Exploring Choi’s Asian Food Market – What makes it special?

Maybe you don’t know that, the owner of this market is the couple Jongin Choi Hyun Sook Yoo and Young Gyu Choi with their son Jongin Choi. This store located at 607 Lyndon Ln, Louisville, Kentucky 40222, USA, specializes in merchandise from across Asia. Jongin and his parents moved to Louisville in 1999 from a small town outside Seoul, South Korea. With a burning business desire, they traveled halfway around the world and finally decided to start a business in this vast Louisville land.

His brother Choi and his family, formerly settled in the city, attended Louisville Seminary School. Jongin, who has spent more than half his life in Kentucky, says he and his family love their adopted hometown, and he realized that Lyndon would be the perfect neighborhood to make his dream of an Asian clean food market come true.

Although Choi’s Asian Food Market has now been a staple of the Lyndon neighborhood for 14 years, few know the early days of the business were at a different address. Realizing that there was no solid foothold in Lyndon, Choi’s opened a small homeware store in Middletown, which offered a variety of kitchen sundries along with movies with Korean subtitles.

Until a year later, they realized that the long building at the corner of New La Grange and Lyndon Lane was a very favorable location, providing the ideal space for them to develop their stores. Why is it possible to say so? The answer is simple, there are a lot of Korean-Americans living in Lyndon and surrounding areas, so the demand for Asian food is huge. Not missing that opportunity, the Choi family decided to set up shop in a place where they knew their services would be in highest demand.

With this convenient location, the store expands to more booths as well as long aisles with a wider range of products such as frozen, packaged and fresh products that are popular throughout Asia. Jongin estimates that 60% of the store’s inventory is dedicated to Korean goods, the remaining 40% is mainly focused on items from Japan and China, with a few other ingredients sourced from Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines.

The store’s criterion is that the services will grow based on their customer base. Items added to shelves are often requested by loyal customers in search of a particular ingredient. Choi’s Asian Food Market boasts an impressive collection of prepackaged ramen noodles that are the most popular and easiest to find in store.

Around the corner from the noodle row is the produce zone, where fresh eggs are locally sourced along with staples of a variety of Asian dishes including Napa cabbage, radishes and a variety of mushrooms. There’s also susu, a green, winter squash-like vegetable native to Mexico. Jongin shared that they started offering chayote because their customers wanted to use it as a stir-fry with their meals.

When it comes to Asian food, especially Korean, it is impossible to miss pork. The store always has pre-cut pork belly pieces in different sizes, which are perfect for making Korean BBQ. Side dishes such as kimchi are also indispensable. The kimchi here is homemade and also features quintessential banchan dishes, traditionally served at any Korean party.

The shop’s specialty is small boxes of silkworm larvae. This type of food has been soaked in an attractive spice mixture and then grilled, considered a popular snack when drinking beer.

Last but not least, there are kimbap—rice rolls with a variety of fillings—and the popular bibimbap side dish available in a small display at the check-in counter. Homemade daily, these snacks often sell out very quickly.