“Tee” shelves the scarlet Lotte Choco Pie box regularly in his Asian specialty grocery store, Tee Oriental Food & Gifts on McCord Road — one of the only Toledo stores to sell the South Korean moon pie.
With Toledo only having a 1 percent Asian population, Somkiet “Tee” Thepsourinthone and his wife did not find immediate success in 1994 when they first opened their store, which sells Asian foodstuffs that a typical grocery store may lack. Now, Mr. Thepsourinthone can easily spot his long-time customers, some whom first started shopping at Tee’s as kids with their parents, and now bring their own children along.
“The Asian population is not that much bigger than it was in 1994. We’re not always busy,” Mr. Thepsourinthone said. “If [the population] was bigger, though, the big Asian stores would have already come.”
A smattering of bubble tea shops, Asian grocery stores, and a taste for Korean pop music have all appeared in Toledo and Northwest Ohio, joining a density of sushi joints and Chinese food restaurants. However, the permeation of Asian pop culture has proven much slower in northwest Ohio compared to other regions of the United States.
Asians make up 5 percent of the national population, so Toledo’s 1 percent can seem sparse. Even so, international college students from Asia who study in Toledo and younger folks have helped spur what growth there is locally in Asian pop culture.
“A lot of it comes down to population,” observed Matthew Donahue, Bowling Green State University lecturer in pop culture. “If you were to look at Chinese popular culture, Chinatowns in the Midwest have somewhat diminished over the decades.”
The big Asian stores that Mr. Thepsourinthone has evaded as competition include H Mart and 99 Ranch Market — large Asian-American supermarket chains. As of 2013, H Mart reached more than $1 billion in revenue. Mr. Thepsourinthone said some of these companies surveyed the area years ago for potential stores, but passed.
Certain Midwestern cities and towns have become a quasi-island from particular ethnic influences that have developed strongholds in large swaths of America. Toledo lags by about a decade in its ethnic pop culture scene, believes Yile Feng, co-owner and founder of R&B Bubble Tea KTV, said.
When Mr. Feng came to the University of Toledo from China in 2008, there were no shops that specialized in just bubble tea, also called boba, which is a popular tea-based drink with chewy tapioca balls. In 2015, Mr. Feng opened his bubble tea shop on Dorr Street next to the UT campus.
“When I started this place, nobody knew what bubble tea was,” Mr. Feng said. “We had to answer the question, ‘what is bubble tea’ like 50 times per day.”
The Dorr Street shop’s clientele was 90 percent Asian when it first opened. All its employees were Asian. Now, after only four years, 90 percent of customers are non-Asian. Only 20 percent of its employees are Asian. People ask what bubble tea is less and less. The boba market is growing beyond its Asian roots, even in Toledo, Mr. Feng said.
“Bubble tea has taken over easily,” Miranda Brown, University of Michigan Chinese studies professor, said. “It looks pretty, involves familiar elements, and has a novel sort of texture.”
Within just 20 years of its 1980s inception in Taiwan, boba had garnered a fervent following across Asia and American coastal cities. By 2010, Americans could find bubble tea chains like Chatime or Gong Cha across the country, from southwest suburbs to secluded college towns.
Toledo does not have them. The closest Chatime is an hour drive away, in Ann Arbor.
One Asian fusion restaurant chain in northwest Ohio, Balance Pan-Asian Grille, also serves bubble tea along with a menu of “clean-eating” bowls, tacos, and snacks. When Prakash Karamchandani and HoChan Jang founded Balance in 2010, the Toledo palate was geared more towards “comfort food, like burger and pizza joints,” Mr. Jang said.
Toledo Asian food in previous decades was the mom-and-pop, heavy grease variety, with the exception of sushi. While the fine-dining, fusion, and clean-eating establishments sprung up across the country, the Midwest and Toledo lagged in cultivating the culinary genre.
“It was a riskier move,” Mr. Jang said of opening a Asian clean-eating restaurant. “But the city has always been supportive of us. I think it’s due to the younger generation.”
While Tee’s grocery store thrives on long-standing customers and loyal family shoppers, places like R&B Bubble Tea KTV and Balance Grille target younger consumers, who may be more receptive to the cultural influences that have hit major American cities.
“The American consumer is very different now,” Ms. Brown said. “The American palate has expanded. It’s now more ‘in’ to be willing to try new things.”
Mr. Feng’s bubble tea shop’s clientele was 90 percent UT students three years ago. Now UT students make up just 60 to 70 percent of his customers.
“These kids bring their parents, and now they are explaining what bubble tea is to the older people,” Mr. Feng said. “It helps because it’s easier to promote something new in young people.”
Balance Grille’s customers are also younger. Mr. Jang sees clients in their 20s to 40s come in often — especially young families and working professionals with bachelor’s degrees who want healthier alternatives and on-the-go choices. The clientele is racially diverse. Younger kids, he said, love the bubble tea.
Tee’s grocery store also attracts more non-Asian customers than before, which Mr. Thepsourinthone attributes to loyal customers’ word-of-mouth and the employees’ friendliness. He believes it takes at least seven years to gauge a family-owned grocery store’s sustainability; however, with the tiny Asian population in Toledo, Mr. Thepsourinthone occasionally experienced doubt in the store’s infancy but had faith because of his family’s hard work.
“We only work seven days a week,” Mr. Thepsourinthone said. “Even when customers call after we close, we come and open for them because some of the customers travel from an hour away, like from Bryan or Montpelier.”
The definition of Asian culture isn’t just limited to places like China, Japan, and Korea. Last weekend’s Festival of India — which celebrates the culture of South Asia and showcases Indian dance, food, music, and film — has been relatively successful in its 30 year existence. Last year, it attracted about 5,000 visitors from the Greater Toledo area, Atul Agnihotri, festival media coordinator, said.
Still, some aspects of Asian pop culture have failed to gain traction locally despite their prevalence in other U.S. cities.
Mr. Feng’s bubble tea shop also offers karaoke entertainment, a popular nightlife activity in Asian cities with low to high-end options. While the Asian karaoke has seen some success in cities like Los Angeles or New York, Mr. Feng’s karaoke rooms remain largely empty except for the occasional birthday party and on weekends. Even then, the one or two hours that the average customer spends is nowhere near the four hours that an average customer in Asia might spend in a karaoke room, said Mr. Feng.
Consider, too, the sounds of Korean pop music which fill Mr. Feng’s store. Local high school students like it even in Toledo, he said. BTS — the ultra-successful South Korean pop sensation — for instance, is the first K-Pop group to hold the number one position on the Billboard Artist 100 chart for five weeks, and recently performed before tens of thousands of concert-goers on its North American tour.
It may seldom be heard on your radio, but K-Pop songs stream in the billions online.
“There’s a growing interest and appreciation for Asian pop culture in general,” Mr. Donahue said. “It’s just a newer phenomenon in Toledo, for sure.”
First Published August 18, 2019, 12:08 a.m.