A taste from home or a new food to try. Asian grocery store in Warner Robins has it all
Bliss Arnold stopped in at the AB&C Oriental Store in Warner Robins with her daughter recently to find ingredients she needed to make Buko Pandan, a favorite Filipino dessert.
“It’s a Filipino delicacy,” Arnold said as she gathered up cans of young coconut meat, pandan flavored jelly, sugar palm fruit in syrup, coconut pandan sweetened condensed creamer and table cream.
Her daughter, 14-year-old Zoe Arnold, headed for the freezer filled with Asian ice cream and pulled out a box of melon flavored Melona, a creamy and fruity dessert that’s like a Popsicle.
The mother and daughter also bought a five-pack package of Samyang Buldak Cream Carbonara Hot Chicken Ramen Noodles, among other items.
“That’s my daughter’s favorite,” Bliss Arnold said of the Samyang Buldak brand and flavor of ramen noodles.
Arnold said she usually finds exactly what she needs at the family-owned Asian grocery store, which offers all kinds of food from the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea and other countries.
“If they don’t have it, you can request it and they’ll order it for you,” Arnold said.
Philippine natives brought authentic food to GA
AB&C Oriental Store is owned by Cecille and Allan Bonde, natives of the Philippines. The store’s name comes from the first and last initials of their names.
“I just wanted to bring some Asian food here,” Cecille Bonde said.
The Bondes have three AB&C Oriental Stores. They started with the Warner Robins location, purchasing and taking over what was formerly Marghie’s Asian Market at 590 Carl Vinson Parkway, Suite 1100, in April 2021.
In April 2023, the couple opened from scratch their second AB&C Oriental Store at 1404 Dawson Road in Albany.
Their third AB&C Oriental Store, which they acquired Sept. 13, 2024, is the former Jane’s Asian Market at 4274 Gray Hwy Building 1, Suite B in Gray near Macon.
The Bondes also have a food truck by the same name.
Familiar tastes & new flavors
For many Asian Americans, markets like AB&C Oriental Store offer familiar and favorite tastes from their native countries. For those not familiar with Asian food, the grocery stores provide a treasure hunt of sorts for new foods and flavors to try.
Asian markets also are popular on TikTok with all sorts of trending posts from the best hauls to best snacks and desserts. Asian recipes also do well on TikTok.
“Customers come in here with a recipe from TikTok and get all the ingredients they need,” said Hermie McMahon, who runs the Warner Robins store.
A native of the Philippines, McMahon said she’s constantly refilling a freezer of Asian ice cream, especially when a frozen treat such as Propitious Mango ice cream, a Chinese frozen dessert, trends on TikTok.
The aisles of the large grocery store are arranged by country for the most part with a large selection of spices, sauces, packaged and canned foods, candies, chips, nuts and more.
Among the aisles are items like Vietnamese potato flour used to fry chicken, ginger tea and organic roasted chestnuts from Korea, and Mae Ploy Spring Roll Sauce and jasmine rice from Thailand.
A few aisles are arranged by food groups such as one that features coffees from various Asian countries. Shoppers can also find Bubble tea kits.
Large freezers of meats line one wall of the store below an American flags and a host of other flags from Asian countries. Other freezers along an opposite wall are filled with vegetables.
The large dessert freezer can be found in the middle of the freezers filled with meats.
Many of the frozen meats are seasoned and ready for cooking, such as Rellenong Bangus, which is stuffed Milkfish from the Philippines.
Some of the frozen goods also are ready for the microwave, such as Magnolia siopao chicken asado steamed buns from the Philippines. McMahon described them as stuffed dumplings.
In addition to various cuts of meat, including pork belly, the meat freezers have other items such as ready-to-cook meatballs.
Some of the seafood options include whole white squid, whole red snapper and whole tilapia. Anchovies can be found here, too. The fish freezers are on the side of the store with the vegetable freezers.
A few finds in the freezers include Turon, a snack made of thinly sliced bananas as well as vegetable and pork lumpia, or spring rolls, ready for frying, all from the Philippines.
The store also offers fresh vegetables that arrive weekly on Thursdays. What doesn’t sell out is kept in a refrigerator or in bins.
Among the vegetables that arrive weekly are watercress, long beans, enoki, beech and king trumpet mushrooms, large purple eggplants, Japanese sweet potatoes and purple yams.
The store also carries balut, a popular Filipino dish of a fertilized duck egg that is incubated and then eaten from the shell.
Dried fish also is carried at the store.
Additionally, the store sells some Asian products like a coconut cutter stool, Japanese steamers, chop sticks and flan pans. A few Asian beauty products also are sold.
“They really need to come in and look around,” McMahon said. “It’s hard to memorize all these things here.”
‘My quick stop’
Delores Sher shops at the AB&C Oriental Store in Warner Robins when she’s in town for the winter. She has family nearby. The retired IRS tax examiner also has a home in Philadelphia where she retired and spends her summers.
“This is my quick stop,” she said of the store.
On a recent visit, she bought some green tea, SkyFlakes crackers and sardines for breakfast. She’ll add garlic fried rice and an egg to make the breakfast complete.
“There’s always an egg in a Filippino dish,” she joked.
The AB&C Oriental Store is Warner Robins is open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. The Gray location is open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily except Monday when its closed. The Albany location is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.
