Montgomery County is filled with food markets that cater to the diverse backgrounds of its residents. Our restaurant critic accompanied five locals on shopping trips to their favorite establishments to find out what they buy.
Those of us responsible for the household’s food shopping know that there’s a lot more to it than just hitting up a conglomerate supermarket chain and being done—we go hither and yon to multiple places that carry particular items we like. Maybe it’s The Organic Butcher in Bethesda for Kerós Greek olive oil and housemade kielbasa, then off to Rockville to Maruichi Japanese Grocery for mirin and soba noodles, and to Patel Brothers in Montgomery Village for Indian spices and fresh okra. Here are the markets that five accomplished Montgomery County cooks prefer.
Janet Cam at Great Wall Supermarket
Potomac resident Janet Cam is a food doyenne who co-owned Le Pavillon, a Valhalla of Washington, D.C., fine dining in the 1980s, and then became a restaurant and hospitality consultant and lecturer with a focus on fine wine. Cam (who declines to give her age) is also a great cook whose specialties include Chinese dishes her mother and grandmother taught her how to prepare when she was growing up in Monterey Park, California.
The Rockville location of Great Wall Supermarket—a chain store that sells fresh produce, seafood, meat, dry goods and household goods—is Cam’s market of choice for Asian ingredients. During a visit there with her, she raves about the Buddhist-style chicken, sold with the head and feet, in the meat department. “They’re so good they remind me of poulets de Bresse,” she says, referring to the highly regarded chickens raised in eastern France. “I use them to make ‘popo chicken,’ which my mother taught me how to do.” (Popo, Cam explains, is Cantonese for maternal grandmother.) Cam dunks the whole chicken into boiling water that has been flavored with pickled mustard greens and crushed fresh ginger slices sauteed in hot peanut oil and kosher salt, returns the broth to a boil, turns the heat off and lets the chicken sit, covered, for 30 minutes. She rinses the bird in cold water, rubs it with sesame oil, slices it and serves it at room temperature with two sauces—one oyster sauce-based, the other made by pouring hot peanut oil over julienned and salted scallions.
Passing through the aisles, Cam points out favorite items and preferred brands: fresh quail eggs, Lee Kum Kee brand oyster sauce, Best Taste brand white pepper powder, Knife brand pure peanut oil and Touched brand mille crepe cakes, which are vacuum-sealed frozen cakes in various flavors, such as mango tango, Shizuoka matcha and taro. “They’re delicious and great for a dinner party,” Cam says. She marvels at the teeming produce section. “They have four kinds of bok choy,” she notes. “Look at these gorgeous daikon radishes!” She also gushes about the fresh morel mushrooms she found on a previous visit.
We hit the market’s dim sum stalls at the end of our visit. “They make ha gao [shrimp dumplings] to order because if they sit in a steam table, they fall apart,” she says. “The shumai are great, and so are the wu gok, fried taro filled with pork, which are hard to find anymore.”
Other places Cam shops include The Market at River Falls in Potomac; Bethesda Central Farm Market and Trader Joe’s in Bethesda; and Yekta Persian Market & Kabob Counter, Maruichi Japanese Grocery and Whole Foods Market in Rockville.
Great Wall Supermarket, 700 Hungerford Drive, Rockville, 240-314-0558, gw-supermarket.com
Anahita Tavakoli at Gourmet Bazaar
Bethesda resident Anahita Tavakoli, a senior drug risk analyst for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. She has lived in the D.C. area since she was 12, when her family emigrated. “Food is such an integral part of Persian life,” she says. “I learned cooking from my mother growing up—she is the best cook—and both of my sisters cook.”
To gather ingredients for her Persian fare, Tavakoli, 50, heads to Gourmet Bazaar on Rockville Pike. While giving me a tour one afternoon, her eyes light up in the produce section, where fresh green almonds are displayed with fava beans, beets, pomegranates and bags of fresh grape leaves. “Look at the bins of fresh herbs!” she says before picking up slender Chinese eggplants she always buys here for a stew called khoresh bademjan. She nabs fresh green beans for a rice dish called lubia polo.
