The Korean grocery chain H Mart opens a branch Thursday at 240 Elm St., Davis Square, Somerville, replacing a bfresh store that had served the area for around six and a half years. While the bfresh gave some residents a more convenient shopping option than the Star Market several blocks down Elm Street in Porter Square, business wasn’t robust enough to keep its Ahold corporate parents satisfied.
H Mart is something different – not just another grocery store where you check a pork loin, bag of Fritos, bottle of spray cleaner and new toothbrush off a to-buy list. For many people who were excited by the idea of an H Mart coming even before they could be excited by the news they were right, it’s a more specific destination of discovery that ends with a shopping bag that can’t help but feel more thrilling than a weekly haul of Cheerios and margarine. You’ll still be able to buy produce, meat, seafood, dairy and other groceries here, but they’re stocked alongside a dizzying array of specialty items.
Here are some things to know about our new H Mart.
Some history. This chain of “Asian-inspired” supermarkets started in 1982 in Queens, New York, as Han Ah Reum, which means “One arm full of groceries” in Korean, changing its name to H Mart in 2002 as it opened its 19th store. There are now nearly 100 stores in the chain nationwide, according to the H Mart website. One opened in Cambridge’s Central Square in 2013.
The grand opening. You can start shopping at 10 a.m. Thursday, according to a flyer from H Mart’s marketing department that lists a few promotions for the event: a reusable shopping bag that’s free if you spend more than $30; and a $1 food sample of kimbap (you might think of it as a sushi roll of cooked rice, tofu and burdock root) for spending more than $50, with another $1 strawberry-flavored milk drink when you spend more than $100. The chain has a rewards card, and new or current card holders can give their email address to get a free thermos mug. It’s okay to be unimpressed – shopping at H Mart can be rewarding enough on its own.
The new site has no food court. Food service is a part of many H Marts, including the one in Central Square with its pastries, sandwiches, sushi, curry and ramen – and you might have assumed the bfresh’s original Dunkin’ Donuts space would be repurposed for this purpose. But there’s nothing with a menu in this “limited space,” marketing team manager Douglas Kim said. (This is considered a midsized store despite being only about 11,000 square feet; the Central Square site is 18,000 square feet.) Shoppers can instead look for precooked and ready-to-eat items such as sushi, steamed sweet potatoes and steamed corn. There’s also a variety of flavors of packaged roll cakes, cream buns and mochi (delicious sweets with fillings inside a chewy ball of glutinous rice dough); an Asian pastry craving doesn’t have to go unfilled.
Instead, go crazy on snacks. There are around 8,000 to 10,000 items on store shelves here, and many of them make H Mart a worthy challenger to Trader Joe’s when it comes to snack foods either sweet or savory, not to mention candies and cookies. No one will be disappointed if they come looking for exotic flavors of KitKat (milk tea, green tea, orange, strawberry and Milo malted drink varieties are among those already stocked) or Pocky (including matcha, coconut, crunchy strawberry, almond crush and cookies and cream), and there are both flavors of crisps you won’t find in Star Market (for instance, spicy salted egg potato chips) and surprises in the bases that hold the flavors (for example, sour cream and onion salmon skins). “The store manager tries to display as much flavor as possible,” Kim said.
The stock enables whole news kinds of cooking. We’re all familiar with Spam either as a kitsch item or chic enabler of musubi – grilled Spam between or atop rice, wrapped by the dried seaweed known as nori – but H Mart allows for experimentation with the ingredient in ways you probably haven’t imagined: maple, spicy, teriyaki, hickory smoked and oven-roasted turkey varieties are available, as well as a pork-belly tocino that will please expat Filipinos. Eating too much Spam? Consider the “lite” or low-sodium varieties. There is also nori in mass quantities, walls filled with ramen varieties, rices, teas and condiments that could make home cooking options explode. (And make it easy for the Kong Pocha down the the street to restock in an emergency.) “We carry items to meet the needs of most Asian customers,” Kim said. “This is a midsized store. In this size, we can provide varieties of asian groceries and fulfill the local community’s needs as well.” Don’t see what you want? Kim said to simply ask store manager Sangchul Shin if he can order it in.
The store is filled with home goods. Part of this H Mart’s square footage – in fact, where the Dunkin’ used to be – is used for Artbox, a chain of cute and inexpensive Korean toys, tchotchkes, stationery and housewares. Artbox reportedly has opened 120 branches in Korea since launching in 1984 and has more than 40 branches overseas. In the United States, many are inside H Marts. This one has a bunch of practical things useful for college students and others: toasters, hot pots, stock pots, grills and pans and even a mini gas stove and a single countertop burner, as well as tumblers, heat-retaining mugs and containers. (Also slippers, cushions and towels.) Some would fit anywhere; some go best in the kind of setting that welcomes teddy bears and cartoon bunnies. The chain usually has standard stock choices across locations, “but each store carries special products to meet the needs of the community,” Kim said. This one is customized – like one in Brookline – to address the needs of students and other young residents.
The Artbox still has plenty of crafty fun. A lot of stickers, charms, stuffed animals and very friendly pens and other kinds of art supplies are packed into a small space. They will delight kids from the very young to those well into their double digits – and can be a way to sweeten the experience of grocery shopping if a bunch of Haribo, Milkita and Trolli sweets doesn’t do the trick.
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