A Trip to Hmart: Stuff Edition

One of my favorite things about Kdrama is how much attention it pays to the little details of life—how people eat, sleep, and even use the bathroom. Most shows leave me longing for more information, but as a resident of rural New England I haven’t had much chance for reconnaissance.

My curiosity about material culture in Korea has occasionally led me to the website of Hmart, an “asian-inspired supermarket” in America that carries many of the things that appear in Korean dramas, from aluminum ramyun pans to traditional Chinese medicines. But I only realized a few weeks ago that Hmart actually has a number of brick-and-mortar locations throughout America, including one that’s just over two hours from where I live.

I told myself it was silly to drive that far to visit what’s essentially a grocery store (especially when I’m a notoriously terrible cook), but I finally broke down this week when my mother mentioned wanting to go to a specific mall store that happens to be in the same direction as Hmart. I hijacked her trip...and spent so much time trawling Hmart’s aisles that we never did make it to the store she wanted to visit. (Sorry, Mom!)

In my local grocery store, they’re called “cucumbers.”

Just around the corner from the mall in Burlington, Massachusetts, Hmart is the size of a small suburban supermarket. About half its space is devoted to a straight-up grocery store that carries both Korean foods and typical American staples, and the rest is split between a cramped food court and sections devoted to Korean home goods, cosmetics, toys, and even red ginseng. There are also a lot of Japanese and Vietnamese offerings.

Hmart has the largest collection of fish this side of the
New England Aquarium in Boston.

I was particularly impressed by the huge, well-stocked produce and fish sections. They had things I’m familiar with from television cooking shows but never expected to see in real life, from durian to jackfruit to seas of tiny octopuses and giant flatfish. Of course there was also a whole section of dried squid, each pressed flat as a piece of paper inside its plastic casing.

My mother hates fish and I’m suspicious of any food item that still has its eyes on, so I’m afraid that our provincial side really came out as we walked through the massive seafood area. About halfway I realized we were both gingerly keeping several feet from the glass and covering our mouths with our hands in quasi-horror, as if a fish might spontaneously try to jump in. (In spite of its apparent authenticity, I noted that the shrimp served with our lunch arrived in their shells but without their heads. This may have been a nod to bumpkin eating habits, or maybe they were saving the heads for stock.) I know from a intellectual standpoint that heads are where the yummy bits are, but my visceral reaction as a fish-stick eating American is just too strong to overcome.

I’ve seen entire grocery stores that were smaller than the instant noodle aisle, and the contents of the soy and fish sauce section would probably fill every swimming pool in my entire home state.

A wang’s ransom of ramyun.
(Oh, Korean. Why must your word for “king” be so unfortunate?)

Any one of these bottles of soy sauce would
probably last me the rest of my life.

There are big sections of prepared foods, including lots of kimchi and a wide variety of vegetable and fish banchan, or side dishes. My local Korean restaurant carries only a few types of banchan, and the idea of making something at home that you’ve never had before seems weird to me. Even following a recipe, how do you know you did it right if you’ve never tried the finished product before? So of course I brought a cooler so I could get a bunch of things to try later. (Handily enough, Hmart provided bins of free ice that you could scoop into bags just for this purpose.) There were also lots of samples, but it took a brave soul to try them—many were so spicy they left me teary and gasping, which is not an attractive look for the freezer section.

The kimchi section is about as big as my house.

The prepared foods. I bought one of each. (Well, not really.
But I will be eating pickled radish for a long, long time to come.)

The rest of the store is filled with housewares and other goodies ranging from bedding to toys, makeup, jewelry, appliances, and plates. This is what I was most excited to see, and it didn’t let me down; I finally got a close-up look at a lot of things I’ve always wondered about. The cylindrical pillows that show up in some traditional Kdrama households, for example, are about 3,000 times harder than the kind of pillows I have on my bed, and they’re filled with buckwheat that gives them a shivery, sandy feel to the touch. Hmart only had one sleeping mat, which was essentially an inch of firm padding in a quilted casing.

I’ll take my pillow-topped mattress over this sleeping mat,
but I’d sure love to spend a night on one. I suspect that
they’re actually more comfortable than I think.

Knowing that kimchi jars are intentionally porous enough to allow outside air
to enter,  I thought they’d feel different from regular crockery. They don’t, though.

The ramyun pot: my single most coveted Kdrama item.

During my travels, I spotted a number of drama curiosities that I’ve wondered about. It can be hard to be sure what’s real and what has been created for television, but it seems that anything important enough to find its way into Hmart’s limited space must be truly essential.

A face massager, as shown in School 2013. 
I guess it’s supposed to minimize your jawline?

A food umbrella! 

The favorite snack of Coffee Prince’s Eun Sae, who was always eating them off the
tips of her fingers. I have no idea what they’re made of, as the label was only in Korean.

Naturally, I bought a ridiculous number of things during my trip.

• A selection of ramyun. Korean ramyun noodles seem to be a bit thicker than what’s sold in America, and they generally require a 4-minute cooking time instead of the 3 minutes I’m used to. The ones I’ve tried have all come with veggie packets as well as seasoning mixes. 

• Two headbands with bows on them.

• A “Yam Air-freshener” in the form of a penguin with pointy ears. (Or something?) It says in glorious Engrish: “As a new characteristic air-freshener, Yam is a guardian angel that makes you dream happy and pleasant dreams. You can make your fun story with yam.”

• A plastic scoop with a handle, for which I will almost certainly never have a use. But it was 2 dollars, and they always seem so handy on television. How could I say no to that?

• Banana milk in juice box-style packaging, complete with bendy straws.

• An aluminum ramyun pot that I belatedly discovered might melt if used on my ceramic-top stove. I did serve ramyun from it the other day, and I swear it really was tastier when eaten off the lid.

• Stainless steel chopsticks, which I was interested in trying out. I’m not particularly graceful with any sort of chopsticks, but I’ve found these heavier, rectangular versions especially hard to use. They’re slippery and keep twisting around in my hand whenever I try to pick something up. 

• Long-handled soup spoons. I like these a lot—the added weight and slight bend of the spoon make them really easy to use.

• An assortment of baked goods necessitated by my recent viewing of Baker King Kim Tak Gu.

Most of the loot. (The rest is in the fridge—fermented or not, after two hours in the car
 my peace of mind required immediate refrigeration.)

I couldn’t find everything I wanted to try—the only Korean pears they had were in huge, pricy boxes, and I somehow managed to skip the beverage section altogether so came home tragically sojuless. And although there was a big section of Korean ice creams, most of them were in pint or gallon format—this Hmart didn’t seem to have any of the single-serving plastic kind. I also didn’t buy any music, although I found some shelves of Kpop buried in an area devoted to toys and fashion accessories. All the big bands I read about were represented, including CN Blue, Sistar, JYJ, and 2NE1, among many others. There were no drama box sets (for which my credit card is eternally grateful).

Even though it was a long trip (and partially conducted during the Friday evening rush on one of the most terrifying sections of I-95 near Boston), I’m glad I went to Hmart. It was an eye-opening experience to be such a rube tourist in my own backyard, and the people-watching was amazing—I saw girls at the food court with their pricey purses in the seat behind them, a mother assuring her toddling daughter that they wouldn’t forget to buy her favorite canned Korean tuna, and even a few dreamy boys that could give our drama stars a run for their money. (You were the ripped Lee Sun Gyun lookalike at the food court; I was the heavyset girl with frizzy hair and a camera. Wanna get together and speak some Korean?)

Check back Thursday for the second part of this post, which will focus on the copious amounts of food consumed along the way.