Organic ethnic grocery store is all the multi-culti rage

CHANDLER — With its automatic doors, uniformed cashiers, and numbered aisles, Lee Lee’s may, at first glance, look like your average supermarket. But it doesn’t smell like it.

Walk into Lee Lee’s Oriental market on Dobson and Warner roads and you’ll instantly be hit with the overpowering, brackish smell of fresh fish.

Giant tanks along the back wall crawl with live crab and lobster. An open icebox nearby boasts everything from scallops to a jumbo octopus – whole.

The produce section, its bins piled high with fresh fruits and vegetables, carries the usual Gala apples and Bell peppers. But these American grocery store standbys are greatly outnumbered by ethnic foods and ingredients.

In fact, most customers pass the “mainstream” goods to examine the Chinese eggplant and Taiwanese pak choi further down the aisle. A few bins away, the sweet scent of Thai coconuts and winter melon offer shoppers a brief respite from the seafood section’s olfactory assault.

Lee Lee’s, which packs its aisles with ethnic foods and spices from China, Korea, Japan, Africa, India and more, is a place where most products have to be subtitled in English. Here, Cheetos look out of place amidst coffee-coated Koh-Kae peanuts, sunflower chips, and crunchy Japanese corn rolls.

Meng and Paulina Truong, who live in Chandler, are the founders and owners of Lee Lee’s. The market, which started out as a small shop on Southern Avenue, has become so popular they recently opened a second location in Peoria.

But the Truongs weren’t always so business-savvy. When they immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s, they barely had a high school education between them.

“It was really hard starting it,” Paulina Troung writes in an email. She’s still not fully comfortable interviewing in English. “We made a lot of mistakes at first. We didn’t know anything, really.”

While the Truongs may not have been confident with their business skills, they were at least confident in their idea. Paulina Truong says she and her husband recognized the scarcity of Asian markets in the Valley at the time, and knew opening the grocery store would not only help them, “but the whole Asian community, too.”

Chandler resident Yin Lin, who emigrated from China to the U.S. in 1986 and heard about Lee Lee’s from friends a few years later. Although the store was still fairly small, she remembers being shocked by how many Chinese products Lee Lee’s carried. She says the competing Chinese grocery at the time didn’t compare for selection and freshness.

Lin was also attracted to the way Meng Truong made an effort to make his customers feel heard. “I would always go up and say hi and give him suggestions about products I thought he should start carrying,” she says through a translator. “I’d say ‘I need this to make so-and-so Chinese dish, could you order it?’ And the next time I came in, he would have it there.” Nearly 20 years later, she still goes to Lee Lee’s for her weekly groceries.

Paulina Truong says requests like Lin’s fueled the store’s swift growth. “When more and more diverse customers came and asked us to start selling things, we had to expand,” she says.

But just because the Truongs widened their selection doesn’t mean they sacrificed the freshness their customers came to expect. Lin recalls Meng Truong telling her how he drove all the way to California every week to personally select the store’s produce. Meng says he still endeavors to bring his customers “only the freshest” goods.

And indeed, despite the smell, the line to have meat and seafood caught or cut stretches around the counter.

“Everything is fresh here. Period,” says Amla Dhamdarve, who has shopped for her family’s Indian groceries at Lee Lee’s since 2000. “That’s why I keep coming back.”

Jennifer Truong, the couple’s 19-year-old daughter, said that when she sees the faces of loyal customers like Amla or the frequent crowds of new buyers, she takes pride in her parents’ success. She knows firsthand that they didn’t come by it easily.

“When I was younger, I hardly ever saw them. I could never go on family vacations like all the other kids I knew,” she says. “But I just admire and appreciate them so much now. They started out with literally nothing and now they’re definitely something.”

= = =

>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.