Maruta Shoten: Japanese American Picnic (Grocery) Goodness

Maruta Shoten, interior (Photo by Tamiko Nimura)

Maruta Shoten is really a Japanese American market, and for that reason it feels like home to many of us who grew up going to a store like this one. It is small enough to explore it on your own and (if you grew up without Japanese school) is full of foods with unfamiliar letters on the packaging. The foods themselves are familiar enough: square tubs of roasted nori, 25-pound bags of Calrose rice by the door, super-kawaii containers of Hello Kitty and Botan rice candies. By comparison, other stores like Uwajimaya fall in the pan-Asian category and are more focused on a variety of Asian countries like the Philippines, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. Maruta is small, and the aisles are a bit narrow, but never, in our experience, oppressively crowded. Like many small ethnic food markets, Maruta is manageable, and delivers small bites of Japanese American-ness, both culinary and culture-wise.

Why do we use the clarification Japanese American, or JA for short? Well, let’s start with the outside signage: it’s not in Japanese, but in English. The signs on the outside call it a “deli”; they advertise familiar Japanese American foods like California roll and teriyaki chicken, and even Chinese American foods like chow mein. We love to head to Maruta for staples in Japanese American cooking: low-sodium Kikkoman soy sauce (half a gallon on sale for $7.98!) and Mizukan rice vinegar (24 ounces for $2.75!). If you want to make your own mochi but can’t pound the rice, pick up several boxes of mochiko, sweet rice flour, for $1.50 each, as opposed to the $3.50 you might pay in a desperate moment at your local supermarket.

Maruta has a very small produce section with items like kabocha, fresh ginger, daikon, two kinds of imo (Japanese potato), nasu (Japanese eggplant). There is a cold drink section with mango juice, coconut water and pulp ($.85), Japanese beers and sakes. Part of one wall is devoted to soy sauces. Several kinds of Japanese box curries. And don’t forget to pick up a pack of origami paper for $1.89 in the drugstore section, or some oil-absorbing paper for fried foods in the kitchenwares.

Go to Maruta for the snacks. Don’t miss fried things like the korokke (potato croquette, $1.25) from the hot deli section or the guava, kiwi, and pineapple daifuku mochi from the refrigerated section. (Maybe skip the eggrolls; too chewy. Chewy? Exactly.) Daifuku is a sweeter, Hawaiian-style mochi, usually fruit-flavored. You’ll find other snacks consumed in Japan such as Kinoko no Yama chocolate mushroom crackers (chocolate cap, cracker stem) and Pocky.

There’s a Maruta takeout counter just next to the grocery store which sells hot Chinese food from 11-2. We haven’t tried the Chinese food, but it does a brisk trade; Maruta seems to be the home of cheap lunches in SoDo.

Our favorite bento is the saba shioyaki, which comes with about a fist’s worth of white rice sprinkled with black sesame seeds, a palm’s worth of broiled salted mackerel (saba), a hefty curl of sweet Japanese omelet, half a potato croquette, about a thumb’s worth of bright pink pickled radish, stewed vegetables (carrot, shiitake mushroom, potato), a small scoop of macaroni salad. All for about $5.50. We couldn’t finish it all despite being famished. Other bentos come with more familiar entrees like chicken or salmon teriyaki, pork or chicken katsu. There are small but satisfying snacks you can buy in the cold deli case: spam musubi, hijiki, namasu, nimono. And there are even larger bentos available for about $10. After 5:00PM, the sushi becomes half-price. You could pick up a couple of bentos, snacks, drinks, and have a fabulous JA picnic. Or, you could eat it all in the parking lot and watch the planes land at Boeing field.

And for those of us of JA heritage, we appreciate the intangibles of the Maruta experience as much as the food. On a recent visit, someone behind us gently jostled our shopping basket by accident. Switching into profusely-apologetic-JA mode, we apologized. The elderly woman who bumped into us had closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair. She wore a lilac and periwinkle housecoat. We stared at her for a few seconds (bad JA girls!), with some déjà vu, some nostalgia: natsukashii, in Japanese. The woman’s middle-aged daughter misinterpreted the stare and she too broke into profusely-apologetic-JA mode: “Oh, no, please excuse her.” “No, no, no,” we replied. “She just reminds us of our aunties.” “Ah,” the daughter replied, smiling. “Aunties are good to have.”