Sunrise Mart — Local services in New York

This is my favorite branch of Sunrise Mart. Everything in the supermarket area is always fresh and well-stocked. The focus is on actual groceries rather than packaged snacks and takeaway food, although they have some of that as well. You should come for meat, fish, veggies, and Japanese ingredients. They have a whiteboard announcing the newest arrivals of fish they're getting from Japan so you know what's in season and newly arrived at all times. I have purchased and consumed sashimi-grade fish from here many times with no incidents. They also offer a wide variety of produce specific to Japanese food. Produce items like myoga and shiso which are very difficult to keep from spoiling are packaged carefully and remain fresh.

Also, they make their own soy products, and those can be found along the fish and meat wall in the far back of the store. The homemade natto is WAY better than the frozen styrofoam packs you usually get! You can use mentsuyu (also available here) as the seasoning if you want to imitate the seasoning that is usually included in the styrofoam packs.

There are some home and personal care items, although not as much as the one in Midtown does, as well as packaged snacks. I like that they don't use a lot of shelf space for low-quality packaged "asian" snacks and keep it 90% real Japanese groceries.

Edit: I left a five-star review too soon.

Today I went back and was looking for real mirin, as in the real alcoholic fermented product you have to show ID to buy, and some sake, again the real sake that you have to show ID to buy. I asked a girl there if they had real mirin and she showed me the mirin-type products that are just corn syrup and ethyl alcohol blended together. I said I wasn't looking for that, I was looking for the alcohol products. She looked at the ingredients, found the ethyl alcohol in the ingredients list, and said, "Actually, all of these have alcohol in them," and then signaled she was done helping me. I still didn't find any real sake or mirin so now I have to go somewhere else, which is an inconvenience.

I also overheard someone looking for gochujang and the staff erroneously told him that gochujang is the powdered red pepper on the shelf. Gochujang is a paste.

The selection is otherwise great but it would be nice if the staff were informed enough about the products to be able to...

The grocery store itself is good, little overpriced but the checkout experience was just awful. On 11/4/23 around 4 PM the two employees at two of the registers failed to inform me before ringing up $170 worth of stuff that the card terminal is broken. The woman here had no idea what was happening and that her card machine is out of order. Would have been nice to tell me before ringing everything up. So I'm directed over the other register to use my card. The young man here tells me to insert my card three times then swipe. I try and it doesn't work then I swipe and he says my card is declined which is false. Then he says try again at this point. I got out my other card to use their still functional tap feature and finally checked out. This employee was extremely rude and had an attitude the whole time. Been coming here since this store opened, won't...

The new checkout girl is not only bad at her job, she's extremely annoying. There were two cashiers and 4 people in line. 2 people were in front of 1 cashier, and 2 were in front of the annoying girl. The annoying girl messed up, forcing the competent cashier to move to her station to help. Mean while the two lines are piling up. Then the annoying girl says the two lines have to merge into one line. I finally get my turn and the annoying girl magically is back on the register and says she'll take me. I wanted to buy two items at a total of $9.98. The girl slaps my card away and covers the chip reader and say "we have a ten dollar minimum for card". I blinked from the abrupt and absurd behavior. She just stared and kept her hand on the reader. I said "its litterally a 2 cent difference. After she ignored me, I put the items on the counter and...