If you wander down to the corner of First and Bell in Belltown, you’ll spot a storefront with signs out front daring you to taste chili crisps and soy sauces like you’ve never tried before. Step inside and you’ll probably be greeted by Tak—short for Takeshi—who’s as passionate about food science as he is about building a real sense of community around Asian flavors. Mixed Pantry isn’t your typical specialty food store. It’s a place where sauces, jams, and popcorn from Asian American makers line the shelves, and where you might just find yourself sampling three dozen chili crisps with Tak leading the way.
Since opening in late 2023, Mixed Pantry has become a gathering spot for anyone curious about Asian ingredients, whether you’re on the hunt for your favorite brand of soy sauce or just learning how to stir-fry for the first time. Tak’s mission goes beyond stocking hard-to-find products: he’s out to give every visitor a taste of something new, to break down stereotypes, and to shine a light on the small-batch makers and family recipes that too often get stuck on the “ethnic” aisle. Around here, it’s all about lowering the barriers to trying something different—and making sure you leave with a few new favorites, plus a story or two.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Please introduce yourself!
My name is Tak, a short for Takeshi. I’m an immigrant from Japan, and I’m the owner of Mixed Pantry. It’s an Asian specialty food store in the Belltown neighborhood. We opened our store in November 2023, so it’s been about a year and a half, and we’re located at the corner of First and Bell in the heart of Belltown. We are surrounded by a lot of wonderful small businesses in the neighborhood.
What do you sell at Mixed Pantry?
We sell all kinds of stuff, but mostly sauces. Everything that we carry here is either imported from Asia or is something that’s created by AAPI community members. We wanted to carve out the space to highlight some of those items and lift up the entire community altogether.
What were you doing before you opened Mixed Pantry?
Before Mixed Pantry, I was actually involved with another pop-up store, through the Seattle Restored Program. They are like a matchmaking program for the city, and they grabbed our business plan, and they matched with this particular location.
What do you want people to know about Mixed Pantry?
First, I think our space is very unique. It’s a relatively open space, so it never feels too crowded. We host a lot of different community events here. We carve out a space to bring in different kinds of vendors locally, but they’re all Asian-American brands and owners of small businesses. Whether it’s from fourth-generation Japanese-American Tanuki Coffee Roasters to Ayako & Family (another Japanese brand here – it’s one of the best jam makers). We have a Party of Popcorn which is a Thai-American sister owned popcorn brand. So there’s so many different items out there, and we want to bring all those really cool brand owners and creators into the space to highlight them.
How do you find the brands?
I spend a lot of time on the internet! (laughs) But at this point, a lot of people reach out to me. My background is actually in food science. I have a Master’s in Food Science and Tech from Oregon State University. I studied beer, mostly. I’m a brewing chemist, and my research was around beer bubbles, like the physical chemistry of beer bubbles.
Many people say “Oh, I love food. I want to have a store!” And I’m like no, you don’t understand like – I really love food. I studied food science in my master’s program!
What should a first-time customer expect when they walk in the door?
I think depending on who you are and what background you come from, the experience is going to be very different. If you already are very familiar with lots of these items here, then you might just want to go explore different kinds of brands we have of the foods you’re already familiar with. For example, you may have a favorite chili crisp, but there are so many out there. I’ve personally tried over a hundred different kinds and I am more than happy to share them and lead you through a sampling.
If you are not familiar with our products and maybe trying to get into the Asian style of cooking, then maybe just talk to me and let me know what you’re trying to achieve and I’ll be more than happy to walk around the store with you and figure out your dinner together.
Can you tell us more about why you love this location over, say, a booth at the market?
I really value the individual connection and engagement with our customers here because, for me, that’s where the real community and the small business core foundation is. If I’m at the market, it’s wonderful there, right? But it can be really chaotic and a little bit too busy and circusy for me. But here we can really take time and get to know each other and get to know what you like, what you don’t like, and really figure out what works for you using Asian flavor profiles.
You’ve got signs outside that say, “come in for a chili crisp tasting,” and “come in for a soy sauce tasting.” How did you come up with the idea to incorporate that into the business?
As a grad student at the food science department at Oregon State, I also helped out at the sensory lab. As a general public, we’re very familiar with beer tasting, cheese tasting, wine tasting, maybe. But in that lab, I was doing things like potato salad tasting and imitation lobster tasting.
If it’s food, we can do side-by-side taste testing. And the difference I could tell by doing that was absolutely fascinating to me. So why not bring that out to the public, beyond cheese and alcohol? And I’ve been doing all the chili crisps and soy sauces, and people are really, really grateful. Because when do you get a chance to be able to try two or three dozen different chili crisps for $10 bucks? And be able to figure out which one actually works for you, works for your style of cooking, the heat level? It’s always really tricky to figure out how spicy things are.
In the grocery stores, branding is everything in the modern world. But that’s kind of weird to me because unless you try, you never really know. So I want people to really try all these different foods and really know what they taste like.
I also want to lower the barrier to exploring Asian flavor. I think our food gets a bad rep, such as “dirty”, “cheap”, “we don’t really know what’s in there” – that kind of stuff. That’s a myth, that’s just pure myth!
Many of these folks bringing consumer packaged goods to the shelf are battling all this institutional racism, working extremely hard to bring their family recipes to the public, only to end up being shoved into the ethnic aisle. It’s not okay.
These are high-quality products, and they should be known. I want to share that flavor with people when people are still curious about it, so that that curiosity doesn’t turn into a sour judgment or any kind of stereotypes.
If you’re curious, come over to Mixed Pantry, I’ll share some samples, and you’re going to become the biggest cheerleader and an ambassador for our food.
