean sprouts whereas other regular stores in the area they’re either gross or out of stock. They have many brands of authentic Thai sauces I need: fish sauce, light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, sweet soy sauce, Golden Mountain, etc. They have the Thai sausage the whole family goes crazy for in a stir fry. Truthfully, their prices are higher than the big chain Asian stores, but I will gladly pay to keep this local, independent place going for a long time. I don’t have any family living nearby; I haven’t been to Thailand in ages; I can’t speak the language, but I can cook Thai food for my kids. I don’t even think the owners are Thai; I believe they’re Laotian, but no matter, this store feels like a symbol of the home I’ve created for us.
In the Check Out Line
Thinking back, I can recall many other grocery memories: going to Aldi for the first time in Germany and then pleasantly discovering later that the ones in the States sell German delicacies; shopping with my aunt in Atlanta and then her teaching me new recipes; a tiny shop in Cefalù, Sicily, where we browsed the aisles of dried pasta and jarred sauces trying not to drool; a deli counter in Windham, Maine, on a ‘friendiversary’ trip where I overheard an old man with an East-coast accent say, “When you think you can’t slice it any thinner, slice it thinner!” I could go on and on.
Food is connected in so many ways to our heritage, family, and lifestyle. It makes sense that the way the food gets to our table would be influential, even if the medium operates in the background of the major moments. Grocery stores are markers of the places we’ve lived and traveled, the people we were with, and what we ate: The times that have fed the story of our lives.