Meet The TikTok Anthropologist Mapping L.A.’s International Grocery Stores
Vanessa Anderson, aka Grocery Goblin, has visited over 100 grocery stores across Los Angeles—and she's just getting started
Photographs by David Gurzhiev
Two Thursdays ago, just before noon, Vanessa Anderson was transfixed on a wall teeming with wrapped Russian candies of various shapes and colors. She picked up one candy after another, turning each specimen over in her left hand and simultaneously capturing a video on her phone with her right. Some made it into her shopping cart—snacks for a speed dating event she was hosting that night. The primary purpose of the visit to Odessa Grocery, a Russian grocery in Valley Village named after a city in Ukraine, however, was to scout. Anderson is a TikToker with 24,000 followers operating under the pseudonym Grocery Goblin. But really, she’s a budding anthropologist, and her area of inquiry is the grocery store.
As Anderson points out, the grocery store is not only a rich lens from which to examine culture and society but an apt one, too. “Everyone has to interact with the grocery store in some way. Even if you’re ordering Instacart, you’re interacting with it,” she says. “It’s not like that with a lot of other businesses. You don’t have to go to a bookstore if you never want to, but everyone has to eat, and everyone has to get their food from somewhere.” The bulk of her work comprises what she calls “store tours,” annotated visits to places like Mercado González, a 70,000 square-foot Mexican supermarket in Costa Mesa, and Happy Days, the 47-year-old hippie food shop in Altadena. She also maintains an extremely useful Google map of international grocery stores, which is how I first caught wind of her. When Anderson invited us along on a scouting trip to Odessa Grocery, followed by Tashkent Produce nearby, it was a welcome coincidence: David’s mom grew up in Odessa, and his dad in Tajikistan, the country that borders Uzbekistan (of which Tashkent is the capital).
An observational narrative weaves together a typical Grocery Goblin TikTok. For example, Anderson explores how support for Palestine shows up at the Middle Eastern grocery Al Tayebat in Anaheim’s Little Arabia. And in a video about the Unarius Academy of Science in El Cajon, a pseudo-religious creative collective that believes in past lives, she considers how reincarnation appears on the shelves at the nearby Vietnamese market Vien Dong. Often, she brings correspondents along, like Yousef Hilmy, an Orange County native who runs the jazz label Minaret Records and whose mom shops at Al Tayebat, and Amanda Lanza, an Italian-speaking chef and culinary anthropologist who has helped her decode places like the gourmet Santa Monica wholesaler Guidi Marcello. To borrow a term from Jonathan Nunn, the London-based restaurant critic and founder of Vittles, Anderson has become something of a gastrogeographer.
“Everyone has to interact with the grocery store in some way. Even if you’re ordering Instacart, you’re interacting with it. It’s not like that with a lot of other businesses. You don’t have to go to a bookstore if you never want to, but everyone has to eat, and everyone has to get their food from somewhere.”
If the goal of Grocery Goblin is to visit every grocery store in the world (it is), then Los Angeles is the perfect jumping-off point. With our diverse population and sprawling topography, L.A. is both culturally abundant and complex—and it’s only natural that our grocery stores reflect that. “L.A. is ten different cities in one. It’s such a great bang for your buck, but also, it can be completely isolating, and it’s hard to wrap your head around,” Anderson says. “Someone living in a mansion in Beverly Hills and someone living in the San Gabriel Valley, they’re both experiencing L.A. authentically to them, but where’s the common ground? Will they ever meet? And how do they intersect? All of these things are really interesting to me.” The epitome of L.A.’s cross-cultural vibrance surfaces in a Grocery Goblin TikTok about Claro's Italian Market in San Gabriel when an employee reveals that one of her Chinese customers purchases bronze-cut spaghetti to make chow mein.
L.A. also happens to be where Anderson lives. She resides in Echo Park and works part-time as a private chef and in the kitchen of the Chinatown wine bar Cafe Triste. Originally from Ithaca in upstate New York, Anderson moved to Los Angeles at the beginning of last year after stints in New York City and Berlin, Germany. She worked on the line at the acclaimed Lower East Side restaurant Wildair, in meal delivery operations, and for a private chef agency. “I used to come out [to L.A.] to hire chefs. The first time I was here was with my old boss, and she taught me how to surf in Malibu. We’d drive around, and she’d say, ‘Okay, this is when we’re gonna call our moms. When you’re in traffic, you call your mom.’ So we’d call our moms on speaker,” she recounts. “She showed me L.A. in a really big way, but a really specific part of L.A. She drove me out to get a tattoo in Tarzana at this shop where all the porn stars get tattooed at.” Although the allure of Southern California was undeniable, it took Anderson a while to land here. When she finally did, the birth of Grocery Goblin came shortly after.
