Inside look at Foodtown, an Asian-food lover’s paradise

Taimy Alvarez / Sun Sentinel

“We have 60 varieties of rice â€" basmati, long-grain, short-grain, broken, 10 types of halal rice,” FoodTown store manager Mary Lu says. “We have so many specialized products â€" Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Chinese, Vietnamese, the Philippines. Our Asian customers are demanding. They want what they know.” FoodTown is in the Carriage Hills Plaza a fantasyland for Asian food fans. It has six, reasonably priced eateries and a wildly diverse, global supermarket that offers goat neck from its halal butcher, Chinese red-bean-paste buns from its bakery and dozens of types of fish (including sheepshead and hogfish) from its seafood counter. “An international food market â€" a place to get everything,” is how manager Mary Lu describes Foodtown, , an 11-year-old supermarket, and she’s not kidding. Taimy Alvarez / South Florida Sun Sentinel