Every meal starts with an hors d’oeuvres platter called a sabzi board, Tavakoli explains. (Sabzi are fresh herbs.) Hers may include Bulgarian and French feta cheese; tons of fresh dill and mint; sliced red onions and cucumbers; tomatoes; walnuts and almonds soaked overnight in salted water; pomegranate seeds; fresh figs; and any of her mother’s homemade strawberry, fig or orange peel jams. “A sabzi board is a great way to introduce guests to our culture,” she says as we ogle a dazzling Gourmet Bazaar case filled with various nuts in giant copper bowls. “We get this for Nowruz [Persian New Year], and Yalda, the winter solstice celebration,” she says, pointing to a sweet mix made with dried white mulberries, almonds, walnuts, dried figs, raisins and pistachios.
Other products she remarks on are the various kinds of torshi (pickled vegetables, especially cucumbers or garlic cloves); lavashak (confectionary sheets similar to American Fruit Roll-Ups); pomegranate molasses (great for vinaigrettes and used in a Persian chicken-and-walnut stew called fesenjoon); rose water; bright green slivered pistachios; and barberries, tart and dried small red berries used in rice dishes and stews.
Other markets Tavakoli frequents include Trader Joe’s in Bethesda, Yekta Persian Market & Kabob Counter and Whole Foods Market in Rockville, H Mart in Gaithersburg and Korean Korner in Silver Spring. “The Asian markets in MoCo carry a bunch of Middle Eastern products and have great produce, like fresh okra, which we use in stews,” she says.
Gourmet Bazaar, 736-A Rockville Pike, Rockville, 301-838-3031, gourmetbazaardmv.com
Aba Kwawu and Efua Bonney at Savanna International Market
The kitchen is bustling in the Rockville home of Aba Kwawu,owner of the Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm TAA PR, as she, her mother, Efua Bonney, 77, and her 16-year-old daughter, Sela, are putting together a Ghanaian feast. While oil heats on the stove for frying plantains, Kwawu (who declines to give her age) puts the finishing touches on groundnut (peanut) soup with chicken and baked whole tilapia stuffed with peppers. Next to the kitchen island, Bonney and Sela make fufu—a pliable dough eaten as a side dish—from cassava root and plantains. Bonney sits on a stool turning the dough over and over in a large wooden mortar as Sela pounds the starches, which had just been boiled until soft, with a long wooden pestle almost as tall as she is. The idea is to work the dough and moisten it to ensure that it’s lump-free, Bonney says. “If we’re having a lot of people over, we use fufu flour, which you mix with water and cook on the stove,” Kwawu says, “but Mom was a home ec teacher in Ghana, so she usually insists on making everything from scratch.”
Many of the meal’s ingredients came from Savanna International Market in Gaithersburg, an African food store and butcher that Bonney calls “the Ghana market”—groundnut paste (unsweetened peanut butter); shito, a spicy deep reddish-brown condiment that Kwawu refers to as Ghanaian chili crunch; cassava root; plantains; and two kinds of kenkey, polenta-like orbs made from fermented white corn and served with stews and fish. Bonney lugs many ingredients back from trips to Ghana, such as palm oil and garri (cassava flour), but heads to Savanna for other staples, including egusi (melon) seeds used for a stew made with spinach; sorghum leaves for waakye (rice and beans); jasmine rice for jollof, a zesty tomato-based West African rice dish; ugu (pumpkin leaves); fresh goat; dried fish; and small flavorful chickens that she says “aren’t pumped up with stuff like [American chickens] are.”
Savanna also carries housewares similar to those the Kwawu family brought from Ghana, such as conical earthenware asanka bowls used for grinding food, wooden mortars and tapoli, a wooden hourglass-shaped pestle.
Kwawu and Bonney also shop at Lotte Plaza Market in Rockville and H Mart in Wheaton.
Savanna International Market, 117 N. Frederick Ave., Gaithersburg, 301-921-1866
Nycci Nellis at The Market at River Falls
Nycci Nellis’ professional life revolves around food. Her website, TheListAreYouOnIt.com, has been a go-to for food and beverage coverage in the D.C. area since 2004. She has a podcast called Industry Night with Foodie & the Beast and, with her husband, David, hosts Foodie and the Beast on Federal News Radio.
