After my Taiwanese parents married in the late ’70s, they decided to move to Canada and start a new life together in a distant land. It was called “Edmonton.”
In that comfortable but offensively cold Albertan city, my parents felt they could provide us with a good life, which they did. What they could not always provide was the food they grew up eating, though my resourceful mother certainly tried.
Sometimes, she would ask the local butcher to save her some pig ears, instructing him to singe off the fine hairs. Boiled until tender, sliced translucently thin, then marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil and Szechuan peppercorns — it was a treat she used to buy from the market in Taiwan, and one of my favourite mom-made snacks growing up in my Edmonton suburb.
Then, in 2002, T&T came to town. The Asian supermarket opened in West Edmonton Mall, above a New Orleans-themed corridor called “Bourbon Street” that had a Hooters and Tony Roma’s. And during T&T’s opening week, my mother went nearly every day.
I accompanied her on one of those trips and marvelled at the Boxing Day-level competition for parking. Shopping took nearly an hour, because she kept bumping into friends. For the first time in two decades my mother could fill her grocery cart with fresh Chinese water spinach and her favourite spicy bean paste. She could buy pre-made pig ears from the deli counter.
She was ecstatic. I was a slouchy teen, wondering: Who gets that excited about a grocery store?
Sixteen years later, I have an answer to my own question: Me. It started when a friend sent a message to a group chat on Facebook. “We’ve got an opening date for Nations!”
Edmonton got its first T&T supermarket around the time I left the city for Toronto, where my grocery options are typically limited to whatever is within walking distance. I moved to the Corso Italia area a few years ago and my kitchen has become a reflection of my new neighbourhood: cannoli from my favourite Italian bakery; tremocos, or lupini beans, from the Portuguese grocer; fresh corn tortillas from the corner store owned by the Spanish-speaking Chinese family.
But the area is a Chinese food dead zone and I rarely eat sliced pig ears anymore. Sometimes I’ll borrow a friend’s car and drive 30 minutes to the Cherry Beach T&T, where I always load a large plastic container with sliced pig ears from the deli. It’s usually half eaten by the time I get home.
Until my friend’s Facebook message, I had never heard of Nations, which bills itself as a “multicultural grocery” where “East meets West.” In November, the grocery chain opened its fourth GTA location in the Stockyards complex off Keele St., just down the St. Clair streetcar line from where I live.
There was a photo gallery of Nations, which I clicked through idly until one of the pictures made my eyebrows shoot up: a row of glistening roasted ducks hanging from metal hooks.
To me, this kind of window display — recognizable from Chinatowns everywhere — is like a signpost for where to find authentic Chinese food. It was also something I never expected to see at Keele and St. Clair. “Whoa!” I wrote back. “They have legit Chinese BBQ!”
Three days later, I was making weekend plans to meet up with friends at a grocery store. The first shopper I saw was an old Chinese man leaving the store with an enormous durian, a stinky green fruit that science writer David Quammen once described as tasting “like vanilla custard” but smelling “like the underwear of someone you don’t want to know.”
Fresh durian being sold this far from Chinatown or T&T? Another promising signpost.
The bright and gleaming grocery store inside resembled your average Loblaws, but it clearly wasn’t conceived by someone named Galen Weston Jr. There was all-day dim sum, Chinese characters on the produce stickers, and a penchant for plastic-wrapping vegetables that seems to have proliferated amongst Asian supermarkets. (Nations representatives say they do this to improve hygiene and reduce food wastage, but pledged to improve their environmental practices after they were recently criticized in an online petition).
But the hot food counter also had goulash, fresh-made burgers, and three varieties of chicken served up jerk, Tikka and Portuguese style. There was gelato and fresh-squeezed juice next to the bubble tea. The shopping aisles had as many brands for yaki nori as they did for corn tortillas. You could buy frozen dumplings and frozen pupusas.
According to the latest census, Toronto has officially become a city where the “visible minority” is the majority, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the spice aisle at your downtown Sobeys or Metro. Sure, you can probably find Sriracha just about anywhere in Toronto’s core but my favourite brand of spicy Chinese barbecue sauce?
