If you live in one of their delivery zones, you must get into Umamicart. This online grocery store delivers high quality Asian ingredients straight to your door. For the longest time, Asian groceries were largely unavailable to me. The sriracha on the international aisle was about the extent of it. Once I moved to NYC, I lived near a Japanese grocery store for a bit and have since worked in Chinatown for a few years; however, those stores can be a bit overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re looking for and are unfamiliar with many of the products. It’s hard to figure out where to start. Enter: Umamicart.
Umamicart carries a mix of traditional staples familiar to those who know and love cooking Asian cuisine, as well as new, distinctly Asian-American products. You can find fresh food – produce like rambutan or ube and meats like sliced kalbi – as well as packaged goods. They’ve got all the snacks and sauces you could possibly want. This goes beyond pocky and chapaghetti. Here you can get sweet rice pudding with syrup, fresh mung bean cakes, and a nearly endless variety of chips.
I impressed myself with my haul. For about $50, I picked up seaweed snacks, tea cakes, curry paste, pickled bamboo shoots, oatmeal, bulgogi marinade, kewpie mayo, cheesecakes and mochi cakes, oatmeal, thinly sliced beef, pocky, and a wafery sweet snack. I’ve tried almost everything I bought and have loved everything I tasted thus far.
Some items I picked up because I had specific meals in mind (like the Emily Mariko TikTok salmon and a bulgogi bowl you’ll read about tomorrow); others I chose simply because I was inspired by the virtual aisles. The good thing about Umamicart is that they offer that inspiration. The site and Instagram feed include recipes and use cases to get the wheels spinning. They’re also constantly refreshing the inventory so you can be surprised by new items. And it’s super easy to shop. Everything is categorized nicely and the descriptions are thorough, which is super helpful when you don’t know much about the ingredients and can’t always read the language on the packaging. I can’t wait for my next order.
Peaches to Apples 