There was a Cybertruck parked on Main Street in East Hampton, outside the Altuzarra store. It was a Sunday afternoon in June, and traffic stalled for a moment. Even the rich are not immune to rubbernecking a brutalist behemoth.

The monster truck marked the end of an avenue of monograms — the island’s main luxury shopping drag, with $850 raffia handbags and $15,000 decorative surfboards. You know their names: Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Lululemon.

Two and a half miles down this same street, however, quaintness emerged. East Hampton turned into Amagansett, and that flashy boutique strip became a town square with white wood-paneled cottages. There was a shoe store called Brunch, a children’s clothing chain called Pink Chicken, a jewelry and gift shop called Love Adorned. A Cybertruck here would read as a declaration of war.

It was near these cottages that the Row, a brand founded in 2006 by Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, quietly opened a store on Memorial Day weekend.

Quietly is how the Row tends to operate. Not only in its clothing — often described as “quiet luxury,” a term used to describe very expensive basics — but also in its communication.

The founders rarely give interviews, advertise or otherwise promote their line. While the Row did announce its Amagansett opening on Instagram, that account is more outwardly devoted to sharing modern art than to moving product. In February, the brand caused a stir at Paris Fashion Week by asking its runway show attendees to “refrain from capturing or sharing any content during your experience” — which is, for many, the primary reason for attending a fashion show. The audience was encouraged to write down thoughts instead.

Somehow this stance works. In an industry overrun by influencers, the Row’s silence is stark. Monasticism is chic. There is an impression of exclusivity and taste, buoyed by the extreme prices. One of the Row’s most popular items, the Margaux bag, ranges in price from $3,490 to $6,810, depending on size and material. It is timeless and ladylike, the kind of purse that might remind Kendall Jenner of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The Row’s stores also have a reputation for being intimidating at times, even among seasoned high-end shoppers.

One loyal Row customer told me she felt like “peasantry” in the Los Angeles store, which houses an untouchable swimming pool. At the store in Manhattan — a townhouse with a limestone spiral staircase — “there is one guy who works there that all my friends are afraid of, who radiates a very ‘you can’t sit here’ vibe,” said Jess Graves, the writer of a shopping newsletter called The Love List, “even to girls I know who walk in wearing the brand head to toe.”

The Amagansett shop is different. It operates out of a house with roots in the 19th century, formerly occupied by Tiina the Store, the Hamptons’ Gap for billionaires. (Tiina stocked the Row.)

It has a porch and a screen door and a woven beige carpet. The fitting rooms are harshly lit behind denim patchwork curtains. (By contrast, the spacious wood-floored dressing rooms at the Upper East Side store, where I recently tried on a $1,550 white cotton poplin tent dress that made me look, tragically, like a hospital patient, have soft lighting and softer robes.)

There is no statement artwork in Amagansett, unlike the London store, where an oval light installation by James Turrell greets visitors at the entrance. The vintage furniture is noteworthy — there’s a black chaise shaped like a person from the 1970s by Olivier Mourgue Bouloum and a white painted wooden lounge chair from the 1930s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. But the décor, with its Asian and African influences, is not the point.

The point of the store is the large selection of jewelry, home wares, snacks and skin care by more than 20 brands and artisans that are not the Row. Shampoo from Florence. Beaded necklaces from Greece. A mother-of-pearl caviar set. A bronze lighter carved to resemble tree bark. A packet of dried mango and a jar of raw almonds. Vintage glass candlesticks that can be purchased only in a set of a dozen for $16,000.

There are racks of ready-to-wear clothes made by the Row, of course, the selection tailored to this beach town: bike shorts ($1,050), denim shirts (also $1,050), ribbed tank tops ($670), sleeveless silk maxi-dresses ($1,890). Ms. Graves bought herself a raffia bag here earlier in the season. (“It felt very appropriate while I’m out here this summer,” she said.)

But the Row confirmed that the Amagansett store is its first attempt at a “local” store concept. What this presumably means is a space that is more relaxed, filled with objects that complement the brand’s vision of itself, staffed by sales associates who do not scare people away but warmly help shoppers track down sold-out jelly flats. Not that the Row’s fans are easily scared away: Even those who are intimidated don’t stay away for long, these masochists for cream-colored cashmere.

In retrospect, the popular jelly shoes, along with the beach towels that models wore as scarves on the Row’s runway in September, may have been a sign that the brand was loosening up — that brightness and humor were coming to this austere world. (Its most recent look book showed a silky camisole dress layered over pants, Y2K-style.)

A British client of the Row visiting the Amagansett store marveled at the vibe shift. Where was the icy indifference? “I don’t think it would fly with the audience here,” she said.

Last year, Americans bought a half a billion packets of Shin Ramyun, the spicy, beefy Korean instant noodle. The bold red-and-black packaging feels inescapable: It’s a staple of college dorm rooms, bodegas, middle-of-the-country Walmarts and viral TikTok videos.

But 30 years ago, the noodles were largely unknown in the United States. No grocery store would stock them, said Kevin Chang, the director of marketing for Nongshim, Shin Ramyun’s parent company. Except, that is, for a few small Korean grocers, including a fledgling shop in Woodside, Queens, called H Mart.

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In the 1970s and ’80s, as Asian immigration to the United States soared, grocers like H Mart; Patel Brothers, an Indian grocery founded in Chicago; and 99 Ranch Market, originally focused on foods from China and Taiwan, started in Westminster, Calif., opened to meet the demand for ingredients that tasted like home. These were tiny mom-and-pop shops in suburban strip malls or outer boroughs with large Asian immigrant populations. They weren’t fancy, but they were vital to their communities.

Now, those same shops have transformed into sleekly designed chains with in-store roti machines, mobile ordering apps and locations across the country — all aiming to serve the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States and the millions of others who now crave flavors like Shin Ramyun, chili crisp, chaat masala and chai.

