Buford Highway Farmer's Market
- Price Range: $
- Accepts Credit Cards: Yes
- Parking: Private Lot
- Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
17 Reviews for Buford Highway Farmer's Market
This is an awesome place to buy imported items. If you like Asain foods you'll love it here. I just picked up a whole (HUGE) bag of looseThai tea for $3.99. Oh my good. they charge about $2.50 a pop at Thai restaurants with no free refills. The tea smelled so good when I made it. It was delicious.(don't buy the premixed stuff that already comes with sugar and cream , it's good but not as good as making it yourself. trust me) they also have packets of seasoning. I got the Thai satay seasoning for $1.19. Tastes restaurant good. I serve this at dinner parties and people think I'm a great cook. I don't buy a lot of produce here ( I like great looking fruits and produce so I stick to Harry's or fresh market)
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I'm in awe. Yeah, it's a little grimy, huge, and difficult to navigate through, but I love that I can get lost in here! This is my kind of food store, they sell everything and none of it is boring. They even have an eastern European aisle! THEY EVEN HAVE KASHA. When they start selling Bobak's meats, this will be the best store in the entire world (except for Jungle Jim's in Cincinnati, but that's just on an entirely different level). Just wandering through the aisles is overwhelming, but in such a good way and they're seemingly endless. I can't wait to try the Korean dumpling stand!
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Lol, I remember when Buford Farmer's Market was about the size of my house (exaggeration but it really used to be about 20% of what it is today). This market originally started out being purely Korean, then, Asian but when they started losing profits they started serving Spanish as well and became very international. Also no offense Kitty but this is not Assi, Assi is a national chain owned by a Californian which is located far up north on 85. Most Koreans now prefer what is now called the H-mart compared to BFM. Their is about 4 in Atlanta areas, one being in Pleasant Hill rd. off of 85 North.
PS, why is this subject under food and not shopping?
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I enjoy almost every farmer's market, at least the produce, meat and baked goods sections. I'm not really into the prepacked stuff anymore. I've seen as many aisles full of foreign goods with funny packaging as I can handle. It's not really entertaining these days. What I do find interesting and entertaining are the all of the odd vegetables and fruits I've never seen, and the special cuts of meat from animals I thought I knew.
Of course, I'm not a butcher so I don't really know what a pig or cow looks like when it's turned inside out, but the Buford Highway Farmer's Market lets me take a look. It's awesome. Sure, this market is always compared to the nice, pretty and slightly superior Dekalb Farmer's Market, but so what. This one's different. It's not as clean. It's not as organized. it doesn't have the same army of workers, just a platoon. It's loud, it's crowded, it's full of really weird things that are just in your face and not washed down and dressed up.
While the Dekalb Farmer's Market seems to lean slightly towards more asian than south american produce, the Buford Highway Market leans slightly towards more south american than asian, just slightly. That's not to say that you won't find everything you're looking for at either spot.
Dekalb has a literal food court you can get food from, Buford just has a guy in the back corner. Just one guy back there in a five by five space with a steamer. If you make your way back there you can witness him skillfully roll vegetable and meat dumplings like he's been doing year after year. They're a little larger than what you normally find in China but they're good.
If you ask him any questions, he'll probably also let you know that his dumplings are nearly fat free. He buys both the pork and beef in whole pieces and grinds them himself so that he can control the quality and fat content. You order in batches of eight and he'll tell you that it takes 3-4 minutes for them to finish steaming. He doesn't steam them until you order.
Four feet across from his small space is a room where they're making fresh tofu onsite.
The meat section is huge. Like the entire market, it's not as pretty as what they have over in Dekalb, but it's slightly larger - and their frozen section has a lot more body parts from a lot more animals. Sure, if you've never bought meat from anywhere except Publix, this is probably not going to be up to your standards of how a market should be. You're probably not going to want to touch all of those eyes and cow tongues neatly plastic wrapped on the styrofoam platters where you're used to only seeing clean cut sides of beef and pork.
For the rest of us, for those who aren't afraid to have our food remind us that it was once alive, well, this is just fun, this place makes me hungry. I have the urge to look up how to cook tripe and other parts and make them actually taste good. Because someone's eating this food, and I want to know how they're doing it. What am I missing out on?
The atmosphere at the Buford Highway farmer's market is also different from the Dekalb market. It's a little more closed, a little less cheesy grocery store customer service. A little more... like you're going where the immigrants shop, not where you can get the same ingredients in a nice clean international grocery store. It's that attitude, that escape from suburban life, that's the reason anyone visits anywhere on Buford Highway, whether it's a mexican, chinese, korean, whatever restaurant, store, or business. It's all more foreign than anything else in Atlanta.
If you go to the Buford Highway Farmer's Market, check out the produce, check out the meat cuts and parts, and order some dumplings from the old man in the back rolling them by hand and steaming them when you order. Buy some fresh tofu while you're at it too.
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This is also a ASSI (Korean supermarket).
