WEST LEBANON — Since moving to the Upper Valley from the Philippines in 2004, Catherine and Marvin Avelino have always struggled to source Filipino groceries in their area.
The Lebanon couple usually have to drive to Manchester or Massachusetts if they want to find products from their native land.
Aware of the same need among other Filipinos in the Upper Valley, about two months ago the couple opened Palengke, a Filipino grocery store tucked into a shopfront in West Lebanon’s Glen Road Plaza.
“We’re hoping all the Filipinos will come and get this going,” Marvin Avelino said in a Monday interview at the store.
Palengke, which means “market” in Filipino, offers a vast array of the archipelago’s staples and seasonal cuisine. The store’s long shelves are lined with sauces such as Mama Sita’s Adobo Marinade; instant coffee; condensed milk; “banana ketchup” pasta sauces; and snacks such as Stik-O Strawberry Wafer Sticks and polvoron cookies, a sweet shortbread Marvin Avelino, 52, remembers his grandma and auntie making when he was a child.
Other foods carry memories of childhood, too, such as unflavored Sky Flakes. The salty crackers are typically consumed with orange soda when sick.
In a second room, several freezers are packed with sweet sausages; lumpia, a spring roll made with thin layers of pastry; fertilized duck eggs; and puto bumbong, a steamed rice cake commonly sold outside churches at Christmas time in the Philippines.
It’s common for Filipinos to start celebrating Christmas in early September, Marvin Avelino said. In Palengke, several poinsettia-shaped light fixtures hang from the walls to ring in the season.
Catherine Avelino is usually in charge of overseeing the store’s inventory, which she orders through purveyors in New York and New Jersey. She’ll also special order specific items if a customer asks so that they don’t have to travel far to procure it at another shop.
It’s always exciting to discover new versions of the snacks she grew up with, she said, such as the sweet butter- and condensed milk-flavored Sky Flakes she’s begun stocking at the store.
“I’m entertained when I’m shopping,” she said.
Even as the cost of most groceries is steadily climbing due to inflation, most of Palengke’s offerings sit under $10.
“I try to think of what I could afford,” Catherine Avelino said.
Still, costs tend to fluctuate due to tariffs, so occasionally she has to raise prices by 50 cents or so.
Since immigrating to the U.S. so Catherine could pursue a career as a nurse, the Avelinos have only been back to visit family in the Philippines once, in 2022, due to the cost of travel.
Running Palengke is a way to expose her kids to Filipino flavors, even while living in the Upper Valley.
The store itself is a family operation and a source of additional income. Marvin Avelino will normally open the store in the morning before heading to his full-time job as a machine operator at Timken Aerospace on Miracle Mile, where his shifts often go from 3 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Catherine Avelino, who left her job as a nurse at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in 2021 due to an illness, will then work the afternoons at the store, sometimes with the help of her son Clarence, who attends Lebanon High School, and Nick, who commutes to college in Concord.
At the moment, the store’s hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday and Monday; 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday; 10. a.m to 7 p.m. on Saturday; and closed on Tuesday.
On Fridays and weekends, Marvin Avelino puts in a full shift at the store.
It’s a lot of work and he admits that “sometimes I need to relax,” but he enjoys staying busy and meeting other Filipinos.
Palengke is a new addition to a handful of Asian grocery stores, which have cropped up in the area over the past two decades. They mainly stock products from countries such as China, Thailand, Japan and India, but few Filipino goods.
Perhaps the oldest of the bunch is the Asian Super Store, a market carrying Indian and other Asian grocery items that opened in 2001 in a narrow storefront on the Lebanon Mall.
There’s also Bangkok Asian Market and Cafe on Miracle Mile and Yiping’s Asian Market, which moved to West Lebanon’s Main Street in 2010 after a two-year stint in Hanover.
In spite of the high concentration of Asian markets, Marvin Avelino said he could rarely find the Filipino groceries he’s looking for.
Because the closest Filipino markets are often a couple hours drive, Palengke has become a welcomed option for customers living in northern Vermont as well as Dartmouth students.
“I meet a lot of friends and a lot of Filipinos” at the store, he said.
He noted that the Filipino community in the Upper Valley has grown significantly since he moved to the area 20 years ago.
In 2023, 1,107 “foreign born” Filipinos, meaning naturalized U.S. citizens, green card holders, and temporary visa holders, resided in the Vermont, while 3,241 resided in New Hampshire, according to Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that gathers data to inform immigration policy.
Over the years, Upper Valley Filipinos would often get together for monthly parties of 50 or so families. After the coronavirus pandemic, those parties have been more infrequent, but Catherine Avelino hopes they’ll start up in earnest again soon.
On Monday afternoon, the couple’s neighbor, Marlon Sedero stopped by to chat with Catherine Avelino while she minded the store.
Sedero, who hails from the Filipino island of Mindanao, used to travel to New Jersey to shop for Filipino products. Now he buys 99% of his groceries at Palengke.
“It’s local, so we have to support local instead,” he said.