Asia Shop

Yesterday afternoon I decided to accompany my aunt to the big market on Vámház körút and she mentioned that there was a superb Asian delicatessen shop right next door, so I peeked in. Wow! There is nothing (and when I say it, I literally mean NOTHING) you cannot find in this enormous food paradise! I found it especially amazing, as this was the first shop that I haven't visited before, which is strange, because I have walked around this place probably more than a thousand times. With this, I welcome you to the diverse culinary world of Asia, and even more!

Let us follow my path in this promising deli! The first stop, where I got absolutely stunned, was the refrigerators. Yes, there are actually four refrigerators here serving the single purpose of keeping different types of special ingredients, spices and vegetables fresh. Delicacies like lemongrass, watercress, sugar snap peas, and fresh leaves of coriander are goods that are extremely hard to find in Hungarian markets, supermarkets, or even special deli shops. On the other hand, you can find all these rare delicacies here, at Asia Shop, and much more than that! If you expect that this store only offers ingredients to exclusively Asian meals, you are wrong, since you can also find fresh basil, cilantro, ruccola, and baby spinach.

I spent half an hour trying to memorize everything I saw on the sauce shelf, but I have almost certainly failed with that mission. No surprise, there is every single sauce you need for Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indian cooking. Moreover, you can also find Mexican, American, African, and English sauces and chutneys, and all the other international food ingredients I now fail to remember. In other words: everything.

The highlight of Asia Shop is inevitably the fifteen-meter-long spice shelf. Now, this shelf is the one that is absolutely not restricted to any nationality, because simply everything is here! As we know, Asia is the cradle of spices, thus it is important that this shop offers a great variety, but I have never expected that many types of them. May it be red, yellow, orange, white, black, light or deep green, fresh, dried, whole, crushed, ground, powder, or paste, you can find it here. As I cannot list the hundreds of different spices, I let the pictures speak instead of me. The best illustration I can give to this wide selection would probably be if I said that I have counted thirty different types of curry mixes. But I won't say that, because I stopped at thirty…

No matter how hard I try to list all the ingredients you can find here, I simply cannot, as there is a huge shelf of diverse types of beans, lentils and other legumes. Furthermore, you can find several flours made out of grains that I don't even recognize, as well as couscous, bulgur, and quinoa. There is also a selection of tortillas, naans, and other Asian style flatbreads and baked goods.

Pasta was first discovered in Asia; so, naturally, this shop has many kinds of flour-based pastas and rice noodles. They can be used very well for Italian food and any Asian noodle dish. Long, short, thick, thin, dense, hollow, filled, stuffed, and shell-like pastas are all available here.

And now that I have successfully summarized approximately third of the content of Asia Shop, I blow off the steam and try to cook something Asian and delicious. If you also want to make authentic Asian or any other food, I strongly advise you to visit Asia Shop on Vámház körút, right next to the great market hall in Pest. It is truly an extraordinary experience! Oh, and I have probably forgot to mention some things you can also get: jams; teas; Asian pots, dishes and kitchen tools; dessert decorations, frozen seafood… Ah! I'll just make another post later! 

The staff said that the website of Asia Shop is under construction, so I will include the link when it's ready. 

Opening Hours:

Monday: 10:00 - 17:30

Tuesday-Friday: 8:00 - 18:30

Saturday: 7:00 - 15:00

Sunday: CLOSED