Nak's- A Wee Shop

When my mom was visiting she was chagrined to learn that there was no Asian market in Palo Alto. I thought the one on Castro should be close enough, but she didn't really love it. It is a little dreary. Then Chris's cat lady landlord, who's also Japanese told him to check out Nak's Oriental Market, chock full of Japanese and Dutch (?) goods. It's not in walking distance, but it's eccentric and cute.

Nak's is on Chestnut Street, a little side street off of Santa Cruz, one of the main streets in Menlo.


Here's Chris nonchalantly modeling his weekend leisure apparel in front of the storefront. Chris is really tall, so you can sort of see how small Nak's is.


I took another picture inside to try and give a sense of the scale. This place is TINY. It's mostly stocked with packaged dry goods, but as you can see at Chris' feet, there's some produce. Also, there was a very small sashimi selection and some lovely galangal and other slightly hard to find veg.


This was our haul. Clockwise from the far left- Nori sheets that I used to pop like potato chips, Umeshyu, preserved plum wine, very sweet, Pocari Sweat sports drink, Peach soda with a marble in the neck (used to be necessary to keep the bubbles, I think), Yama Moto Yama Green tea, Sake, Instant noodles, Instant Miso, Ikura and NATTO!

More posts about Natto are surely coming up. Natto, for those that don't know is fermented soybean that is packaged with mustard and some other sort of sauce. It stinks, produces nasty mucous, and is supposedly very healthy (preventing osteoporosis, thrombosis and some other things). I like it with green onions and maguro.