Hang Won

As good as it gets to get your oriental ingredients which includes tofu, fish balls, shrimp paste, sambal paste, soba/​udon noodles and others. On top of that they also have frozen dim sum at the back and to my surprise I saw a traditional bamboo steamer for sale too! You will also be able to find a few selection of Asian soft drinks that is familiar if you lived in Asia.
You will be spoilt for choice in the instant noodles department!

There are a few options in Chinatown if you want to stock up on your Oriental/​Asian food but this is my regular which sells everything I want. Its not the biggest Chinese supermarket about but its jam packed with stuff!
If you have never been to a Chinese supermarket, you will find all sorts of interesting things! Its worth a visit. You will find interesting frozen foods, various dried foods for things like soups, you will also see some food still alive. Often you will see some crabs and/​or lobsters — watch your fingers! Don’t get too close! Nearby you will see some «less alive» things like large fish heads.

Ok so this isn’t as big as some of the Asian supermarkets such as Wing Yip and WH Lung but it’s definitely the largest in Chinatown and what they lack in floor space they make up with maxing it out with hundreds of ingredients, from the standard to the bizarre (at least to the traditional Western tastes).
You can get dried, frozen and fresh ingredients, the latter including Asian fruit and veg as well as live lobsters for the brave! They also have a small selection of utensils and cooking paraphernalia such as steamers and pans etc.
Anyone looking for specialist ingredients or just wants to find inspiration, you’ll be pretty sure to find it here.

As a dedicated kitchen adventurer, I like to experiment with new dishes and new ingredients, and my recent kick has been oriental foods. Naturally, I shunned the Sharwoods noodles and Tesco spice mixes in order to explore the wonderful, exciting, bargainous world of Hang Won Hong.
This oriental supermarket is a real find, and whenever I shop there the customers are almost all from the Chinatown community, so that’s a seal of approval right there for the authenticity and quality of its products.
The range of stuff sold here is so wide, I daren’t even hazard a guess, but I think eight trillion is probably close enough. There’s a huge range of oils and sauces and pastes perfect for making pretty much any dish you might want to hazard an attempt at. They sell my favourite sweet chilli dipping sauce in huuuge bottles for less than £3, and the soy sauce here is really fantastic stuff; more pungent and dark than the stuff you can pick up in Sainsburys, and miles tastier. As well as raw ingredients such as tofu and dim sum sheets, there’s a fantastic frozen section which is the boyf’s fave. Mainly because his favourite spring rolls, like, ever, are £1.89 for 30! Yeah, it sounds awesome, but when you come home to a flat full of smoke because the boyf absent mindedly set fire to a pan of spring-​roll oil while he and the boys were playing Street Fighter, it can kill your soul. That is, however, more down to the boyf’s kitchen-​inability, rather than anything to do with Hang Won Hong
You can pick up authentic fortune cookies here, which are ace. I remember them fondly because when I threw a Chinese dinner party about 8 months ago, I opened mine, sitting next to the boyf, and my fortune read «Stop searching forever. Happiness is just next to you.» How do I remember that word for word? Because I’ve had it in my wallet ever since. The boyf’s fortune said something about having great wisdom, though, so they’re not always as eerily accurate as mine…
The kitchen section mentioned by Angela is ace. You can pick up steamers and whatnot for under a fiver (great if you’ve bought some of their dim sum dumplings) and chopsticks for around £3 for a set of four pairs. The best bits here, though, are the woks. Throughout uni I got through 4 economy woks. They buckled, they rusted, they flaked. They were crap. So, last year, faced with the demise of another Ikea wok, I went to Chinatown and galvanised myself against what I was sure would be an expensive but worth-​it wok. I didn’t need to; my current wok was a mere £8 from HWH, it is still in mint condition, and I don’t expect to be replacing it any time soon.
The best thing about HWH, for me, is that it stocks A&W root beer; the lushest of all root beers! And when they don’t have A&W, they have Mug, which is almost as good. I know, I know, it’s not an authentic oriental product. Shush, you, it’s delicious, and HWH deserve props for selling it!

Probably one of the best Asian supermarkets in town. It is packed to the rafters with Chinese and Oriental produce. You can spend more than an hour in here picking your way through the maze of shelves and sections of dried foods, canned goods, fish/​meat and specialist fresh vegetables/​herbs such as agar-​agar and lime leaves. Some of the items in here make you wonder what on earth they’re used for. I mean, jellyfish skins?
They’ve even got a kitchen section in here with great cookbooks and special utensils that you’re not likely to find in your regular department store. I bought my steamer in here, which like the rest of the items in this store, was cheap but good quality.