This supermarket is so big that you can get everything in here. Their fresh veggie section is the biggest one I ever been to. They serve all different kind of countries food. They have 2 big sections of Spanish and Asian grocery area. They have sushi chef inside the store that you can get fresh good sushi / shashimi to take home. (of course is way way better than Pub-lix sushi if
you know what I mean).
Great place! They always have everything I need. Whenever I'm back in GA and cooking for friends/family or picking up things for my mom, this is one of the places I go. Oh, how I wish this and Dekalb's Farmer's Market were out in CA. Although there are soooo many asian markets/stores over here, I like these two better. Probably because they are cleaner.
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Buford Highway Farmer's Market is undoubtedly one of the largest grocery store I've ever been to. To me, this place is Atlanta's attempt to squeeze the entire world into one store. From Hispanic to Korean, they've got pretty much everything.
I'm sure it's supposed to be convenient - being able to have every item you need in one store. But what's the use if you can't even find them? I mean, this store is so big, that often times, you can't even find what you are looking for. One time, I was looking for pumpkin puree. I went to the baking section, but no luck. I went around the entire store aimlessly for thirty minutes, but still nothing. In the end, I went home with bunch of other stuff but my pumpkin puree.
Another complain I've got about BFM is that it's so dirty! I cannot stay in this place any longer than thirty minutes (my record) because the smell is so overpowering. And did I mention the crazy-parking situation? It's not that the parking lot is small or anything. The place is always crowded, especially on weekends. Avoid using carts on weekends. It's just impossible.
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I visited here when i 1st moved to Atlanta.. I had really never seen anything like the Buford Hwy area Before and was amazed!!! they have a great selection of Asian and well as Latin foods.... tanks of fish swimming around for you to eat up...with staff ready there to prepare them...Assortments of rice steamers and little odds and ends of housewares items too...I would think this would be a good place for hard to find ingredients... I loved to explore the store.. .last time I didn't leave with anything in hand... :( besides a few produce items...Perhaps next time I'll do a little research before I go.. Most of the items I looked at were mostly written in language's I didn't understand.. So yes a Little research next time!
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If you're Asian, I'm sure you've been here already. Loads of goodies. The only supa where a six pack of Singha Beer isn't over $7.00. It's just fun browsing each aisle, seriously. Loads and loads of everything you can imagine. Go to the seafood section and .... it may scare you a bit. :P
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BFM (Buford-hwy Farmers Market), as is printed on the plastic bags used to haul away your merchandise, is, again according to the bags, in Doraville, but some say Atlanta. Minor quibble there, unless you learned to swim at the public pool in Doraville and still know the words to that Atlanta Rhythm Section song by the same name "...touch of country in the ci...tayyyyyy..."
This is where I tell you that I do believe the BHFM used to be the Treasure Island where my mom used to take us kids to shop, WAY back in the day. One of those big discount stores, a precursor to Richway, which later became Target, and so on and so on, and I think later it was a Handy City, which was what Home Depot wanted to be, but Home Depot did it better and bigger and Handy Home Depot City became simply Home Depot. Somewhere along the way I totally lost touch, and it became the fine BHFM it is now.
Wow, what a store. WOW!!!! You enter through the produce section, which is about a third of this HUGE and VAST and TEEMING with life and food and etc. warehouse of a store. So much produce like you have never seen, and not that fancy organic super expensive stuff like at Whole Foods, but cheap and plentiful and a variety like you have never seen (in Atlanta), and Asian and Mexican ingredients, and a million different kinds of apples alone, and so many different kinds of tofu, I mean who knew there were so many? Silken, and soft, and firm, and extra firm, and rock hard, and squishy, and it just goes on and on, and if you pick something up to look at it, there is some guy working there who is going to replace it right behind you, because that's just how efficient the place is, or was on the Saturday I went.
True, I've only been once, to this current incarnation, not counting the time it was Treasure Island and my mom was going to let me get that candy bar until she realized she was already over her limit and had to start putting things back. Hey, I was a kid.
I went to BHFM on a recent Saturday to look for vegetarian frozen potstickers, and I found them, like twenty different varieties. Everything here comes in a variety, a plethora, a damned cornucopia of choices. Everything from the amazing produce to scary meats (hey, I'm veg, what can I say?), a little bakery where there will be a live person cranking out tortillas (!), to an astonishing array of frozen foods from different countries, to even... luggage. I know, it's weird. Once I had the frozen stuff in my cart I sort of rushed my way through the aisles upon aisles broken down by country of origin of products. But I do intend to pay another visit one day soon - maybe just to browse the aisles and look at all that stuff.
They have a dairy and juice section too, some organic eggs, but not much else that's organic. If you're a health food nut, you won't find much, it's all pretty much factory farmed/industrialized agriculture, to my knowledge. But you will no doubt leave with a bag full of goodies, and it's well worth the drive from wherever you live, Atlanta, nearby Chamblee, or Doraville itself. As the song says, "... it ain't much, but it's home." BHFM has made itself home on that spot, and for good reason - it is unmatched. Go! If for no other reason than to look around, your jaw dragging on the floor. No doubt some worker will come and pick it up for you.
