A Souk With the Flavors of Bombay and Marrakech

If the San Fernando Valley has a common ground, Valley Produce on Vanowen Street may be it. A quick stop at this culinary Babel will have you jostling against Indians, Koreans, Persians, Armenians, Muslims, Orthodox Jews and Latinos for that last Fuji apple.

I started shopping there after my wife asked an Persian friend of ours where she finds her heaping mounds of herbs and fruits. Like many Angelenos, I’m an East Coast transplant who still hasn’t fully embraced the low-lying spread of Southern California, where our idea of a crowd is a traffic jam.

That’s why I come here, one of the few places in the San Fernando Valley that feels like it’s part of a real city.

Ephram Nehme, a 53-year-old former accountant from Lebanon, and his wife, Odetta, opened the store in 1992 on Sherman Way. They outgrew the 5,000-square-foot space in four years and moved to the present location on Vanowen Street, a 70,000-square-foot former electrical supply store.

Greeting shoppers at the door is the sweet scent of crushed-almond cookies and Persian pastries wafting from the bakery. Sounds fill the air: the staccato tap of receipts printing, the brassy percussion of banging shopping carts, a few squealing toddlers and a low global hum of languages--a great verbal soup that would give United Nations Plaza a run for its money.

At the checkout stand, women in chadors queue up alongside those in saris. Men wearing turbans squeeze past those wearing yarmulkes.

“I’ve got something for everybody,” Nehme says. Acorn-sized eggplants for Indians, flat lavash bread for Armenians, starchy taro root for Vietnamese and Polynesian shoppers. Sandwiched between strip malls and a drab apartment complex, Valley Produce is no architectural treasure. The aisles are small, and because Nehme’s customers like to shop with their families, the place is usually packed. I don’t even try to go there on the weekends.

Low Profits at High Volume

Nehme says the secret of his success is a paper-thin profit margin and a remarkable reluctance to delegate. Recent demographic shifts haven’t hurt either--according to 1990 census figures there are now 27 ethnic groups and 67 languages in Reseda. Nehme tries hard to cater to as many specific tastes as possible, he said.

“Six nights a week, at 2 a.m. I go to the market to shop for the store,” says Nehme. The market Nehme is talking about is the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, the nation’s largest. It is there that Nehme says he finds the “specialty items” that knit the world together at Valley Produce.

“My customers are great shoppers,” says Nehme. “They know prices. They know what’s out on the market and they’ll tell me if I am too high.”

But too high is a relative term at Valley Produce, where prices are often a third of what you might find in big supermarket chains.

For example, a honeydew melon was 49 cents a pound at Valley Produce. At the Ralphs across the street it was 99 cents a pound. McIntosh apples cost $1.49 a pound at Ralphs. McIntoshes were 49 cents a pound at Valley Produce, and for the same price you could try Cameo apples, Rome Beauties, Pink Ladies or Braeburn apples.

Granted, the quality of the fruit isn’t always what it should be, but Nehme says that’s because his store is relatively small and he has to move the produce quickly, and most of his customers won’t buy unripened fruits anyway.

Besides, most Valley Produce shoppers can take care of themselves. These are not the kind of customers who just accept the first bell pepper they see. They’re going to smell it, poke it. They might even snatch off a piece and have a bite before they buy it--or, more likely--throw it back on the pile.

“It has to be hard, clean and green,” says Encino real estate broker Jenny Sharaf, inspecting a Persian cucumber, crunchier and juicier than its bland English cousin.

Persians often serve them on a plate with radishes, fresh basil leaves, feta cheese and lavash bread. Middle Easterners can often be seen waiting for workers to dump fresh, firm cucumbers onto the table. In the rush to grab the best cukes, people have actually snatched good picks out of my hand. Nehme buys his cucumbers from Oxnard and Mexican farmers, who grow them in Israeli-built hothouses.

He says he has a whole stable of distributors and independent growers.

To keep prices low, he haggles as only a veteran trader can, and pays his bills in shorter installments--seven days compared to the 90- or 120-day grace periods major supermarkets enjoy.

Nehme says that’s how he can afford to please so many different customers, including Trinidadian Elaine Fredrick, 64. She is grabbing some yucca, plantains and a tamarind, which looks like a large, dry bean pod.

“You take out the seeds,” she says in her lilting patois, “boil it and make a sweet sauce or you can mash it into a ball, like a pastry.”

Besides cheap, diverse food, Valley Produce offers the kinds of chance intercultural encounters one seldom finds in Los Angeles’ ethnic enclaves. A Taiwanese woman once explained to me that I should peel my Asian pears before eating them. A Persian butcher explained to me that lamb “eggs” (he declined to use the word testicles) are best when barbecued. My wife and I once drove home an old Turkish woman who told us all about her escape from pre-Glasnost Russia.

Still, as much as I enjoy visiting Valley Produce, the parking lot can be frightening. Many Valley Produce shoppers learned how to drive in nations with far less strict traffic laws than are found in the United States, and on a crowded day, it shows.

It also sounds: Valley Produce patrons make more frequent use of their horns than Ralphs customers, and sometimes the parking lot blares like Manhattan.

Reminders of Home

That all suits Anthea Canes fine. Canes, 34, immigrated to Woodland Hills 11 years ago and says the store reminds her of home.

“I lived in Israel and this place has that kind of Middle Eastern vibe, with all the pushing and shoving and finding your way to the food,” she says. Valley Produce also carries many kosher items that Canes, a Jew, says she can’t find elsewhere.

Shirley Svorny, a Cal State Northridge economics professor and director of the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center, surmised that Nehme’s strategy of buying food with a short shelf life saves him money and attracts a niche of frequent shoppers, who she described in economic terms.

“They’re probably people with ‘lower time value’--poor people who don’t have jobs or housewives who have time to shop every day.”

Blue-turbaned Sunny Singh, 28, and his wife, Lovely, 27, say they come to Valley Produce often, even though they wish the store was a bit more orderly.

But like Canes, Sunny Singh shops at Valley Produce because it reminds him of home. “Whatever we can get in India, we can find here,” he says.