One day while driving in LA on Centinela Ave I discovered this sign. After doing some research it was the ALOHA Grocery and was in business for over 40 years. I tried to contact the owners but had no luck. I sure would like to find a way to preserve this amazing piece that is about to fall off the building. This place seemed to share good vibes //
Aloha Grocery , 4515 Centinela Ave., Los Angeles; (213) 822-2288 . Hours: Monday through Saturday 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. If you get to Aloha Grocery in the early morning, you can watch a barrel of ugly soaked soy beans turned into the most exquisitely fresh tofu in town. Behind the market's produce section, there's a small, glassed-in mini-factory where three men work with the synchronized movements of a Swiss watch, turning out the sort of hand-crafted tofu one finds only in small (and disappearing) shops in Japan. The factory operates on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday--which, needless to say, are the best days for tofu connoisseurs to shop.
While Aloha is the only Los Angeles market I know that can boast a tofu atelier, tofu is just a sideline at this 30-year-old Hawaiian-Japanese market. Hawaiian-born owner Hiroshi Uyehara and his wife Alice carry a wide selection of Japanese groceries. And for their Hawaiian customers, they fly in poi and sweet Hawaiian breads from the Islands every week.
The market's assortment of specialty items reflects the Hawaiian melting pot: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino and European. In the butcher's case, for example, sweet-spicy Portuguese-Hawaiian sausage sits next to char siu , the Chinese barbecued pork used in stir-fry dishes or mixed into Hawaiian-style scrambled eggs and served over rice. For sushi, there's a huge slab of tuna, skipjack and mackerel beside a colorful array of different kinds of fish roe. Next to these are two kinds of fresh Chinese noodles. And a beautiful display of zuke , the Japanese pickles served with every meal, is set out in a series of stainless steel tubs, not packaged as in many larger stores.
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The market is the sort of friendly, mid-sized neighborhood place that went out of style with milk delivery and dime stores. Customers call the butcher for their special meat or sashimi orders. Chickens are brought in fresh and whole and are neatly trimmed by hand. You can actually get those hard-to-find chicken backs and necks when you need to whip up a batch of chicken soup for a sick friend.
Aloha looks after its customers: When the FDA stopped the market's weekly shipment of lau lau from Hawaii--that's the famous dish of butter fish and salted pork wrapped in taro and ti leaves and steamed--Aloha's butcher, Ken Kaiso, began preparing it for his customers. (Aloha is FDA-approved.) Less-dedicated cooks may use spinach, but Kaiso still gets taro and ti leaves flown in from Hawaii for his lau lau , which is always available in the freezer case.
