We are new to Charlotte and have been seeking out the Asian supermarkets to see if we can find our favorite Asian food products. Grand Asia is a medium sized supermarket that also has a restaurant and bakery.
We were told that the bakery's pastry chef was a former pastry chef from the Four Seasons Hong Kong. So we bought a dan that (egg tart), bolow bao (pineapple bun), tau fu fa (sweet or savory tofu dish), milk tea boba and strawberry smoothie boba to try. Both of the bobas were pretty good, the boba was dense and chewy as they should be and the drinks themselves were very good. The strawberry smoothie was made from real strawberries as opposed to a powder mix. I was pleasantly surprised to see they had the tau fu fa as you usually cannot find it outside of dim sum restaurants or a Chinatown. We opted to have the tau fu fa as a sweet dessert. We were given a few squirts of the sugar syrup but had to ask for more and also the ginger syrup as it was not offered to us. It was served warm and was pretty good. We saw someone eat it with scallions and I think soy sauce (I've never had it as a savory item). The two items that fell short of our expectations was the dan that and bolow bao. The dan that was eggy and bland instead of sweet and custardy as it should be. The bolow bao was the worst. I might as well have been eating paper. It was so dry and tasteless. It's supposed to taste sweet and light with a nice chew you might find in a brioche bun.
We also ordered beef chow fun from the restaurant. It wasn't bad but the wait for the food was interminable. We were there at 5pm on a Saturday so before the usual dinner time but there is only one cook so we waited 20 minutes for the noodles.
The selection of groceries were so-so. I found it somewhat lacking but I'm used to gigantic Asian supermarkets in NYC and Boston where I can shop to my heart's desire. We were able to find some of things we would normally buy at an Hmart but found the selection of brands to be small. Where I'm used to finding 10 brands of gochujang here there were only 3 to choose from. My kids were hoping to find a variety of Calpico (their favorite yogurt drink) but only found a small sized bottle of the strawberry flavor. They did have a decent selection of ramune (Japanese soda which is my kids' other favorite Asian drink).
All in all, a decent supermarket. Depending on what you're looking for you may or may not find what you want. I was only able to get half the items I was looking for.