My Heroic Dispatch from Several H Marts
plus culture recs for tornado weather
Dear Friends,
Welcome back to The Crunchwrap! And thank you for your surprising number of inquiries about my health after last week’s review of Taco Bell’s Milk Bar Birthday Cake Churros. If you ultimately tried them out or are a cardiologist, I’d love to know your thoughts.
First Crunch
I’m writing you from Atlanta, where the players play kind folks at A Cappella Books are hosting me for an event today. It’s at 3 PM so, depending on where you live, you might still be able to make it. If you do fly in, I recommend two things:
Ignore the media’s warnings about the new viral TikTok trend where people have been showing up to the airport 15 minutes before their flights. As I’ve been saying for years, legacy media remains shamefully in the pocket of Big Concourse and, contrary to the future Mrs. Crunchwrap’s protests, showing up right before the gate closes (almost) always works out for everyone.
Fly out tomorrow because I’m told there is a rare and significant tornado warning in effect for the area tonight.
Now, weirdly enough, the first thought I had after hearing about tonight’s tornado warning was: What am I gonna watch tonight while hunkered down?
While these days it’s totally reasonable to worry that humanity’s survival instincts have gotten a little too dull for its own good, I also know that if I don’t have a plan in place, I’ll end up scrolling my phone for several hours and sending increasingly unhinged memes to friends or pricing out ugly sweaters I’ll never even buy. So while I sort out my plan for tonight, I do want to share a few Crunchwrap-approved culture picks for how to amuse yourself, whether you’re waiting out a tornado or not.
Sad, inventive, but subtly uplifting new movies: The Nickel Boys and Anora are both great in their own lovely, gutting ways. I also loved The Brutalist, but maybe more for a regular stormy night than a tornado night.
Whimsical and slightly niche new movies: This year’s Animated Oscar Short Films are still playing at a lot of indie theaters around the country. (Check listings here.) They are fun to see every year and each film comes from a different country, thereby showcasing weirdnesses beyond our own. Also, Eephus, as friend of The Crunch David Sims notes, is definitely for baseball fans, but is also just a nice, nostalgic look back about what boredom felt like before technology.
Turn my brain off and binge: The Pitt on HBO Max follows a fictitious emergency room in Pittsburgh over the course of a day with each episode covering an hour of the shift. It’s not high art and I’m grateful for that.
BONUS recommendation: Read my latest piece! (Gift link here.)
For Bloomberg Businessweek, I wrote about the rise of the Asian grocery market empire H Mart, which started out as a small bodega-sized specialty store in the shadow of the 7 train in Woodside, Queens in 1982 and became a billion-dollar company that is beloved by food obsessives, content creators, and, thankfully, some reasonable folks too:
According to a recent American Time Use Survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average grocery trip takes more than 40 minutes these days, a finding that efficiency scolds chalk up to an overload of options followed by consumer paralysis. But at H Mart, the influencers whisper, an errand can become an activity, a hobby, a pleasure even. The internet is full of people ogling at H Mart’s fabled snack aisles and the treasures of its freezer cases. “I low-key feel like I’m blacking out, and it is just too early for that, but I am already obsessed with this store,” goes the narration on a first-visit-to-H Mart TikTok video seen more than 1.5 million times. Almost a decade after experts said millennials were shunning supermarkets (perhaps permanently!) in favor of dining out or ordering in, the grocery store has become a playground for those seeking out luxurious and hard-to-find foods.
It’s a retail story, but also (if I may) a fascinating story of how immigration expanded American culture and appetites. For this story, Businessweek sent me to the original H Mart in Queens, let me drag a family member to another in Falls Church, Virginia, as well as trek to stores in the American Dream Mall in New Jersey, San Jose, and San Francisco.
Catch Me
Speaking of San Francisco (eh eh?), if you can’t fly into Atlanta this afternoon (tick tock!), I will also be having great conversations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and virtually on the ol’ internet through the Smithsonian in the coming weeks. I would love to see you out there.
Okay, Waffle House and a dastardly and unAmerican egg surcharge await me, so that’s it for now! Comments, confidential tips, sandwich recs are always welcome so long as they’re nice. Thanks again (as always) for reading.
With love,
Adam
unfortunately i remain in the pockets of Big Concourse. love that liminal space, baby! (loved the H Mart piece, btw. really fun)