RIP H Mart

It’s time to make this public and talk about how horrible H Mart has become.

Qualifications: I’m a local private chef, and go through anywhere between $2000 and $6000 worth of groceries every week. Among other more mainstream American and European food, I happen to be one of the few private chefs specializing in Japanese and Korean cooking.

TLDR: H Mart turned from a legit grocery store that Koreans were proud of, into a terrible sh*thole. Why? Because H Mart ruins product via time/temperature abuse and unethically keeps those items stocked.

For the past 5 years since moving to Houston, I always assumed that the quality of H Mart Houston Blalock would be the same if my local H Kart back in Southern California. Initially, I did not notice any issues. In fact, my issues with Blalock H Mart didn’t become apparent until about a year ago.

After a storm in early 2024, like many businesses per the norm in Houston, H Mart experienced a power outage that lasted anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 a day. I went to H Mart to get some ingredients for a service, and noticed that there was water everywhere on the floors, newspaper strewn everywhere to keep the freezer aisles walkable, and that the power to the freezers were all off. During this time, all of the meat (seafood, beef, poultry, pork, EVERYTHING) was still on the shelves and completely thawed, and was above 40 degrees Fahrenheit (I knew this because I’ve been dealing with meat and groceries for quite a while). I asked a random non-management worker what was going on, and he said, “the power shut off sometime last night and we haven’t gotten our power back since.” By this time it was already about 3 in the afternoon.

During this time, everything including items that needed to be frozen were being sold to customers, which I found uncomfortable to say the least.

BUT HERE WAS MY MAIN CONCERN: I was worried that H Mart would refreeze all of this product over the next day as night and continue selling like nothing happened. So I took some photos of product including unagi, beef, pork, chicken, and some specific ice cream products to refer to the next day because I knew I needed to come back the following day for another cook (I’m typically at H Mart 2-3 times per week).

I spoke to management on my way out, and he assured me that all of the thawed product was in the middle of being disposed of, and that all new product will be stocked the next day.

The next day, I came back, and I was disappointed and angry to see that all of the meat and frozen foods were simply refrozen and stocked to sell to customers. This was the beginning of my really sour relationship with H Mart. For non-cooks, you may ask how I could know by quickly glancing at the entire frozen section of product and know it was ALL thawed and refrozen? Because thawed and refrozen product deforms, and develops an icicle-like freezing pattern that is a dead giveaway for refrozen food.

Just fyi, it’s incredibly unsafe and degrades quality significantly when you refreeze thousands of pounds of product like this. Those grocery store freezers are not meant for refreezing food like that.

Since then, I’ve CONSTANTLY encountered wayyyyy too many instances of time/temperature abuse in their frozen section, refrigerated section, and the quality of their banchans in the side dish section (next to kimchi) has degraded significantly.

• Opening packs of tofu that are sour, curdled, and stinky as hell
• Pickled section refrigerated items constantly being rotten (I notice them when Instacart delivers for me once in a while). Happens a lot with the 쌈무 (ssam moo)
• Constantly grabbing frozen items only to see that they were thawed and refrozen (냉동음식)
• When I grab some Banchan after a long day of cooking for other people, I get home disappointed, because everything is WAAYYYYY too salty or drowning in sugar.

Like all other Koreans, I used to be proud of H Mart. Now, I can’t recommend it to friends unless they are as experienced as cooks when it comes to grocery shopping.

Not only is the quality terrible and inconsistent, it is unsafe. Management prioritizes profits over quality. It wasn’t always like that.

I’m tired of the crappy situation at H Mart.