TOUR: Mekong Market - Worcester, MA

Mekong Market

Opened: ca. 2005 in current location

Owner: Anh Truong

Previous Tenants: none

Cooperative: none

Location: 747 Main St, Downtown, Worcester, MA

Photographed: August 26, 2018 and December 8, 2018

Ha Tien Market, down a few blocks south on Main Street, is one of the two larger Vietnamese grocery stores in Worcester. The other is here at the northern edge of Main South where it borders the southern edge of downtown, and Mekong Market isn't actually all that old. It was built from the ground up sometime around 2005, replacing an older store closer to the street on the same property that had been there for a while, but actually itself replaced an older store at 705 Main.

You enter on the right side of the store, then turn left to enter the produce department which runs along the front wall. The rest of the grocery aisles run front-to-back in a pretty standard setup, with meat and seafood on the back wall. Frozen and refrigerated foods are on the far right side of the store.

I tend to prefer Mekong to Ha Tien (although they don't make banh mi here, as far as I know) because it's a larger, cleaner, and generally better store. Still, Ha Tien is a good small neighborhood shop for Vietnamese foods.

The service counters take up the back wall.

There's also bulk items for owners of small restaurants or grocers.

Packaged meat and seafood take up the rest of the back wall. It looks like some of the fixtures may have been secondhand when the new store opened -- possibly brought in from the old store -- and others were new.

And a look at the registers in the front of the store...

On Monday, we're headed a couple blocks north for a supermarket representing a completely different region of the world!