TAYO Asian Market Haifa

For an Asian home cook in the north of Israel, the hardest part of a recipe is rarely the cooking — it is finding the ingredients. Gochujang, fish sauce that tastes like fish sauce, fresh rice paper, the right short-grain rice, Thai curry paste that has not been sitting on a shelf for three years: these are the things that turn an approximation into the real dish. TAYO Asian Market on Derech Yafo 21 exists to close that gap, and for Haifa and the Krayot it has become one of the most reliable places to do it.

TAYO is a small Israeli chain — alongside the Haifa store it runs branches in Rishon LeZion and Beer Sheva — built specifically around pan-Asian groceries rather than a general “international foods” aisle. The chain organises its range by country of origin: Korea, Thailand, China, Japan, the Philippines, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam, plus African, European and American sections. That structure matters in practice. A Filipino shopper looking for a specific brand, or a Korean parent after the snacks their kids grew up with, can find a coherent shelf rather than hunting through a jumble.

What you actually find at the Haifa branch covers the full pantry. Sauces and pastes are the deepest section — soy sauces, oyster sauce, fish sauce, sriracha and chilli sauces, gochujang, Thai red and green curry pastes, tamarind. Then the staples: rice and rice paper, every kind of noodle from Korean ramen to rice vermicelli to egg noodles, dried seaweed and mushrooms, cooking oils, vinegars and spices. There is a fresh and chilled side too — fresh onigiri, tofu, pickles and kimchi — alongside frozen seafood and fish, plus the long tail of things that are otherwise impossible to source locally: Japanese and Korean snacks and sweets, bubble-tea tapioca, Asian soft drinks, instant hot meals, and kitchen kit like bamboo sushi mats and woks. A portion of the range is marked kosher, which widens who can shop the aisles.

The store sits on Derech Yafo, a main artery through the lower city, and it is open long hours through the week — roughly 9:30 to 20:00 Sunday to Thursday, with shorter Friday and Saturday hours — so it works for a planned shop or a last-minute one. It also delivers across Haifa and the Krayot through Wolt, and the chain runs its own online store at ta-yo.co.il for anything you cannot get to in person.

For the Asian communities of northern Israel — and for the restaurants and home cooks who feed them — a shop like this is less a convenience than a supply line. It is the difference between cooking the food you grew up with and settling for something close.