Foreign Candy Puts American Candy to Shame

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At Sunrise Mart, a small Japanese grocery with a branch in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, you can’t miss the mountain of KitKats. The shop sells all kinds of fresh foods and imported snacks, but as soon as you step inside, you’re toe-to-toe with an enormous heap of colorful bags of the chocolate bars, rising up from the floor in the store’s most prominent real estate. The bags offer flavors such as lychee, chocolate orange, and cheesecake. At $10 each, they’re a little expensive. That doesn’t seem to matter. When I visited the store this spring in search of soup ingredients, multiple shoppers buzzed around me on an otherwise slow weekday afternoon, snapping up bag after bag.

I’d never had anything but a standard American KitKat before, but I’d heard so many people rave about the Japanese versions that stumbling on the opportunity to try them myself seemed like money I couldn’t afford to spend. I stuffed two bags of the pistachio and matcha flavors in my tote and headed for the subway, feeling like I’d just unearthed some kind of treasure. When I got home, I pulled out both,), and staged my own little taste test on my kitchen counter. Their flavors and textures differed from the candy I’d been eating for my entire life. They were all great. Matcha won.