For that, I always had to go to Chinatown or borrow a car and head for the 905. But now, with the arrival of Nations, I can take a quick streetcar ride to my nearest grocery store.
Nations feels like the kind of “mainstream” grocery store downtown Torontonians have long deserved, and the logical next step for a city rich in both small ethnic food stores and big shiny supermarkets.
Catering to the expanding and culturally specific tastes of Canada’s evolving demographic seems like an obvious business opportunity to Frank Ho, Nations’ senior vice-president. He points out that in 2017 alone, 300,000 people left their home countries and came to Canada.
“What do they eat — traditional Canadian food?” he asks cheerfully. “I don’t think so. Ha, ha, ha!”
Ho believes it’s newcomers like him — someone who was born in Shanghai but has lived in Canada since 1999 — who are best positioned to deliver supermarkets that truly cater to Toronto’s increasingly diverse tastes.
The owners of what he calls “traditional” Canadian grocery stores are certainly trying to diversify but he believes they can expand their “ethnic aisles” only so far, whereas the template for his grocery store was originally designed with the diverse shopper in mind.
“They cannot see what they cannot see,” he says. “They do not have the vision of the (other) side. All of the decision-makers, they are sitting on the top, but they only see their own side.”
But what does a guy from China know about catering to Portuguese tastes? Or the spices Brazilians prefer? Or the cuts of meat Jamaicans like to cook? Ho admits he has no clue, but he is learning by talking to local chefs, small vendors and suppliers who cater to Toronto’s ethnic communities.
He also relies on demographic research, which shows that the immediate area around the new Nations is strongly Portuguese — a community that eats a lot of fresh fish, so he makes sure the seafood room is particularly well stocked. But it also holds buckets of pig tail, cured pork snout and salted mackerel “for Caribbean people,” Ho says. “They go crazy for it! I don’t eat it, but they just love it.”
Ho’s supply chain has more than 500 suppliers, which sounds maddeningly complex, and his early strategy has been to simply ask them to provide their top-selling products — and then watch the shelves to see which ones move. This scattershot approach was evident on my first visit, when I walked down the spice aisle and counted six different brands of madras curry powder.
But can one grocery store chain be all things to all people, especially when each location serves such a different mix? When I went to Nations in early December, the diverse customers I met seemed satisfied: a Filipino woman with pandesal sweet rolls from Mississauga’s Manila Bakery; a West African engineer buying fresh whole fish, which his family in Ghana used to buy directly from the fishing boats; a young couple — she was Chinese and he was Vietnamese — picking up Cantonese noodles and lemongrass, a common ingredient in Vietnamese cuisine.
Jennifer Singh, a woman originally from Guyana, had driven from Scarborough after reading online about Nations. Her cart was filled with oxtail and pork hock, which she planned on using for pepperpot and garlic pork, two favourite holiday dishes in Guyanese households.
But she was particularly keen to see if the store had genips, or “Spanish limes,” which are difficult to find, but one of her son’s favourite foods. “I thought if all the foods are here in one spot, let me come and see.”
She found her genips, but they were selling for $3.99 a pound — a bit steep, especially when sold by the bag, she says.
Her verdict? “It’s a nice experience but not extraordinary,” she says. “The meats that I got are the meats I could get in Scarborough.” But if she lived in the area, she added, she would definitely shop here.
I don’t see myself becoming a weekly fixture at Nations. I’m generally a bit lazy about grocery shopping and when I do venture out, I like to support farmers markets and the family-owned stores along St. Clair.
But I know I will be coming back. After checking out the Chinese barbecue display during my first visit, I turned the corner and could hardly believe what I saw: rows of sliced pig ears, packaged in takeout containers.
It felt like a small but triumphant milestone. In my Toronto neighbourhood, I can now shop along the same streetcar line to buy Italian prosciutto, Portuguese tarts and sliced pig ears, the food of my Albertan childhood and the Szechuan delicacy my mother once bought from the markets of Taipei.
I put some in my basket and ate them as soon as I got home, standing up in my kitchen and straight from the box.
They were not as good as the ones from T&T and definitely not as delicious as my mother’s. But crunching into those salty-sweet ribbons of pork and cartilage was a moment of bliss. Home had never tasted more like home.