Hello Kitchen

Hello Kitchen! Every time I shop at this Japanese supermarket, I had to pause and remind myself not to call it Hello Kitty! No kitty.
This is where I go to stock up on my favourite Japanese snacks.
Hello Kitchen sells a good variety of Japanese foodstuffs. They also sell Sushi though not as fresh as the ones you get at restaurants.
They have a good selection of Japanese sauces, teas, noodles, snacks, etc. You can also get sake here, but you need to ask the staff. It must be the age restriction law.
I like their mochi and dorayaki (pancake). The mochi are fresh and not too sweet with red bean paste fillings. The dorayaki can be very sweet, depending on the flavours. I grew up watching Japanese cartoon Doraemon. Dorayaki is the favourite snack of Doraemon!
They have reduced price items every now and then, especially when the items are near their expiry dates. Most of the reduced price items are displayed in the middle section on the shop.
Oh, remember to check the baking recipes that they share with customers, near the counter.

I love Japanese (or any Asian, really) food stores. When I go traveling, it is one of my favorite things to do and one of the first places I check out.
Going to foreign/​ethnic markets at home, therefore, is a sort of mini escape for me. Hello Kitchen is on my commute home and is a cute little Japanese grocery store. It pretty much exclusively sells Japanese goods, along with the occasional Chinese or Korean item that is popular in Japan. But really it is pretty much exclusively Japanese. And since it is Japanese, it is not cheap. A single brick of ramen will cost you like £1.60 here at least.
But you can get all your staples: sushi rice, ginger, rice vinegar, tofu, noodles, miso paste, Japanese pickles, curry blocks, nori (seaweed), Japanese candy, crackers, seasonings, soy sauce, ponzu, sake, and so on. While they have a few fresh produce items (last I checked, they had fresh shitake mushrooms and Chinese cabbage), but this pace is mostly dry goods, so don’t count on doing a full shop here.
They also have a prepared food section… but I have to say, the sushi I had here was pretty gross. Like, on par with Tesco’s sushi. What kind of self-​respecting Japanese folk are these?! The rice was cold and too dense and the salmon fishy. Itsu sushi would wallop Hello Kitchen sushi in a sumo match. And that’s sad. Ok, so stay away from the sushi, but otherwise, this is a nice spot to pick up some quality imported products.
Directly across the street from Golders Green Station on the Northern Line.