The H Mart of today is a $2 billion company with 96 stores and a namesake book (the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart,” by the musician Michelle Zauner). Last month, the chain purchased an entire shopping center in San Francisco for $37 million. Patel Brothers has 52 locations in 20 states, with six more stores planned in the next two years. 99 Ranch opened four new branches just last year, bringing its reach to 62 stores in 11 states. Weee!, an online Asian food store, is valued at $4.1 billion.

Asian grocery stores are no longer niche businesses: They are a cultural phenomenon.

Turning specialties into staples

Despite their recent growth, Asian American grocers still represent less than one percent of the total U.S. grocery business, which is dominated by retailers such as Kroger and Walmart, said Dymfke Kuijpers, a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey who specializes in retail. But these stores exercise an outsize impact, she said, as they dictate which products the big-box chains stock.

Americans have become deeply enamored with Asian flavors: From April 2023 to April 2024, sales of items in the “Asian/ethnic aisle” in U.S. grocery stores grew nearly four times more than overall sales, according to the data analytics company Circana. And more than any restaurant, cookbook or online video, Asian grocers are driving this shift.

“They are the vanguard of mainstreaming,” said Errol Schweizer, who was the vice president of grocery at Whole Foods Market from 2009 to 2016. Miso, ghee, turmeric, soy sauce — their journeys to becoming widely available pantry staples all began with an Asian grocer.

“Without Asian grocery stores, it is extremely hard to get into the mainstream market,” said Mr. Chang, from Nongshim. They make accessible those ingredients that people grew up with, ate in a restaurant or saw online, he said. Brian Kwon, the president of H Mart, said he’s used to seeing employees from major grocers show up at one of his stores and note down which brands are available.

But H Mart is attracting the clientele of the big grocers, too. Thirty percent of its shoppers today are non Asian, Mr. Kwon said, and he’s made changes to continue drawing them as the company expands into areas with smaller Asian populations — placing more emphasis on in-store tastings, explaining how ingredients are used and posting signs in both Korean and English. Similarly, at 99 Ranch, the announcements ring out in Mandarin and English, and Western music has been added to the store playlists.

Swetal Patel, a partner at Patel Brothers, said that as the chain has expanded its audience — he estimates that 20 to 25 percent of shoppers are now non South Asian — stores now look more like a Whole Foods, with wide aisles and glass windows. “It is not your mom and dad’s Indian grocery store anymore.”

This evolution has not been welcomed by everyone.

Toral Dalal, a retired financial planner in Fulton, Md., said she used to frequent a small Indian store run by a husband-and-wife team she befriended — until a Patel Brothers opened nearby in 2019, and the shop closed in part because it couldn’t compete on price. While she does shop at Patel Brothers, she said, “it feels like a chore.” She very rarely buys anything new, and she doesn’t know any of the store employees. “It is impersonal.”

She lamented: When did the Indian grocery store get so corporate?

‘The feeling of being home’

Even as many Asian grocers have adapted to their changing customer bases, they insist that the communities that got them started remain top of mind.

At the Dallas-based chain India Bazaar, for example, organic lentils are on offer, and the bhakri is labeled gluten free — tweaks that not only help bring in non South Asians, but also keep the store relevant for second-generation South Asians, said Anuja Ranade, the chief operating officer.

South Asians will always be the priority, said Ms. Ranade, even as store design or product packaging might evolve.

“It is about the feeling of being home when they walk into my store,” she said. The shops still smell of spices and the employees speak various South Asian dialects and wish customers a happy Diwali — “because when you go to Walmart, they say, ‘Merry Christmas! Happy Thanksgiving!’”

That authenticity is precisely the appeal for many non Asian customers as well.

“I find it fascinating that there are things on the shelf that I have no idea what they are,” said Jill Connors, an economic development director for the city of Dubuque, Iowa, who started shopping at Hornbill Asian Market earlier this year because she and her husband became vegan and wanted high-quality tofu at a reasonable price.

The sheer variety of foods to explore “brings more joy to the shopping and cooking process,” said Alexine Casanova, a nonprofit operations manager in Hamden, Conn., who shops at G Mart and Farmer’s India Market.

Sheil Shukla, who lives in the Chicago area and wrote the cookbook Plant-Based India, said the wide popularity of stores like Patel Brothers has given him more flexibility as a recipe developer. “It has made me not shy away from using traditional ingredients,” he said. “If I were developing my cookbook 10 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have a garam masala recipe in there because I wouldn’t think anyone would actually make it.”

These chains have also paved the way for more regionalized Asian grocery stores, like the Taiwanese shop Yun Hai in Brooklyn or Sua Superette, a Sichuan marketplace in Los Angeles — both run by second-generation Asian Americans.

“We are building on the work that previous people, like 99 Ranch, have done before,” said Lisa Cheng Smith, the founder of Yun Hai. “Without them, we wouldn’t be able to go to this next level of specialization.”

Many customers said they still missed the original stores — the humble community anchors where they hung out as children, or that made them feel welcome in their first years in a new country. But even as they expand, many of these grocers continue to function as so-called third places, spaces for social gathering. Mary Anne Hamper, a Filipino American genetics researcher in Astoria, Queens, said she plans trips to H Mart with her Asian American friends; they catch up as they wander the aisles looking at snacks.

Kat Lieu, the Seattle-based author of the cookbook Modern Asian Baking at Home, said she didn’t mind the influx of non Asian customers into these spaces.

“In an Asian grocery store I feel like a queen,” she said. “If I see a confused white person, I am like, ‘That’s the best soy sauce.’”

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This story is part of a series on how Asian Americans are shaping American popular culture. The series is funded through a grant from The Asian American Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection and focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of this series.