A Dong Supermarket — Attraction in West Hartford

Large market with fresh veg and meat, frozen section, and shelf stable Asian and Indian ingredients like tea, sauces, flavor mixes, and snacks. A whole aisle of dried noodles! Most item labels have limited English wording but primarily are labeled in full in non-English. Also a lot of items have no shelf labels so you wont know the price of everything. This may be a large store but it's not Stop and Shop. The floors are not shiny. There are always boxes in the aisles. The lighting is poor. The signs hanging from the ceiling don't exactly line up with what is in that aisle, and the rice is at the end of the store, but the long check-out line means shopping for rice will risk your place in line. The check out process is probably my biggest gripe. One line forms in the last aisle which you have to enter from the back of the store because it's so cramped with other people and carts already in line and the bottleneck of rice shoppers, that you can't get in line from the front. Because this building was once a big name market, there are about 12 registers, but all the times I've been here, only 2 lanes are open so expect to wait. They have lots of boxes available at the front if you prefer this over bags. While I feel this store could be cleaner and better organized, you won't find a wider selection anywhere in the state, and it is still a standard visit any time I'm near Hartford, to stock up on essentials and grab a few bags of dumplings (a full freeze aisle, both sides, all dumplings/dim sum!). The parking lot is awful. It's on a slope and because the entrance is in a 90 degree corner of this plaza, close parking is very limited, however, down the slope, there is more parking on the far end of the building, furthest from...

It's the anchor major Asian grocery store for much of CT and part of Western MA. The thing is, it more likely than not, offers the mid-tier shelf items for a lot of staple ingredients. This means that you will need to buy more ingredients to concentrate down (like, evaporate the water out), find specific items elsewhere, or just go to a good restaurant for classic staple foods.

For example, if you're looking for a good soy sauce, fish paste/sauce, or stock base, you will have to cook additional ingredients with salty and/or umami flavors into your recipe for it to reach the height required for "authentic taste" because the ones you chose from here are often watered down in some way or they're not the flagship kind of brands. I say this, as someone who has had to survive off of home cooking for several years (and it is worth the 2+ hour trips to Boston/NYC to get those higher quality sauces or dry ingredients to make a recipe good). It's frustrating because the prices at A Dong are either manageable or high enough that I do wait for the long trips to get ingredients and maybe stick to A Dong for fresh ones. You need to come during the right weekday to pick produce because they are otherwise kind of limp.

But alas, I do like going here because it's better than nothing, and you can always have fun at the small massage spot or Pho Boston next door. Being a one-stop shop, if I can't handle the time commitment to go to different stores to get the ingredients I want, I'll throw all of those items into my cart and challenge myself to make a good recipe out of what I bought.

It's nostalgic too, like going back to the 90's to...

I haven't been shopping at this place as often as like before, due to some reasons that I think it's unfair to the consumers. For example, I used to buy some Thai basil leaves that'd been packed, when I got home and unpacked it. There were big stems hidden under those basil leaves which made its weight was heavier on the stem to make it higher price per pack. Another example that I recently notices and completely stopping buying it for good is ground pork. I was impressed by the price that ground pork was so cheap at this store, $1.99/lb at that time (but right now that price is going up but not much), and here the reason why. I also noticed that the ground pork in the package looked so different from Stop and Shop, Shoprite, or other grocery store. It looks soggy, mushy when it touches the plastic wrap. However, I didn't really care at that time since it was cheap, and it didn't effect on my cooking that much. After that (I'm not really sure when it started getting worse because I stopped buying it long time ago,) I purchased again and cooked some preserved sour pork, and this time I realized this was something wrong with the pork, it was giving too much excessive water because the ground pork had been added a lot of water in it in order to make it weighs more than actual pork content, and I answered myself why the ground pork at A Dong is cheaper than other places. Well, there's more things that I don't want to write more since the comment is already too long. In conclusion, I don't buy things at A Dong much anymore if I can find it some where else. Moreover, the prices of things there...