Many reasons to love the new Ranch 99 Market in Plano

by Teresa Gubbins

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Many kinds of mochi!

PLANO — The colonies surrounding Dallas are already rich with Asian food markets, but now they're richer with last week's grand opening of Ranch 99 Market in Plano.

Located in a vacated Albertson's store at the northwest corner of US 75 and Spring Creek Parkway, Ranch 99 is part of a growing chain founded in California in 1984 as Tawa Supermarket Inc. by Taiwanese expatriate Roger Chen. Most of the chain's 30+ stores are in California, but there are branches in Washington, Nevada, and Texas; a branch opened in Houston in 2009.

Ranch 99 joins a robust group outside 635 that includes Asia World in Plano, Super H Mart in Carrollton, and Hong Kong Supermarket in Grand Prairie and Garland. But Ranch 99 surpasses its peers for its exceptional sleekness and user-friendliness.

The aisles are broad and the goods on the shelves are precisely arranged, which creates a cleaner feeling, visually. The store layout mimics a regular supermarket, with: a "housewares" aisle; a large produce department tucked against the far left wall; and a meat and seafood counter along the back. It all feels exactly the same as your neighborhood Tom Thumb. Which isn't to say that your neighborhood Tom Thumb is perfect, just that the layout's familiarity gives you, the Typical American Shopper, a better sense of where to go for what. Given the store's preponderance of fabulously unusual and/or unfamiliar items, it's helpful to have the comfort of context to be able to process it all.

Also excellent: the cool background music, a house-techno-chill combination that made me feel like I was shopping in the future.

Produce

The first thing you see when you enter the produce department is a bin with massive jackfruit, which acts as a neon sign: "Weird, cool stuff to be found here." Unfortunately, nearly all of the greens and vegetables are wrapped in plastic -- the kind of plastic sheets used by florists -- which probably helps the staff keep things from getting trampled on, but which doesn't help the no-new-plastic crowd.

Alternatively, you can buy some fruits and vegetables in quantity, still in their flats, at a serious discount.

The aisles

It goes without saying that there's an insane variety of rice with nearly an aisle dedicated to it: brown, basmati, white, sushi, pre-cooked, freeze-dried, too much to even comprehend, from single-serving warm-up kits to massive 40-pound canvas sacks.

Ranch 99 Market rice vinegars

On the sauce aisle, rice vinegar was another category with more varieties than you could imagine. One aisle was dedicated specifically to Indian food, with curry powders, ginger paste, boxed instant Indian meals. The housewares aisle included rice cookers, soy sauce cups, and oodles of fancy chopsticks. There were hundreds of varieties of green tea, plus foil packages of instant tea and "instant ginger drink." There were all varieties of Pocky, the Twix-ish chocolate-cookie item that has its own cult.

There were dozens of kinds of dried fish in plastic packages, and on the aisle where you'd expect to find hot dogs was a slew of "balls" ... pork meatballs, fried shrimp balls, cuttlefish balls, all in vacuum-packed bags.

But also, mixed in with the Asian goods, was a sampling of American-supermarket staples, such as Doritos, Reese's peanut-butter, and a big selection of olive oils. An aisle called "European cookies" included English biscuits and shortbreads.

Frozen

Ranch 99 Market frozen pops

I could've spent 24 hours looking at the frozen stuff. There were frozen green onion pancakes, and dozens of buns and dumplings: shrimp-and-vegetable, vegetable-and-chicken, pork-and-cilantro, and even one with spinach only. The frozen dessert selection was awesome, with all sorts of cool fruit-flavored ice pops and wild-flavor mellorine (ice cream), and my personal favorite, mochi ice cream, available in dozens of options -- green tea, Kona coffee, taro, vanilla, strawberry, and more -- by more than one manufacturer. I usually buy this at Central Market for the most-outrageous price of $7.99 per box, and nearly all of the options here were $3.50 or less.

Meat and fish

They have a regular ol' meat counter with cuts of steak behind glass, as well as refrigerated cases in front, just like you see at the Tom Thumb, usually full of briskets on sale or hams during the holiday. One featured special was an entire filet mignon tenderloin, wrapped in sealed plastic, for the incomprehensible price of $3.68 per pound; people hovered around this case, poking and prodding to find the "best" one. There were cooked salted duck eggs in a six-pack carton, just like regular eggs, and packages of fresh sliced pork ear.

But easily the most intense aspect of the store was the fish counter. They have a whole row of cases of live fish, like lobster, with the fish in there swimming frantically, from which shoppers make their selection. I watched the guy with the fishnet on a giant handle climb up a ladder and scoop one out, put it in a bag, then pull out a white mallet and SLAM it on the head until it stopped writhing. It's enough to make you a vegetarian.

Delicatessen/bakery

Ranch 99 Market butter cookies

Cantonese roast ducks hung in a row inside a heated case, and people were lined up at a cafeteria-style kitchen where you could get very average-looking noodle and stir-fry dishes. But the Desir Bakery, adjacent to the canteen, was terrific. They had tall yeast breads flecked with sesame seeds, and trays of raisin Danish sitting next to trays of golden pork and corn buns. I got a container of Assorted Butter Cookies -- chocolate-nut, sesame-seed, coffee, and something that looked like pumpkin (which turned out to be made with "carrot powder" and "spinach powder") -- and they were made with real butter, not the shortening you see used at many other French-inspired bakeries inside Asian markets.

Love this touch: When you subscribe to their mailing list, they ask what language is spoken in your house and you choose from English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Taiwanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish, or "others."