From ube everything to malunggay leaves, this Puyallup market packs a Filipino punch

“People are making ube everything!”

So much so, said Marifel Osera, that her Filipino market has imposed a two-bottle limit of ube extract. In a recent Instagram post, she called it “purple gold.”

Osera sells this ingredient, essential to conjure that legendary indigo hue in baked goods especially, alongside many other Filipino specialties at Sari-Sari, a year-old market in Puyallup she co-owns with her mother, Ofelia.

“If you’re born and raised Filipino, you would know what a sari-sari is,” said Osera, who has spent most of her life in the Tacoma area.

It’s more than a grocery store, though it is very much that. It’s a snack sanctuary. It’s 1,400 square feet of imported candies, chips and cookies stacked alongside everything you would ever need to cook chicken adobo, tinolang manok, and yes, ube everything.

“Sari Sari is basically just a corner store,” explained Osera. “Every neighborhood has one. You go walk a couple of blocks, and you’ll find one.”

The term translates from Tagalog to “variety” or “sundry.” In the Philippines, they might operate out of a garage, and some even barbecue. You can’t do that in the U.S., she laughed, but you most definitely can supply the goods for an at-home version.

From the outside, the storefront at 11910 Meridian E. resembles any old convenience store, sandwiched between a salon and a smoke shop. Immediately upon entering, you’re hit not with Twinkies and beef jerky but rather a bevy of alluring baked goods from Delite Bakery, a wholesale Filipino bakery with locations in Seattle and Everett.

There’s pichi-pichi, a steamed ball of cassava flour and sugar dusted with coconut; mamon, a simple sponge cake in a variety of flavors; bibingka, a celebratory cake made with rice flour and coconut milk; and pan de sal, both full-sized and mini, slider sizes.

Similar to a Parker House roll, pan de sal can be enjoyed any time of day. The ube version — of course there is ube! — surprises with a dollop of cream cheese hidden within, perfect for a colorful breakfast.

Whether a bakery item, a snack or a new ingredient, “A lot of Americans are willing to try, and I love that,” said Osera. During the pandemic, customers of all races have flocked to the store to stock up on rice or discover something new. “That’s how I realized how to describe these things!”

FINDING THE RIGHT STUFF

The store was born of her family’s desire to continue cooking Filipino food.

When she was growing up in the ‘90s, stores like Hong Kong Supermarket in Tacoma’s Lincoln District didn’t exist. They would drive all the way to Seattle, sometimes Kent or Renton, to source the right ingredients. Finding fresh ginger and bok choy, let alone more specific ingredients such as tamarind paste and bagoóng alamáng (fermented shrimp paste), at big-box grocers 25 years ago was near impossible. So-called international aisles remained an anomaly.

“We just wanted to keep cooking Filipino food,” said Osera.

She and her husband, also of Filipino heritage, moved from Tacoma to Puyallup a few years ago. It was like living through the ‘90s all over again, she said. No bok choy. No snappy ginger — only sad, wrinkly knobs.

Sure, she could drive north to Kent or west to Tacoma, but the traffic!

“I never want to cross Meridian,” she laughed, noting that she liked this particular location because you can enter from either direction, north or south.

After toying with the idea of opening a Filipino bakery in Maple Valley with her sister, who works in marketing for Starbucks, she turned in 2017 to the sari-sari. She took her severance from a “stable, comfortable and boring” job at AT&T to get the business off the ground. Her mom, now in her 60s, long ago ran a shipping supply company with her dad. Osera helped with computer data entry, and now she works with many of those same companies.

“The hardest part is to truly commit and dive in,” Osera recalled of her 2018 decision to develop this business plan and shop for a space. “So I said, let’s just dive.”

The former salon already had plumbing installed, perfect for her veggie vision. In addition to snacks galore and a wide range of Asian ingredients — from Hawaiian to Thai, Japanese, Korean and Chinese — Sari-Sari also boasts a solid collection of produce you’re unlikely to find elsewhere, even at H-Mart.

The display, custom-built by her father, offers saluyot, a leafy green that looks like mint but acts more like spinach or chard, providing a hefty dose of nutritious greens to dishes like law-uy, as well as malunggay (also known as moringa). This other small-leafed plant is commonly used in Filipino stews and soups like tinolang manok, a comforting bowl of chicken in a clarifying broth of ginger, garlic and fish sauce. Osera shared her Manila-area family recipe at Kain Tayo, the Filipino “fiesta from afar” hosted by Tacoma chef Jan Parker; she also shares recipes on the store’s website and on social media, and she invites Filipino food trucks to set up outside every week.

The packaged section boasts similar necessities, from banana ketchup (“if you put that on anything fried, it’s amazing”) to quail eggs in brine, canned jackfruit and tinned corned beef (“if you don’t have corned beef or sardines,” said Osera, “it’s not a [Filipino] pantry). The same goes for milkfish, which you’ll find here in the freezer, and longanisa, the classic Filipino sausage ground with soy sauce, brown sugar and chili.

Though Sari-Sari focuses on Filipino food, which Osera said has attracted more customers than if she attempted to cover the broad ground of larger Asian markets, you can also find items including curry paste, noodles for pad thai and samyang instant ramen.

“We’ve crammed a lot of stuff into this store,” admitted Osera.

She is in the store most mornings, save for Mondays, when she scurries around south King County to several wholesalers to snag her share of some hard-to-find ingredients. She hustles to fill nearly every square inch with not only all of the aforementioned essentials but also hard-to-find luxuries: ube extract, frozen siopao, boba ice cream bars.

Those bars — they’re delicious, tea-flavored wonders, but be cognizant of the two-per-customer limit. Apparently they are as precious as toilet paper circa March 2020 in America.

For the chance to find them in Puyallup: You can thank Marifel’s Sari-Sari, as Osera’s market would be known on the bustling streets of her family’s home country.

SARI-SARI STORE

▪ 11910 Meridian E., Suite B, Puyallup, 253-904-8622, sari-saristore.com

▪ Hours: Open daily, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (closes at 6 p.m. Sunday)

▪ Details: Filipino ingredients, snacks and candy, plus other Asian cooking essentials

▪ Weekly food trucks: Uncle Mike’s Filipino Comfort Food and Flavorworks; check social media for updates

This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM.