Last week, inspired by a friend’s photos of homemade ramen, I made a trip to Tang Frères, Paris’s legendary pan-Asian supermarket. There are several Asian grocers in most Parisian neighbourhoods, but their stocks are oddly incomplete.

I’m prone to getting lost in even the most ordinary supermarket, wandering the plentiful aisles in giddy delight, so my partner had taken the sensible precaution of coming along to sheepdog me out after a few hours.

Paris’s Asian neighbourhood (one of three “Chinatowns” in the city) sprawls over the 13th arrondissement on the Left Bank, spiralling out from the place d’Italie up till the avenue d’Ivry, the avenue de Choisy and the boulevard Masséna. Migrants from Vietnam, Laos and China in the 1970s and ’80s settled in this area of high-rises, State-developed housing and cheap rents. Today it’s dotted with pho restaurants, tea houses, rotisseries, herbalists, and a Buddhist temple under the car park on Avenue d’Ivry.

Tang Frères (‘the Tang Brothers’ in French) is one of the neighbourhood’s landmarks. Chinese-Laotian businessman Bounmy Rattanavan, also known as Mr Tang, left Vientiane in 1971 to study in Lyon, and other family members followed, escaping war-torn Indo-China. With his brother, Rattanavan began selling soy sauce and rice cakes in 1976 and the business took off. It stocks Chinese or Laotian ingredients but also Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Korean, Japanese and even some African and West Asian treasures.

Entering, we were greeted by an aisle of Pakistani mangoes, long tubular aubergines and persimmons. Another wall was covered in chilli sauces and varieties of oil in cans. Inside, the supermarket extended as far as the giddy eye could see, bursting at the seams with produce and packages.

To the left, a Japanese section; to the right, refrigerated displays of rice paper wrappers, tofu, frozen spring rolls, bean curd desserts, accra cod balls, Vietnamese lemongrass sausages, fresh-made noodles and dumplings, samosas, pig stomach and pig’s blood.

“Pork buns!” I almost cannoned into people in my excitement, throwing them into our basket.

“Didn’t you want ramen?” said the long-suffering partner, who was already laden down with mangoes, spring roll wrappers, dumplings, a family-size bottle of chilli-garlic sauce, Vietnamese pork paté, tamarind paste and half a watermelon I’d hidden under the wonton wrappers when he wasn’t looking.

We crossed over to the Japanese section for kelp and miso paste, and then to the noodles. Chinese noodles had their own aisle (rows and rows of Shandong, Guangdong and Wuhan); ramen, udon and soba were round the corner, rice noodles were yet another section, and a bewildering array of instant noodles and rice brought up the rear.

Over in the produce aisles, people jostled as they picked out beautiful pale green Thai pea aubergines, nashi pears, knobbly galangal, turmeric root and pea shoots. I needed lemongrass for a Thai curry, but it appeared to come only in one-kilo bags. A shop employee scurried away when asked (Tang Frères isn’t known for customer service). As I stood, uncertain, in front of the lemongrass, an older Asian woman nudged me. “You can take what you need,” she said helpfully.

“What, like five?” I said, suspiciously, since she didn’t appear to work there.

“Yes, just choose,” she said, ripping open one of the bags.

“I don’t know how to choose,” I confessed.

“They must be green, and smell,” she said. “No brown!”

Copying her, I sniffed each thin stem, drinking in the strong green, citrus scent as I put them in a plastic bag. Then I followed my new friend to the butcher’s section.

There, however, I lost her, because I was transfixed by the sight of a large heap of what looked like grey-brown, frilly, goose-pimply skin.

It turned out to be a highly-prized kind of tripe, the inner lining of a cow’s stomach, called feuillet de boeuf in French, omasum or leaf tripe in English. I’m not a tripe fan — least of all of tripe that looks like it’s got chilly goosebumps — so I had to turn away to the restful sight of calves’ liver, short ribs and turkey hearts. Over at the fish section, the fishmonger was looking neglected among his baby squid and sea bass, so I went over to buy shiny pink salmon fillets. The frozen fish included round steak cuts of blue shark. “Sharks!” I burbled. “Aha, the predator becomes the prey – ”

“No, he doesn’t,” said my partner, steering me away.

The condiments (sweet-and-sour, black bean sauce, teriyaki, sriracha mayo, hoisin, plum sauce, Shaoxing wine and black vinegar among them) were another trap. Fish sauce and shrimp paste were on the shopping list, but how could we forgo hoisin or sambal oelek ? Then we added five kinds of curry pastes, even though we’d just bought all the ingredients to make them. “For emergencies,” I said firmly, stacking them in the trolley.

Outside in the courtyard, there were stalls selling rotisserie ducks and pork crackling, sugar cane and coconut juice, takeaway dim sums and banh mi. But we crossed the street to buy two pork buns from Hoa Nam’s deli, and walked back to the metro with our shopping bags, buns in hand. Pork buns for lunch and pork buns for dinner: not a bad day at all.

Naintara Maya Oberoi is a food writer based in Paris; @naintaramaya

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