WESTSIDE COVER STORY : World’s Fare : An Influx of Immigrants, Health Concerns and Curiosity About Ethnic Foods Help Feed a Boom in International Markets

What does an Israeli woman married to a Chinese man buy in a Japanese supermarket in Mar Vista? Would you believe, chocolate covered macadamia nuts from Hawaii?

That, at least, was one item in Rachel Chung’s basket as she headed toward the checkout stand recently at Yaohan market. Two Fuji apples and a chocolate-filled sponge cake from a Japanese bakery filled out her order.

“We like to try new things,” said Chung, who owns a shop called the “Flower Connection” in Gardena.

Though she didn’t know it, the Santa Monica woman--who shops at Israeli and Chinese markets too--exemplifies an ever more common way of life in Los Angeles, in which, it seems, the first step in getting used to each other’s culture is getting used to each other’s food.

“Food is an entree,” said USC anthropology professor Andrei Simic. “It’s a way (ethnic groups) say something about themselves to the outside world that can be appreciated.”

The willingness to appreciate native cuisine has never been greater on the Westside. And the opportunity to do so, experts say, has mushroomed in the past 10 years as new ethnic markets have sprung up and existing ones have expanded.

Indian. Thai. Russian. Korean. Middle-Eastern. Japanese. Mexican. The journey to places with the promise of exotic foods is a short car ride away, no passport needed.

In Santa Monica, Frances Gallegos Gomez, her husband and three sons run the Gallegos Brothers Market on Broadway Avenue. The no-frills establishment testifies to the deep roots of Mexican-food markets in the Los Angeles area: Gomez’s father started it with a handful of family recipes in 1946.

There’s a takeout counter, outdoor patio dining and abundant produce--chilies, spearmint leaves, cans of tender cactus. Family members get up at 3 a.m. each day to grind corn for the tortillas, which they sell to local restaurants.

“Everything is fresh and made to order,” Gomez said. “That’s the secret.”

At the vast, high-tech Koreatown Plaza market in Koreatown, meanwhile, food is displayed like art.

There’s a wall of greens with names like perilla leaves, shingeku-- a kind of parsley--and a takeout section offering squid that tastes like candy, crab in soy sauce, potato salad with fruit, garlic with hot paste, cooked baby crab pickled with whole heads of garlic and seasoned seaweed.

The women behind the counter, who cook every day, don’t speak English, but they gladly give samples.

The basic seasonings of Korean food--red pepper, green onion, soy sauce, bean pastes, garlic, ginger, sesame, mustard, vinegar and wines--are on display, as are jars of kimchi, a staple in the Korean diet that accompanies every meal.

Kimchi is a spicy fermented pickle, made from cabbage, turnip, cucumber or seasonable vegetables seasoned with the traditional Korean spices and fermented in an earthenware crock.

Kimchi leaves a clean taste in your mouth after eating greasy foods, said Jackie Shinn, American food buyer for the California Market, a neighborhood Korean market a few blocks from the modern shopping plaza. “We carry eight different varieties of kimchi,” Shinn said.

The Silom Supermarket at the Thailand Plaza, on Hollywood Boulevard near Western Avenue, houses a shrine where shoppers leave food for the gods before they purchase food for themselves. Inside, a shopper is bombarded with exotica like salted duck eggs and pink preserved eggs, essence of jasmine, a water chestnut drink, pennywort juice and a wall of curry pastes with flavors including chili, shrimp and fried ginger.

The market carries the foul-smelling durian--the most expensive fruit in the world. According to author Grace Kirschenbaum, armed guards are posted at orchards in Thailand to make sure none of the $15-a-pound fruit is stolen.

Recipes on the back of packages of curry can turn non-Thais into instant Thai cooks.

For Eastern European and Middle Eastern fare, there’s the sprawling Ron’s Market on Sunset Boulevard, also near Western. The market carries everything from Croatian raspberry vinegar and Polish cherry syrup to Armenian eggplant and Russian sausages.

Several markets in West Hollywood offer Eastern European food on a smaller, neighborhood scale, including the Odessa Grocery store and the Gastronom European Market, which carries 50 varieties of sausage.

At Venice and Bagley avenues, meanwhile, a branch of the India Sweets and Spices chain offers a wide variety of Indian food. Manager Ashok Kumar said all of the hard-to-find items are imported from India, including such spices as asafetida and cardamom pods--the world’s third most valuable spice next to saffron and vanilla, according to Neelam Batra, author of the cookbook “The Indian Vegetarian.”

Besides offering these spices for sale, Kumar uses them to flavor takeout items in the store’s small--and invariably crowded--deli section.

Such markets mainly serve members of their respective ethnic groups, including Angelenos who retain their native cuisine as a key part of their identity generations after they have become assimilated in other ways.

“They forget the language, but the cuisine lingers,” Simic said. “It’s a kind of communion.”

Preserving one’s native cuisine, he adds, is far easier than keeping up with other, more daunting, cultural practices from home.

“To maintain patrilateral cross-cousin marriage (as they do in Syrian villages) is more difficult than cooking pilaf or shish kebab,” Simic said.

Yet the Westside’s ethnic markets also draw customers from outside the principal ethnic groups they serve.

In some cases, urban explorers who initially sample unfamiliar cuisines in restaurants eventually turn to ethnic markets to try to recreate ethnic dishes at home.

Other customers are gourmet cooks on the prowl for flavors and variety not available on the shelves of the local Alpha Beta. For Persian fare, for example, Venice psychotherapist Jim Conway goes to the Tehran market on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. For Indian ingredients, he shops at the Bharat Bazaar in Culver City.

“My style is to find something I want to cook that involves ethnic foods or ingredients and to become an urban forager in going out to get them,” Conway said. “I’ll go anywhere for what I want.”

A third, and growing, group of ethnic-market aficionados are in it mainly for their health: to perk up a low-fat or vegetarian diet. Indian cuisine, for instance, is replete with vegetarian dishes and spices that are said to aid digestion, freshen breath and combat morning sickness.

Judith Ashley, a dietitian and assistant professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, says Mexican cuisine’s beans and rice provide a low-fat supply of essential vitamins. Japanese and Chinese diets high in soy foods such as tofu, soy milk and tempeh appear to deter certain types of cancer, she says.

Doctors are actively recommending such foods for people who run a high risk of contracting breast and prostate cancer, she says.

“There are lower incidents of those cancers in the Japanese and Chinese cultures,” Ashley said. “Also (there is) a slower growth of cancer cells in the laboratory when soy is introduced.”

Another explanation for the appeal of ethnic markets to outsiders is that many have evolved to look more like modern food emporiums, complete with takeout counters, well-stocked produce sections and fresh fish.

Linda Burum, a student of ethnic markets in Los Angeles for more than a decade, said such markets are responding to customers who have become more Westernized themselves.

“As a community evolves and becomes acculturated, then they want their store to look like Ralph’s and not some dumpy little place,” said Burum, author of “A Guide to Ethnic Foods in Los Angeles.”

Newer immigrants from a modernized nation such as Japan also expect a sleek supermarket like the ones back home, Burum said. The Yaohan market on Centinela Avenue and Venice Boulevard, where Rachel Fong was shopping, fits the bill.

Its gleaming aisles, labeled in both Japanese and English, showcase delicate, speckled quail eggs, at least eight kinds of sesame oil and too many varieties of pickled plums to count.

Fong’s chocolate covered macadamia nuts are not out of place at Yaohan either: Many Japanese-Americans came here by way of Hawaii, where they acquired a taste for the islands’ ubiquitous candy-covered nuts.

That’s the way it is in the melting pot: As one nation’s cuisine bumps up against another, both are altered forever.

Kirschenbaum, publisher of a quarterly newsletter, “A World of Cookbooks,” said local ethnic cuisines are not simply copies of the original.

“I’ve seen an increase in interest in international foods blending in with American food, breaking down all of the barriers,” said Kirschenbaum, who reviews international cookbooks in her newsletter. “(Ethnic groups) are developing something here in Los Angeles that is a combination of theirs and ours.”

Mainstream American culture is accepting ethnic goodies at an accelerated rate too, Simic said. “These things are assimilated into American culture and very often lose their ethnic specificity.” A case in point: the taco.

A budding phenomenon, Burum reports, are crossover markets that serve more than one ethnic group in the same community. The most striking example, she said, is in Pomona. An empty supermarket there became a Chinese-Thai food store with live fish and other products to serve customers from those two countries who lived nearby.

Then, Burum said, the market owners noticed that there were also many Filipinos and Mexicans in the area, so they’ve added sections to fill their food needs.

“This is going to happen more often,” Burum said.

Burum says buyers for local ethnic markets also influence suppliers back home. At the behest of local buyers, import companies use packaging and nutritional labeling that people who live here come to expect.

American grocery chains have not ignored the food preferences of the newest Americans.

Alpha Beta and Von’s both compile extensive demographic surveys to keep abreast of what shoppers want. One new Alpha Beta store in the Mid-Wilshire area stocks ethnic foods, including Latino, Armenian, Jewish, Iranian, Japanese and Korean items.

Alpha Beta does a demographic study three times a year to make sure they are stocking products that shoppers want, said a spokesman for the supermarket chain.

Von’s spokeswoman Julie Reynolds said her supermarket chain seeks to become the neighborhood merchant.

“We talk to our customers, ask them what their special requests are and hold focus groups to determine whether we are doing the job,” she said.

Sometimes, such efforts don’t succeed.

In 1987, Von’s opened a string of Latino food stores, called Tiangus Mercado, in Mexican American communities. The last of those nine stores, in El Monte, will close this year.

“We found that our customers acculturated faster than we thought, and they wanted to shop in more American-type stores, so some of the Tiangus (outlets) are being converted back to more typical Von’s stores,” Reynolds said.

Because he is as interested in cultural experiences as he is in unusual herbs and spices, Conway, the gourmet cook from Venice, prefers his ethnic markets to be authentic.

“It’s a pleasure to encounter this new diversity,” he said. “I grew up in a town (Fontana) where rye bread was kind of exotic.”