In summer 2024, Bellevue mall the Marketplace at Factoria is getting a gigantic new tenant. T&T Supermarkets, a Canadia Asian grocery store chain, is opening its first U.S. store there, and it’s a doozy: According to the press release we got, it will be 76,000 square feet, making it the largest Asian grocery store in Washington State. In case you were curious, as we were, Uwajimaya is 60,000 square feet, so picture an Uwajimaya with a quarter of an Uwajimaya attached to it, then another little bit of Uwajimaya.
The upshot is that expat Canadians who are T&T heads will no longer have to drive up to British Columbia to score T&T brand green onion pancakes and other goodies. With all that room, T&T is also going to have a sushi counter, noodle station, hot food bar, and an in-store bakery that will make pastries and cakes as well as buns and bao.
The press release quotes a T&T customer who says, “We just don’t have anything like it here. T&T coming to town is going to be a huge game changer for the food scene,” which honestly feels like an unnecessary shot? In terms of existing Asian supermarkets there’s the aforementioned Uwajimaya (which has a branch in Bellevue), plenty of H Marts in the Seattle metro area (including one in Bellevue), and a ton of smaller independent Asian groceries in the Chinatown-International District and South Seattle. In the Marketplace at Factoria area you have Southgate Oriental Grocery and Jing Jing Asian Market.
But none of those have the footprint that this T&T does, and there are plenty of T&T loyalists out there. The press release also touted the more than 300 jobs the new store will bring the area; it plans to host a job fair for supervisor and above positions this summer.