Inspired by handles like @fruit_stickers and @cutesttags, Anderson began cataloging food packaging designs on the @grocery_goblin Instagram account. That led her to spend more time in L.A.’s grocery stores, a pastime she’s always loved. Like many of us, she has fond childhood memories of grocery shopping with her parents and even went to childcare at the local Wegmans, an East Coast supermarket chain. “I’ve been coming here since I was a goblin in training,” starts a video for Kalustyan’s, a treasured and vast international Indian market in Manhattan, then cuts to a clip of an 11-year-old Anderson behind a Handycam amongst bags of spices. “It’s a really big store, full of lots of interesting things,” she says.
Anderson had never owned a car before moving to L.A., and her newfound mobility was energizing. Visiting grocery stores became an essential outlet for exploring the city and situating herself as a new resident. She fell in love with the grease-stained walls of Mid-City’s Greek mecca Papa Christo’s, the user-friendliness of the massive Tokyo Central in Torrance, and the chicken grilled in the parking lot of Super A Foods in Glassell Park. “A lot of the markets I [tour] are small, international markets run by first or second-gen Americans, but I think it’s equally as important to talk about Gelson’s and Ralphs and how people interact with those spaces,” she says. “Even Cookbook, because whether you like it or not, it exists, it’s in the community. Therefore, we should be examining how it intersects with the rest of what’s going on in the community.”
There was so much to discover as she traversed the grocery store aisles of greater Los Angeles. “I felt like in order to feel like I actually lived here, I needed to chew as much as possible and really get to the meat of it,” Anderson recalls. Eager to share what she had learned, she turned to TikTok. Her first stab at the store tour format was for Epicurus Gourmet, the luxury food warehouse in North Hollywood, where she highlighted acorn-fed pork collar charcuterie and other imported European ingredients. “The fact that you can do a deep dive about something that you find super interesting and put it online, and it can reach some of the right people, is really cool and inspiring, and I think it should be looked at more like an educational resource,” she says about the short-form video platform.
In reality, TikTok—specifically, Grocery Goblin—is being used as an educational resource. Recently, two professors reached out to Anderson to speak in their classrooms, one of whom teaches Economies of Food and Agriculture at the University of Puget Sound and another of Human Geography from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. In less than two years, she’s become a serious scholar of grocery stores. At the same time, she’s absorbed a lot about Los Angeles. “L.A. is segregated along race lines and class lines, obviously, but also, because it’s so spread out, people can not leave a community,” she says. “They can have their entire world be in one neighborhood, and because of that, you get these neighborhoods that are so rich with culture and stories, but you also get people who don’t leave the bubble.”
At Odessa Grocery, we pored over every section of the compact store. Employees were stocking the shelves behind the counter with freshly baked black bread and helping Russian-speaking customers order caviar and smoked fish. There were containers of house-made holodets (Russian aspic) in the fridge, bags of frozen pelmeni and vareniki in the freezer, and pantry items ranging from canned herring to condensed milk cookies. Anderson captured videos discreetly, utilizing Google Translate—or David, who speaks Russian—to decipher certain ingredients. Next, we headed to Tashkent Produce, a Uzkebi-owned market just down the street, where we sampled scratch-made mushroom pate, warm potato piroshki, and cold chocolate-enrobed cheesecake bars called syrok. Anderson hit it off with the second-generation owner, then interviewed him in the lot behind the store.
She was still in the early stages of determining the narrative for this particular TikTok, but she had a thread of an idea. She had watched a talk by Jonathan Gold, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic considered by many (besides himself) to be one of L.A.’s most important cultural anthropologists, about authenticity. The sermon starts with an encounter he had in the Moscow airport with the dish herring under a fur coat, a layered Russian salad of herring, egg, beets, and carrots. It goes on to argue for the merit of foods created authentically from cross-cultural experience, a phenomenon that is particularly prevalent within the food culture of Los Angeles. Anderson pinned Odessa Grocery and Tashkent Produce as two groceries within the Soviet expat enclave of Valley Village, each selling herring under a fur coat.
Anderson hadn’t read much Jonathan Gold before she began working on Grocery Goblin. Now, her copy of Counter Intelligence, a book of his reviews published in 2000, is well-worn. “Los Angeles is a place that you can’t really unlock until you live here,” she says, referring to a famous Gold quote:
If you live in Los Angeles, you’re used to having your city explained to you by people who come in for a couple of weeks, stay at a hotel in Beverly Hills, and take in what they can get to within 10 minutes of their rented car. The thing that people find hard to understand, I think, is sort of the magnitude of what’s here, the huge number of multiple cultures that live in the city who come together in this beautiful and haphazard fashion. And the fault lines between them are sometimes where you find the most beautiful things.
The big-picture plan for Grocery Goblin remains: to visit every grocery store in the world. Yet Anderson is the first to admit that her work in Los Angeles is only just beginning. For someone who is by all definitions still new in town, she’s doing her part to contribute to the chronicling of L.A.’s expansive food culture. She’s also inspiring her viewers, who are equally obsessed with grocery stores, to lean in. “I always say I’m a grocery goblin, not the grocery goblin, because I think everyone is.”
