Kwong Tong Chong

Feeling uninspired in the kitchen? Come to Kwong Tong Chong and marvel at their awesome selection of random Chinese herbs and mixes. If you don’t read Chinese, don’t despair! There was a lot of Chingrish on some of the boxes for us lacking in the Chinese language department.
Some cool finds:
Torto black sesame dessert mix
Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot broth mixes
Jook in a can

Kwong Tong Chong Co. is one of those spots that you never really thought existed unless you just stumbled in while lost in Chinatown or know of a Chinese person who shops there.
Basically I tell people this is THE place to get your Chinese food stuffs that you can’t find in Chinatown. They carry and import so many items that is normally hard to find anywhere at all.
Case in point. Go find a bottle of Horlicks powder. To those who are confused on what Horlicks is, its a malt beverage that you mix with hot water. It is chock full of vitamins and is the best tasting malt beverage out there. Because Americans don’t really drink this stuff, the company barely sells any to the US market. Kwong Tong Chong is one of the few places on the island that sells them. I heard Indian markets also sell them.
Case number 2: The mythical Rickshaw tea bags. This is the premium teabag for milk tea drinkers like myself. Some people swear its the only tea to use to give it the full flavor. Others, including some restaurants, use Lipton’s. Rickshaw is a very common premium teabag for Hong Kong residents. Kwong Tong Chong carries them also.
You won’t find those two items anywhere else in Chinatown. Trust me, I’ve looked all over. My dad actually uses this place as a last resort because he knows that they usually almost always carries what he needs but is extremely out of the way inside Chinatown.

Coming here two days prior to Chinese New Year’s, we met a crowd of determined women shoppers, buying their raw materials for their New Year’s «Jai». A friend told us her recipe using twenty-​one different ingredients (like the Colonel’s mix of herbs and spices?!), handed down from her mother. She raved about these mushrooms that ONLY this store carries (slice and sautee with onions to accompany your steak)… large button mushrooms from Taiwan. As a mushroom lover, I had this high on my priority list of bring-​home items. Knowing the owner, Mr. Wong, from doing business with him, I questioned him about this and confirmed that he is the only importer in Hawaii carrying these JUMBO sized mushrooms (pointed to the «JU» marking on the can). Come here for your dried goods, sauces, canned goods, and other cooking ingedients to make that down-​home dishes. He also has a small pharmacy area for Chinese herbs and herbal products. Judging by the crowd size, this is probably a good shopping spot for those hard to find goods.

Very little information on the web about this place, even though this store has been located in Honolulu’s Chinatown for a long time. Honolulu Weekly once wrote an article and dubbed it the No Name Shop. Reason being that the shop does not have a store sign as you walk by. I had to run a phonetic Google search to find the correct name for this place.
Anyways, Kwong Tong Chong is one of the longstanding Chinese grocery places in Chinatown. It was previously next to the Bank of Hawaii, but switched to the opposite side of the street and now is next to American Savings Bank. There is no produce or fruit found here. But you will find all kinds of Chinese grocery goods including sauces, candies and teas.
Most often I come here for their herbal teas. It is kind of my natural alternative to getting better when I have a certain malady. I would suggest this as a starting place if you are looking for Chinese remedies as they have a good selection here.
The store is kind of small, so products fill up the store. There are even a couple shelves in the front where it is really difficult to get to the product. It is hard to sell something that shoppers can not see or know what the product is for.
Many of the stores I used to frequent in Chinatown have disappeared. Other than Hing Mau, this is one of the shops that has staying power.