25th and Clement Produce Market

When my brother and I were growing up in Seattle one of our favorite adventures was to go down to the Pike Place Market. The late 1970’s and early 80’s were not the market’s heyday. It was rotting from the floorboards up and a market revitalization project designed to attract tourists hadn’t yet begun, but to us it was heaven. We had a bowling league on Saturdays and afterwards we would head down the market and get lunch or just wander around. Sometimes the market would be our only destination. We would take the bus downtown, get off at the Bon Marche and spend the entire day there. We had a lot of favorite things to do. It was often freezing in the open market but no matter the weather one of our first stops was usually to Marketspice to get a free cup of sweet cinnamon infused tea. My brother liked to get chicken for lunch and I usually got a bagel and cream cheese from De Laurenti’s. We would explore the “high” and “low” produce stands, fancy meticulously displayed conventional produce and the more casually displayed farm grown produce accordingly. During the summer we could gorge ourselves on locally grown blueberries and raspberries and during the winter we would search for things we had never had before We were fascinated by mangoes and one week brought our own knife down there so we could try one.

It was at the Pike Place Market that I found my first health food store among the shops below the market. My brother and I would go and bother the woman who owned the store to buy small amounts of dried fruits. We must have driven her crazy asking for two pieces of pineapple or a eighth of a pound of dried apples. When we knew that our parents were going out for the evening we would buy the ingredients for our favorite dinner, baked pasta with zucchini and tomato sauce. We loved to pick out the different pasta shapes from the bulk bins. As the market changed we also changed our destinations—we started getting crumpets from the Crumpet Shop. I don’t think my brother liked it much but I would get tabouli from The Souk. Shopping for antique fruit labels was also a huge part of my time down at the market. To me it was better than any shopping mall—fresh fruit and vegetables and pretty much everything else that I cared about when I was a teenager.

There wasn’t really a place to sit and eat at the market because there were too many homeless drunk guys wandering around the open spaces so we would head up to the concrete fountains in Freeway Park, which at the time had fewer indigent people. But even then whenever we told people that was where we were going we would get shocked looks in return since it wasn’t generally known to be a very safe place.

Whenever I drive by the many produce stands in San Francisco I always think of the Pike Place Market. Except for the farmer’s markets, San Francisco doesn’t have a central market like Pike Place. There are many small and medium size produce markets and although they don’t have the same magic they can be fascinating places to look around.

Continuing our path west down California Street in search of markets the other day Vic and I ran into the fancy district of Sea Cliff. Although there are corner stores and markets everywhere in San Francisco there are no markets in Sea Cliff. Since we literally ran into cliffs we had to turn south back toward Clement. Vic was very anxious to get to the park but since it was incredibly windy I was not as anxious. I drove until I saw parking at the 25th and Clement Produce Market. When Vida and her friend Z were playing T-ball a couple of years ago we often stopped there to get popsicles on the way to practice. This is a very nice neighborhood produce market and grocery store. Some very hard working people own it and although they can be a bit gruff there are probably a lot of customers who love the familiar treatment. Their produce displays are typical in many ways. They don’t have any organic produce and they work really hard to display some produce and just toss others onto the rack without seeming to care. I think this is because some produce lends itself to orderly stacking and others just seem intractable to the uninspired. One of my biggest pet peeves in produce displays is using bits of ugly cardboard boxes to keep it from falling. The food looks great if you can get beyond the ratty paper in the stacks. If this place had some better fixtures for its deli and cheeses it could definitely sell much more prepared food. They have one of the most ridiculous coolers with some Casa Chicas salsa that I’ve ever seen. Using a produce case for their cheese is an incredibly inefficient use of space—a situation that I am more than familiar with.
I would have loved to buy Victor some fruit instead of junk but I couldn’t bring myself to buy anything conventional—especially since the things he would have wanted like strawberries or blueberries contain the highest levels of pesticide residue among conventional produce. The store has a great selection of groceries, especially if you need pasta or tomato sauce or an obscure Asian sauce. Of all the things in the market Victor wanted Marshmallows. I finally picked out a decent beer for a change, Lagunitas Wilco Tango Foxtrot a new 22 oz beer from one of my favorite breweries.

Vic's Snack--Marshmallows--Beer of the Day Laguinitas Wilco Tango Foxtrot 22 oz.