J & Food Ginseng Company

If you use a Sunset standard to compare their products, they are pretty good. However, if you use a Chinatown standard, they can do better. This is the place you come over here to get some dried seafood, gingko nuts, dried herbs, etc, but I don’t recommend you to get frozen seafood. The owner may try to sell you the frozen sea snail, abalone, sea cucumber, etc. To be honest, their frozen seafood is a bit pricey. 2 lbs Austalian Abalone = $ 80 vs Costco 2 lbs Abalone with shell $ 42. I bought sea snail, abalone, sea cucumber from here before. I am not sure how long they keep the frozen seafood in the freezer. They are almost tasteless.
Other than that this place is a pretty good place to get dried herbs, dried seafood, chinese snacks, tea, etc.

How to pick good ginseng? Make sure it’s super dry and it smells like ginseng. I went through different buckets and bins and I found that the ginseng in the glass jar was the most legit quality ones. Range is $ 80/​lb-​$ 130/​lb. They seal it for you too!

Call Jenny first inquiring whether or not fresh ginseng is in stock! I’ll will return, Jenny when I recover from my surgery! Thank you so much!

This is my go-​to place whenever I want to stock up on yin chiao tablets, the stuff I take when I feel like I’m coming down with a cold. A remedy given to me when I was a child (I was sick often!), these herbal pills head off sore throats or gets me past my cold/​fever when I’m sick. I also buy Tiger Balm here; an ointment I use for the occasional acne spot (to me, it works as well as Oxy 5, and it’s way cheaper).
Recently, I stopped by this shop to buy ingredients for the herbal soups my mother used to make. My mom’s gone now so I’m on my own to recall the names and actual items that go into those soups. However, the owners there are very friendly, gentle and helpful people. After I asked for help in my horrid Chinese/​better English mix, the woman owner steered me to one of their soup kit packets and showed me additional ingredients that go into the soup I mentioned.
This store also carries tasty snacks (Farmer’s Garlic Peanuts, yum), Chinese black mushrooms of various grades, ginseng, and the dried ingredients for making vegetarian dishes that Buddhists /​monks eat. stuff like cloud ear, dried bean curd sheets, fot choy, and golden needles.
Better quality and prices than in regular Chinese supermarkets. Highly recommended.

Great place to shop if you’re looking to make a Chinese soup. I love stopping in here after buying a melon (fuzzy or winter etc.) at sunset super then going to j&food for the dried nuts, fruits, veggies, dried critters and or herbs to make a healthy and refreshing soup.
The younger lady (owner?) is super friendly, helpful and speaks English. If you’re ever in doubt of what goes well in Chinese soup, just ask her and she will help put together ingredients to make perfect soup.

Odd looking mushrooms, tortuously contorted roots, dehydrated sea-​life, and a strange assortment of dried fungi jams every available square inch of the showroom floor. Along the counter are even *more* interesting items… inorganic-​looking substances, strange plant life, and odd forms of translucent vegetation that look like incubator pods for an alien life form. «What is this stuff?», is the first question to cross the mind of any English-​only speaker that steps inside for a quick look around. What indeed… handwritten cardboard signs indicate prices in common Yankee English, but the descriptions written in Chinese characters leave non-​Asian visitors clueless as the purpose of any given item, be it nourishment, seasoning, or medication.
I came here in search of Ginseng, and not the typical Wisconsin-​grown stuff that’s available at half-​a-​dozen places on Kearny Street. I was looking for «red» ginseng, a more yang-​centric variant that’s grown in Korea.
Several minutes of gaping slack-​jawed at a sea of Chinese labeling convinced me that I needed help. Someone asked if I needed assistance, and though the staff spoke little other than Chinese, they refereed me to an English speaking customer who was more than willing to lend a hand. I explained to him what I was after. «Red Ginseng»…“Boost Energy”…“Yang Energy”. He nodded, knowingly smiled, and gestured towards a shoebox-​sized container that was sitting about two feet from us. He then reached into it and handed me what looked like a super-​thick chunk of Beef Jerky. The lady behind the counter dropped it on a scale, and declared it’s price to be fifteen dollars. She then took it back to an area where it was heated and fed into a small machine that chopped the stick up into dime-​sized morsels. The English speaking man gave me the basic in’s-and-out’s on ginseng: The older the root, the better. Just put a small piece into a bit of tea or soup. Several other customers gathered around me as the stereotype of transactional and insular Chinese merchants quickly disintegrated. Each one bestowed a bit of wisdom about what I was buying. And strangely, they all seemed pleased that someone from outside their culture was interested in something that came from within it. I left with a carefully wrapped pile of reddish fragments, a curiosity as to what everything else in the store was, and a knowing sense that I *just might* have discovered a useful faucet of a culture very different from my own.