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The first time I went to the Buford Highway Farmer's Market was kind of like a trip to Disneyworld, up to a point. I literally felt giddy wandering into the produce section filled with all sorts of strange fruit. The aisles here are literally sorted by country and filled with all kinds of imported product that you couldn't even begin to imagine without being there. It's surprising to realize the things other people eat. They have a huge array of pinatas hanging from the ceiling. They have dried insects and pig ears. They have a whole refrigerated wall full of dim sum and other oddities. Half these things I'd never eat, but only ogle.
The meat department alone is a spectacle unrivaled. All kind of weird fish and live seafood. I'd have a hard time eating most of what they sell here. Mostly I was afraid. I watched a boy use a pair of metal tongs to beat a live crab and break its shell. You could spend hours here and keep on seeing things you'd never see.
I once bought an electric Jesus wall hanging in the parking lot for myself for Christmas.
A lot of people like to eat weird foods. This is your one-stop-shop. Me, I just like to look.
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Great market; one of my defaults when I'm not just getting "regular" stuff that I can pick up in-town at a publix. I often swing by if I'm already in the neighborhood (usually eating somewhere on Buford).
Parking can be pretty crowded on the weekends, but that's par for the course as far as Asian/International markets go.
I don't know what Ash E. is talking about when she says "avoid the meat whatever you do." They have some excellent and beautiful meat there... maybe she's just scared of the random organs and whatnot... no one's forcing you to eat it.
As far as her comments about being "dirty, noisy, smelly, rude;" I guess that's fairly accurate, but that's how you know it is a good *authentic* international market and not some cleaned-up, made-for-middle-America imitation of an ethnic market. The produce might look a little dirty, but that's just because they don't bother to wash/polish/pretty-it-up like they do in "western" markets... you wash your food before eating it anyway, right... so who cares? The Dekalb FM is not really any better. Noisy? It's not a library! Smelly? I think most of us actually consider it to be fairly fragrant... perhaps the meat and fish sections have a bit of a smell, but try going to the fish section of Whole Foods and it honestly doesn't smell all that different. Rude? I've only seen good things from the staff... much more efficient than your typical in-town supermarket and they've been plenty friendly enough.
"I now stay in the car while my spouse runs in...and I am sure to lock the doors while I wait." That's hilarious. I'm sure "all dem ethnics and minoritiy folks" are just waiting to mug you the second you step out of your car... Ash, I think you need to get out a bit more.
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This place is great and inexpensive and wonderful. How can you beat this place?! They have a huge Hispanic section and a massive Asian section with a huge variety of absolutely fabulous and rare items. The vegetables are so wonderful and always fresh.
If you're looking for bulk, then this is the place to visit. Anyone who needs 50 lbs of rice needs to check this place out. Five gallon jars of pickles or mayonnaise are perfect for those large parties, too.
Just check this place out and you'll never want to go to another market for your Hispanic and Asian vittles.
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Great produce, I had a feast here. I think I perfer the DeKalb though. Great selection of Asian and latin products. Just wish their fish was a little fresher. Anyone know where I can get fresh fish besides whole foods?
This is a gigantic farmer's market with ethnic foods as its specialty.
Their produce section is huge, and it's the first thing you walk into. Next you walk toward the bakery. They make FRESH HOT TORTILLAS for $1 per STACK. They lay out samples with yummy salsa for tasting. The tortillas alone are worth coming for.
They have a huge seafood section, with fresh fish, crabs, eels, and you name it. There is a large sushi area, as well as a Korean dumpling making stand. SO GOOD.
The rest of the store is laid out by ethnicities - each aisle depicts the type of cuisine. This is NOT like the DeKalb Farmer's Market where you can get exquisite cheeses and deli meats... this is the place to go for asian/latino ingredients.
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Can't we all just get along? Well, yes, we can. At the Buford Highway Farmer's Market all the races seem to co-exist in a wonderful microcosm. Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, Thai, Japanese, and Chinese patrons flock to the international market on weekends for the incredible selection of fresh fish and meats. They've got a piss poor bakery, but the fruit and vegetable section is massive. They bring in exotic fruits constantly like dragon fruit, lychee, palm fruit, jack fruit and many other types from Far East Asia. Oh, and it wouldn't be an ethnic supermarket if you couldn't buy luggage, shoes, DVD payers and dishware along with your tomatoes and apples. Buford Highway Farmers Market has all that and then some. Can Dekalb Farmers Market make that claim?
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Dirty, noisy, smelly, rude; that is how I sum up my experiences at BFM. I now stay in the car while my spouse runs in...and I am sure to lock the doors while I wait. We both prefer Dekalb Farmer's Market but there is something or another here my spouse can't find anywhere else. To be fair the limes here are amazingly fragrant and the Japanese mushrooms are worth coming for. Avoid the meat whatever you do.
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