-By James Mellgren

Number of Stores: 2
Location: Oakland & Berkeley, Calif.
Year Established: 1987
Store Size: 2,200 to 14,000 square feet
Number of Employees: 200
Owners: Sara Wilson, Tony Wilson and Peter Wilson
Web Site: www.rockridgemarkethall.com or www.markethallfoods.com

The tradition of the market hall is a long-standing one in many of America’s older cities and certainly throughout Europe (think, for example, Seattle’s Pike Place Market, Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, Baltimore’s Lexington Market and Harrod’s Food Hall in London). A large space with individual vendors plying their trade and offering their own particular area of expertise, typically located in the central part of the city, was once an indelible part of urban life, as much for the social aspect as for procuring one’s daily food. In the modern era, of course, the concept of the market hall has been approximated by both specialty stores and supermarkets, but often without that sense of ownership in the individual departments. The true market hall is a collection of artisans and merchants gathered together in the same building or at least under the same roof. Such a place exists for the lucky residents of the Rockridge district in North Oakland, Calif. Located in an area of the country that is famous for the high quality of its food — restaurants, shops, farmers, cheesemakers, winemakers, etc. — the Rockridge Market Hall stands out as an exemplar of culinary prowess and is highly regarded by the entire community. Anchored by The Pasta Shop and Oliveto, one of the Bay Area’s premier Italian restaurants, and guided by Sara Wilson, who owns Market Hall with her bothers Tony and Peter, and an extraordinary team of buyers, cooks and department managers, the Rockridge Market Hall is helping to keep a tradition alive in Oakland, one bag of pasta at a time.

Pasta, Peaberry’s, Produce & More
Sara Wilson and her brothers envisioned a traditional market hall, located in a building they owned, where each of the businesses would be individually owned and operated, all existing under one roof for the collective good of their customers. They began planning Market Hall Foods in 1984 and actually opened the doors in 1987 with just the produce market inside the Market Hall and the restaurant Oliveto occupying the corner space, quickly followed in 1988 by The Pasta Shop. The Pasta Shop was an existing business owned by two women just down College Avenue from Market Hall, the name reflecting their core business of making fresh pasta that they sold on premises, as well as to wholesale accounts throughout the Bay Area. The two women who began the business decided they had had enough of the day-to-day operations and sold the business to the Wilsons, who continued the pasta operation but expanded the specialty offerings of the shop as it became the anchor business for Market Hall Foods.

More pieces of the gourmet puzzle were added, and today, there are eight individual food stalls that make up Market Hall Foods, four owned by the Wilson family — The Pasta Shop, Hapuku Fish, Market Hall Produce and the Bakery — and four individually owned — Peaberry’s Coffee & Tea, Enzo’s Meat & Poultry, Bloomies Flowers and Paul Marcus Wines. Additionally, there are several other businesses owned and operated by the family — the pasta-making operation, Market Hall Caterers, two wonderful Mexican restaurants called Cactus Taqueria, and Manacaretti Italian Food Imports, a company that Sara Wilson owns jointly with a partner that represents an impressive line of Italian specialty products such as Rustichella Pasta and all sorts of high-quality olive oils, vinegars, rice, sauces and so on, and a name that should be familiar to most people in the specialty food business. A second Pasta Shop opened in 1996 in nearby Berkeley’s upscale Fourth Street shopping district.
Over the years, Market Hall Foods and The Pasta Shop have become not only greatly loved by their customers, but they are the heart and soul of their communities, both in Oakland’s Rockridge area and in Berkeley. The product selection is thoughtful and abundant (an amazing array of foods is on display in The Pasta Shop at Market Hall in a relatively small area), and throughout the shops, there are interesting and innovative ideas in motion.

Out & About With Market Hall
Rockridge Market Hall sits on a corner of College Avenue across the street from the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station, a proximity that makes going to Market Hall very convenient for food lovers throughout the Bay Area, including yours truly. On the day I visited with Sara Wilson, she and her staff were busy with the final preparations for Rockridge Out & About, an annual street festival on College Avenue that features food, crafts, music, chef demonstrations and all kinds of special exhibits and events, and is sponsored by several national and local businesses, and for which the Pasta Shop’s cheese program manager, Juliana Uruburu, has been the chief organizer for the past few years. The Out & About is one example of Market Hall Foods’ commitment to its community.

Sara Wilson is a vibrant and interesting woman, whose passion for what she does is evident as she moves about the store greeting customers and staff alike, taking the time to give an annoying reporter a grand tour of the operation. When you approach Market Hall Foods from College Avenue, the first things you see are the café tables that line the sidewalk with people enjoying coffee and pastries from inside. Upon entering, you pass through an open area between the Market Hall Bakery and Peaberry’s Coffee & Tea, with The Pasta Shop straight ahead. A large display of wrapped baked goodies sits in the midst of this foyer, making impulse buys for snacks and gifts very inviting and easy, while the intoxicating aromas emanating from Peaberry’s mingle with those of the bakery, all of which gets your mouth watering before you’re even into the main store.

