06/18/2026
The other day, I was talking to one of our regulars and she said, “Oh, so you’re so much more than a cashier”. I think very little of my job is being a cashier. It’s mostly filling things up, washing dishes, placing orders and problem-solving. A big part of my job is design. Everything in this shop is in here because of me. Any label you see is one I wrote, designed and printed. I hand-painted all of the wooden signs. I chose the paint colors on the walls.
Sometimes people email me like this is a faceless entity. This is a small, neighborhood shop run by two people. The same two people you see every time you come in here. We live down the street and I walk here every morning. Sometimes I stay up late at night working on labels, like last night when I was hand-tracing this image from our soy sauce box.
I use paper labels and wheat paste for the hundreds (thousands?) of bulk items we store in glass jars around our shop. But paper labels aren’t great for the fridge. So I made this one for our soy sauce and I plan on making another one for our tamari, as well as our maple syrup and rice vinegar too.
We carry a lot of Asian condiments from Wan Ja Shan. Many are made in Middletown, NY, and Jim drives down to pick them up because they give us great prices. All of them are vegan and the majority are gluten-free. Our organic tamari and organic soy sauce are $4 per pound. You can bring in your empty containers to fill up, which will save you about $3-4, compared to buying pre-packaged bottles.
Jim went there on Tuesday (his day off) and brought back a bunch of new products. Our organic offerings include: soy sauce, tamari, Worcestershire sauce, shiitake stir-fry sauce, teriyaki sauce, rice vinegar, and hoisin sauce. We also have hard to find ingredients like mirin, black bean soy sauce, vegetarian oyster sauce and formosa sweet chili sauce. Come see what’s new! Support truly small business!