Nellis, 55, entertains often at her Kensington home. “My philosophy is keep it simple, stupid,” she says. “There was a time when I insisted on doing everything all by myself from scratch, but there are so many good products available now in markets that allow for easy, graceful entertaining.”
She loves The Market at River Falls in Potomac, owned by Potomac residents James McWhorter and his wife, Yasmin Abadian, as a one-stop shop. “You can get dinner, extras for entertaining, your meat and fish, grab a bottle of wine—everything for a night at home or entertaining,” she says.
On a visit there, she picks up a bag of Wicked Mix, a spicy snack mix with Chex cereal and nuts. “Oh, these look good. I’ll try them!” She grabs a bottle of Kozlik’s Canadian Mustard brand horseradish mustard. “I’m obsessed with this mustard. I put it on charcuterie boards or brush a pork tenderloin with it, wrap it in bacon and bake it for a quick, easy dinner.”
Passing by the poke bar, where customers can customize bowls with various toppings and dressings, and cases filled with pristine fish and butchered meats, we arrive at the prepared foods section. “They have a tremendous selection here,” Nellis says. “I like to buy a few days’ worth of meals for people who have had surgery or maybe just had a baby, and River Falls makes it so easy. Their little meatloaves are ridiculous. They serve about two people, and I can’t make it better than they do. They have an assortment of prepared salmon [such as hickory-smoked, horseradish-crusted, grilled with mango chutney, and poached] that is medium rare in the center so you can reheat it without ruining it, which is so smart. Usually when you buy cooked salmon elsewhere, it’s overcooked and cakey. Their grilled beef or chicken kebabs are also excellent.” Nellis raves about side dishes such as orzo salad, grilled asparagus, green beans amandine, garlic and thyme-roasted mushrooms, and Israeli couscous salad. She’s a sucker for blondies that come from a Pennsylvania Dutch bakery, and Nightingale ice cream sandwiches.
Nellis also shops at Bethesda Central Farm Market on Sundays for produce and cheese, Whole Foods Market in Rockville, Pescadeli and Butchers Alley in Bethesda, and Potomac Sweets bakery in Kensington when she needs fresh bread.
The Market at River Falls, 10124 River Road, Potomac, 301-765-8001, marketriverfalls.com
Tatiana Mora at Megamart Supermarket
Silver Spring resident Tatiana Mora, 48, is a chef and co-owner of Mita, a Latin American, fine-dining vegetarian restaurant in D.C. that opened in December 2023 to rave reviews. In his Spring Dining Guide published in May, Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema named it as one of the D.C area’s 26 best new restaurants.
Mora, who hails from Venezuela (as does Mita’s other owner, chef Miguel Guerra), often shops at the Gaithersburg location of Megamart Supermarket, a regional chain of stores in Virginia and Maryland that specializes in Hispanic products. “We find a lot of ingredients for our menus here that suppliers don’t carry, especially South American ones,” Mora says as we stroll through Megamart’s large produce section, above which multicolored pinatas hang. “We get banana leaves here, malanga [a tuber similar to taro root], sapote [a fruit], fresh yucca, sugarcane, huacatay [an Andean herb also known as black mint].” Other ingredients listed on her current menu are available at the market, too: plantains, herbs such as hoja santa, a type of green called mizuna, mangoes and young coconuts.
Walking past the market’s large meat and produce sections, stacks of multiple brands of fresh tortillas, bags of corn husks and refrigerator cases filled with crema (the Central American version of sour cream) and sundry quesos blancos (white cheeses), Mora points to bags of maracuya (passion fruit) and guanabana (soursop) pulp. “We get fresh or frozen fruit pulps here, like cherimoya, which is on the menu now, for ice cream,” she says. “They have less additives than others that are available to us.”
Perusing the aisles, Mora notes various items of interest: cinnamon sticks (“different than the variety Americans use,” she says); chunos (“black, white or gray potatoes that are frozen, then dried in the sun,” she explains); and a stunning array of dried chiles, spices and herbs that include ruda leaves, hibiscus leaves and eucalyptus. “My grandmother would make teas to cure us from these,” she recalls.
Mora also likes to shop at La Plaza Latina Market in Falls Church, Virginia.
Megamart Supermarket, 33 Dalamar St., Gaithersburg, 301-330-9223, megamartsupermarket.com
This story appears in the November/December 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
