Asian Dining Rules by Steven A. Shaw

Author:Steven A. Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

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CORNERING THE MARKET

The first time I tried boiled peanuts was at the home of my friend Dean, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. When he handed the bowl to me, it was more of a dare than an offer. Boiled peanuts, a beloved tradition in the Southeast, are—to put it generously—an acquired taste. To me, they’re like salty peanuts that fell into a glass of tepid water and were forgotten for a few days. Surely, I thought, this is just some peculiar fetish of the Old South. And yet boiled peanuts were also invented independently in Vietnam—and therein lies a tale.

When it opened in 1965, the Tryon Mall in Charlotte, North Carolina, was the place to be. Anchored by a Woolco and a Peebles department store, and located in the middle of a thriving middle-class neighborhood, the mall flourished throughout the 1970s. But in the 1980s, as a result of urban blight and outward migration of the middle class, the Tryon Mall atrophied. Woolco gave way to a Winn-Dixie, which gave way to a furniture liquidator, which in turn went out of business. The once-proud Tryon Mall, with its two red pagodalike entrances, was nearly abandoned. As the local paper, the Charlotte Observer, described it, “Retailers flocked out. Soon only Family Dollar was left. Weeds sprouted in parking lot cracks. Graffiti decorated walls of vacant buildings. Breezes sent litter scudding everywhere.”

A structure in such disrepair, with its pothole-filled parking lot and reputation as a hangout for drug dealers and gangs, would normally be torn down to make way for new development. But in 1997, three Vietnamese-American sisters, Mimi, Ivy, and Megan Nguyen, bought the 130,000-square-foot central plaza of the old Tryon Mall. The Nguyens, owners of a small Vietnamese supermarket called Viet My that had outgrown its original location, had a vision: they would open a large Asian supermarket and rent the rest of the space to other shops and restaurants. After almost two years of unanticipated costs, renovation delays, and disasters—including a flood caused by Hurricane Danny—the new International Supermarket opened and the Tryon Mall was reincarnated as the Asian Corner Mall.

Aside from its now-packed parking lot and the people, mostly Asian-Americans, streaming in and out of the entrances, the Asian Corner Mall still looks a bit like an abandoned mall. Little has been done to repair the parking lot or to spruce up the interior (because Asian Corner occupies only the central section of the mall, there has not yet been an agreement among all the owners about how to share repair costs). But where there were abandoned stores, now there are Asian restaurants, markets, and shops. Current occupants range from the Dragon Court Restaurant and Hong Kong BBQ to the Nguyens’ International Supermarket and the newer, larger New Century Market, owned by another Vietnamese-American family, which opened in 2004.

Vietnamese-American customers are an important segment of the client base at Asian Corner Mall, and on Tet (the Vietnamese lunar new year) the mall is packed inside

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