Moving from the front into the Pasta Shop, you pass through what I refer to as the great wall of pasta, a wonderful display of Rustichella d’Abruzzo pasta in bags and bulk. For those familiar with the brand, it’s fun to see the entire line arrayed before you, every shape and size, and those made from whole wheat, farro and corn. Inside the Pasta Shop to the left is a fresh pasta case full of a dizzying array of extruded and filled pasta in as many colors, all handmade by the Pasta Shop. I should say here that when I visited, they were about to renovate and enlarge the cheese department, so the whole area was going to be topsy-turvy for a few weeks during the construction period, with the cheese counter moving over next to fresh pasta. I’ll say more about the fabulous cheese department in a moment.
Moving down past the fresh pasta, there are several cases containing prepared foods and charcuterie, a beautiful presentation of food that is almost entirely prepared on premises. In fact, between the bakery, the fresh pasta and the prepared foods, The Pasta Shop produces over 60 percent of the food it sells. The kitchens are upstairs above the store and they have grown considerably over the years, supplanting a few offices along the way. A bevy of cooks were bustling about the kitchens when I visited, making sandwiches, salads, pasta dishes and a host of other foods. The catering business has its own end of the kitchen with plenty of room to make and assemble very large parties.

Considering the packaged food aisles, the Pasta Shop to me represents the very best of what a specialty shop should be. What stood out for me was the wise editing of the selection throughout the store. The selection is abundant and yet it is pared down to what the owners consider to be the best in each category. It’s what one goes to a specialty shop for in the first place. Longtime packaged food buyer Linda Sikorsky has done a masterful job of putting together each section in which one senses there is just the right amount of everything. In other words, there is plenty of selection but not so much that the shopper becomes overwhelmed with choices. One also gets the feeling that one could buy any product within a category and not go wrong, because the products have been so carefully selected by people who obviously know a great deal about the food they sell. Whether it’s preserves, olive oils, vinegars, cocoa, packaged teas (mostly Mariage Frères from Paris), salsas and other sauces, or one of Wilson’s pet passions, honey (perhaps the nicest honey selection I’ve seen), the selection and merchandising are flawless. There is also the sense that neither Sikorsky nor Wilson are quick to jump on bandwagons.

“Everybody else does a big thing with chocolate,” said Wilson, “so we concentrate on two of my favorites — turron (Spanish nougat) and licorice — and we do very well with both.” (I must point out that they do, in fact, have a thoughtful, if not huge, selection of fine chocolates.)

That kind of attention to buying details and thoughtful, informed selection is exemplified in the cheese department, easily one of the best cheese counters I’ve ever shopped in. Here, there are not 300 varieties of cheese from which to choose, but what they have — and again, they have plenty of selection — looks perfect. They carry a broad selection of British cheeses from Neal’s Yard, splendid Spanish cheeses, the great European entries and many of the wonderful artisan cheeses that are produced within a hundred miles of Oakland. Because the cheese personnel are so passionate about what they do, and because they know and have visited so many of their cheesemakers, the level of knowledge and expertise is extraordinarily high. They also could give master classes in the art of good signage, as theirs is informative and evocative. As I said, they are in the process, as I write this, of enlarging the cheese department to about twice its current size, a change that will allow them more freedom in their merchandising, more selection, and more room for cheese lovers to browse and shop. The cheese counter at the Fourth Street store in Berkeley is equally impressive and it’s no wonder, as Uruburu and her team oversee both stores. This is evident in the consistency of the signage, selection and merchandising.
From the Pasta Shop, shoppers pass back along the corridor along the street side windows past Paul Marcus Wines, Hapuku Fish Shop and finally Enzo’s Meat & Poultry, all of which have been enlarged and enhanced over the years. Opposite the fish shop are several tanks containing lobsters. The tanks appear to be more like aquariums than retail lobster tanks, which is right in line with the overall attitude in the Market Hall toward livestock — that it should not suffer just because it is destined to be food. Rather than doing away with lobsters as Whole Foods has done, these lobsters have room to move about and have a semblance of a natural habitat in which to live. Both the fish and meat shops offer a splendid array of merchandise.

Market Hall Produce is in a separate part of the building although it is all under one roof. Here, again, the selection is expertly done and reflects the kinds of food Market Hall’s customers are interested in. There are large posters on the wall above the cases that talk about the families of the fruits and vegetables, the nutritional values, and how to prepare them. All of the mostly California produce is neatly and artistically arranged, and there is sampling of many of the delicious fruits. Market Hall Produce is like the best roadside produce stand you can imagine with everything fresh and colorful and enticing, much like the rest of Market Hall Foods.

The Fourth Street Pasta Shop in Berkeley is consistent with the Market Hall location except that it is much larger, about twice the size of the Rockridge location, and it has a wonderful connection to the restaurant next door, Café Rouge. In the French tradition, Café Rouge has a small butcher counter at the back of the restaurant in front of the kitchen. It sits in a small corridor that connects to Pasta Shop so that one can buy fresh meat while shopping for other delicacies. It’s an inspired bit of merchandising and the meats are fantastic.
There are so many lessons that could be learned from visiting Market Hall Foods and both Pasta Shops that I could go on and on. The three main women behind this extraordinary operation — Wilson, Sikorsky and Uruburu — are smart, passionate about good food and the people who produce it, and extremely knowledgeable about the industry. I encourage everyone in the food business who finds themselves in the Bay Area to make the trip to Oakland and/or Berkeley to get inspired by what they do. It is one of my favorite food destinations in the world, and if I lived closer than I do, I would likely be in there every day. Wilson hinted to me that business is good, and that so far they are having their best year ever. She is convinced that people are staying and eating at home more often, which is good for the food business.

“Eating is the easiest sense to modify,” said Wilson. “Art, music and so on are generational in a way, but food … all you have to do is get someone to taste something and it can change their whole perspective.”

I would add that all one need do to really change their perspective is to visit Market Hall Foods and the Pasta Shop. It’s almost as good as a trip to Europe, and for those of us lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, it’s a lot more convenient.