An Asian food haven

Farther down the aisle, black mushrooms, straw mushrooms and baby corn float in tubs of water; little cartons of colorful California quail eggs rest near gobo root, used largely to flavor stir-fry.

If all this talk about the Olympics kicking off in Beijing on Friday has inspired you to prepare an authentic Chinese dinner, Grantstone should be one of your first stops.

The supermarket, which has anchored the corner of West Grant Road and North Stone Avenue for more than 25 years, is arguably the city's largest Asian market, offering imported spices, sauces, snack foods and noodles from China, Thailand, Japan, Korea and the Philippines, as well as a handful of goods imported from India.

"This is where I get all my Asian spices," said Cindy Ros- Anderson, a Cambodian-born, California-raised mother of one who makes the trek from her Rita Ranch home to Grantstone at least once a month.

Jackson Wong opened Grantstone in 1982, a baker's dozen years after moving to Tucson from his native China to work at his uncle's grocery store.

"I had three uncles in Tucson. One own a grocery store, one own a hotel, another run a hotel," Wong said. "I come here and work a year as a stocker and carryout boy. I come here, I don't speak no English."

Wong spent a decade tooling around area grocery stores, learning the business, before he bought his first market in Phoenix. In 1982, he returned to Tucson and bought the former A.J. Bayless store on Grant and Stone and opened his Asian market.

His store quickly became a neighborhood mainstay, where residents find staples like milk, bread and meat and cash their payroll checks to pay their grocery bills

It's also a hub for Asian restaurateurs from Tucson to El Paso, with hard-to-get imports, from fresh lotus root to concentrated fish and oyster sauces.

"This is the only market that carries all the Asian sauces," said Ellen Chan, who with her husband, C.K. owns Cafe Pacific at 3607 N. Campbell Ave.

Supplying restaurants is still a big part of its business, said manager Steve Sze, who has been at the store since 1989. Many Tucson Asian restaurants turn to Grantstone for items, including Asian noodles, fresh bean curd, canned jackfruit, Chinese sausages, lime leaves, fresh Chinese bitter melon and broccoli, fuzzy melon and live Dungeness crab.

In a freezer case next to the butcher shop are packages of frozen pig intestines, pig tails, pork snouts, liver and stomachs, full beef tongues, chicken feet and turkey tails — many of which are used to flavor soups and sauces, or are mainstays on dim sum tables, Wong said.

"You would probably be surprised. When I come here in 1969, American people they didn't even want to eat the chicken wing. Now the wing, the feet cost (more than a whole) chicken," the 58-year-old father of three chuckled.

Grantstone carries packaged spices as ordinary as granulated garlic and as exotic as ground shrimp and dried eucalyptus leaves.

Most are displayed at the end of an aisle that also carries packaged foods from noodle dinners to boxed mango pudding, almond gelatin and DoFu Delight, "a favorite Asian treat."

There's a sense of organized chaos; open cases of goods are scattered throughout in warehouse fashion. So a half-dozen varieties of imported ramen noodles are not far from gallon jugs of soy sauce and rice wine vinegar, still in the cardboard shipping boxes.

Across the store, near where Ros-Anderson scanned bottles of sauce and packaged noodles, is a refrigerated case with an array of Chinese sausages, dried seafood (fish, anchovies, sardines and shrimp), stew bean curd and tofu, and fresh Asian noodles — some of the very ingredients that motivate the Rita Ranch resident to drive across town once or twice a month.

"This is the store that is most authentic. It has more ingredients that I need," she commented. "This kind of reminds me of the California stores a little."

• Moan's Oriental Market, 2022 S. Craycroft Road, 747-7892. Thai, Chinese, Philippine.

• Sandyi Oriental Market, 4270 E. Pima St., 320-0389. Japanese, Korean.

• Grantstone Supermarket, 8 W. Grant Road, 628-7445. Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Philippine, Thai.

• Kimpo Oriental Market, 5595 E. Fifth St. 750-9009. Korean.

• Sun Oriental Market, 2205 S. Craycroft Road, 790-6945. Korean, Japanese, Hawaiian.

• Mabuhay Filipino Food Store, 2023 S. Craycroft Road, 747-2233. Philippine.

• G & L Import Export Corp., 4828 E. 22nd St., 790-9016. Chinese, Japanese, European and Indian.