There's nothing wrong with QFC. We all shop there. It's... swell. Most of the foods we Americans consume can be found in the painstakingly designed expanses of QFC or Safeway, but these are one-size-fits-all places. Regular grocery stores don't always fit the bill—even (the lovely and slightly irregular) Trader Joe's. Throwing a party? Don't shop there. Making Indian food? Forget about the "ethnic" aisle. Want products—delicious stuff—that you've tasted but never seen for sale? Here are a few places to start.
Rising Produce (1003 S King St, 324-6205) and Dong Hing Market (1001 S Jackson St, 621-2006)
I've waxed rhapsodic before about Lam's Seafood Market, the best all-around grocer in Little Saigon, the Vietnamese commercial district anchored at 12th Avenue and Jackson Street. But wait—for all those who can set local/sustainable/etc. aside, there's more! Rising Produce is a greengrocer in a barn-shaped warehouse with silver insulation on the ceiling. A buck—one dollar!—will buy two bunches of cilantro, one massive cluster of dill, a shock of slender asparagus, or a pound of bright-red tomatoes. Every vegetable you'd need for Asian or Western food is stocked in bounty. Also: cheap fresh rice noodles. Around the corner, Dong Hing Market has the rosiest cuts of pork I've ever seen. Chops and loins and shoulder are tucked into the fridge case like folds of bedding. The prices are amazing: $2 to $4 a pound. Same goes for beef—$3.69 a pound for marbled ivory-and-crimson New York steak. Duck is $2.68 a pound. At the seafood counter in the back, tilapia swim in a giant aquarium and a boy is gently petting a par-frozen perch fin while his mom bags her own fish heads. Take that, QFC.
Cash & Carry (Rainier Valley, Sodo, and Aurora—which is the best stocked, at 13102 Stone Ave N, 364-1737)
Beef brisket, chuck, and round are among the most flavorful parts of a cow, but they are tough as hooves and take approximately five eternities to cook (after which, all that toughness turns into chunks of awesome). If you're going to spend all that time with a brisket in the oven (or, better yet, smoking it on the barbecue), then you might as well cook a lot of it. Which requires buying a massive lump of cow. At Cash & Carry, which used to be a restaurant supplier but is now open to us commoners, they sell large lumps of everything at amazing prices. Beef brisket, for instance, is $2.12 a pound; a dozen-pound hunk sells for roughly $25. Plus: five pounds of cheddar cheese for $10, 10 pounds of mushrooms for $15, 12 pounds of chicken breasts for $29. But don't be intimidated. Unlike Costco, Cash & Carry carries lots of products in manageable, normal sizes at better prices than QFC (like a box of soy milk for 99 cents). Bonus: affordable kitchen supplies like bus tubs, restaurant dishes, hotel pans, straws, ice cream scoops, etc., all in that charmless-yet-enchanting restaurant-supply atmosphere.
Big John's PFI (1001 Sixth Ave S, Level B, 682-2022)
Big John's has been retailing for 20 years out of a brick building that has gone mostly undiscovered because, well, TRY FUCKING FINDING THE PLACE. The address alone is nearly useless. I advise traveling west on South Dearborn Street, turning left on Airport Way South, swinging a right on Sixth Avenue South, then looking for the alley/ parking lot to your right. Big John's has no storefront, just a giant brick face with a small red awning and two doors. Enter them. Inside is a wall of cheese, a case of luscious hams, and an olive menu longer than a Wall Street banker's rap sheet—a cavalcade of black olives, green olives, mixed olives. At the cheese counter, which runs the better part of the store's length, I tried a sample of Bethmale (French, nutty, with little holes in it) and bought a pound. Assistant manager Daniel described the products (including shelves of Mediterranean canned goods, pastas, flours, and spices) like this: "Really good food that sells." He described the clientele like this: "People who used to buy these things at more expensive outlets." You can be one of those people—if you can find the damn place. Fun fact: Big John is actually really big.
The Souk (1916 Pike Pl, 441-1666)
If you want the Indian food you make at home to resemble the stuff you've had at restaurants, start with a hot pan of ghee and then toss in cumin seeds or black mustard seeds. They POP! (And the ghee doesn't smoke and burn like butter.) The warm spice oils will permeate every bite. At the Souk, a market the size of a shopping basket toward the north end of Pike Place Market, you'll find lots of stuff you read about in recipes—like kasoori methi, aka fenugreek leaf, to make butter chicken or matar paneer taste right (paneer is also sold). And did you know that gram flour (garbanzo bean flour) and water and vegetables and your stove turn magically into pakora?! It's true. But you can't do it without gram flour. And you can't get that at QFC.