Asia“dorf“ Duesseldorf: Kim’s Asiamarkt / Asia-Mart
A piece of home to bite into
By Sun-Mi Jung for R2-Horizon
Foto: MAT
Duesseldorf. The vivid Asian business quarter of Duesseldorf is located between Berliner Allee, Klosterstrasse, Charlottenstrasse and Graf-Adolf-Strasse: Restaurants, super markets, service companies and retailers have found their place and their customers here. And it is here, on Stresemannstrasse to be exact, that Kim’s Asia Market is doing its business. Lead by Korean family Kim, and in the second generation. Jun Kim, the young manager, is very busy this afternoon: “On Saturdays, all hell breaks loose “, he’d already advised the R2-Team in advance.
And really: Customers keep pouring in. Many Asian looking people, but also many Westerners are looking for Asian specialties: Nashi-pears, sweet potatoes, soy sprouts, Tofu, Kimtchi, rice of course, barley, buck wheats, algae, sea weed, soy sauce, soy paste, sweets, rice cakes, noodles, spices, rice wine and many other items. Yeong Kyong Kim und Alexander Redschitz came from Detmold, albeit not just to visit Kim’s Asiamarkt. The Russo-German-Korean couple with two small kids (aged four and seven) thinks they’re in the heaven of Asian food, because ”in Detmold, such stores don’t exist.“ Sea weed and sesame oil are already stacked in the young family’s shopping basket. Things they’d have to order online otherwise. Alexander and Yeong Kyong met in Korea, now Yeong Kyong has already been living in Germany for twelve years. In a country, where you have to drive many kilometres in order to be able to buy fresh sea weed.
That is not a rare thing to manager Jun Kim: “On weekends, our customers come from as far away as the Netherlands and Belgium. They buy goods for 500 Euro and pack their whole trunk full of stuff for friends and family.“ Even from Greece and Poland Korean ex-patriates are coming in order to buy a piece of home. A piece of home that you can eat.
Foto: MAT
Lourdes and Guenther Klause from Neuss are looking for Asian food.
Lourdes and Guenther Klause from Neuss are looking for cookies from Thailand. Lourdes (aged 59) hails from the Philippines yet has now been living for 23 years with her husband in Germany. “My wife always visits Asian stores“, recounts Guenther Klause. It’s their first visit to Kim’s Asiamarkt and Lourdes, who confesses not to even cook Asian food that often at home, immediately finds her way around easily. “Those are glass noodles, this is glutamate“, Lourdes is happy to explain to the R2-reporters. Only the Thai-cookies the couple has been looking for haven’t been found so far.
And that in the light of the fact that Thai-products are best sellers in Kim’s Asiamarkt. “Many Germans are looking for them. And of course they ask us about anything to do with Sushi. That is still very hip right now“, says Jun Kim. Korean food is not so often sought by German customers, “usually that only happens, when Germans want to cook a dish they know from a Korean restaurant.“ Most customers are Koreans or Japanese at the end of the day. And especially for the first target-group, Kim’s Asiamarkt has a special treat:
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