I am a major fan of the many ethnic groceries scattered around this town, and one of my favorites is Zion Market, located in Kearny Mesa just a couple blocks from the big Asian grocery/restaurant nexus of Convoy Street. Zion Market caters to the Korean community, and its big boxy space is packed full of food thrills--especially the bakery, deli, butcher and seafood departments.
They have one huge chill case dedicated to just panchan (sometimes also transliterated as banchan), these highly-seasoned salad-y/side-dish-y type combos; a typical Korean meal is always accompanied by a flotilla of little dishes bearing small portions of several varieties of panchan. The most well-known of the banchan is kimchee, the firey pickled vegetable salad, which itself comes in a myriad varietes besides the most common one made from napa cabbage laced with chile paste. But there are other kimchees made from many other vegetables; I've had some from Zion Market's banchan case consisting of whole Kirby cucumbers slit open and packed with chile paste that was out of this world.
And then there are bunches of other types of banchan--salads and combos made from such veggies as soybean sprouts, spinach, seaweed, mushrooms, garlic, chile peppers, and more; protein-based concoctions featuring squid, fishcake, tofu, hard-boiled eggs, and assorted bits of fish and sea creatures I haven't learned to translate or identify yet; and a few things I suspect are American transplants, such as a very sweet and mayonnaise-heavy take on potato salad. And this is just one chill-case we're talking about here. The whole store is swarming with similarly interesting food finds.
The store is also, frequently, swarming with people. I've been in groceries with narrower aisles, to be sure, but especially when Saturday rolls around those aisles are swarming. And the parking lot is a nightmare any day of the week. On Saturdays I don't even try to get into the main lot any more; I just go around the corner and head right for the overflow lot.
But the parking hassle, in my opinion, is so worth it. Today, for instance, I had a potluck to go to, so I stopped by Zion and picked up some kimbap (Korean answer to maki roll, usually containing a wider variety of fillings than the Japanese version); kong namul (a panchan consisting of blanched soybean sprouts in a sesame-oil based dressing); and what the store labels "pepper pancakes," halved jalapeno peppers stuffed with a ground meat mixture, dipped in an egg-heavy batter, and fried until the batter spreads out into a kind of eggy pancake in which the stuffed jalapeno winds up embedded. The pepper pancakes actually bacame my mid-afternoon snack; the kimbap went to the potluck as-is; and I added the kong namul to a batch of noodles, along with some juliened kirby cucumbers and sliced scallions, and voila--instand Asain noodle salad.
By the magic of potlucks, one usually arrives home again with more food than one started out with. So in addition to some leftovers of other dishes, we still have a big batch of the knng namul/noodle salad. and I just had the last of the kimbap as a late-night snack. Yum. And the sesame oil made my car smell so good!
