If you’ve stopped by The Hall on Market and Jones, you might have been dazzled by the softly pulsating sunbeams hitting the Moroccan-Peruvian food at Cassia. You might also have felt a wistful twinge, because the building is going to be torn down in 2016.
But we’re getting something even better: The Market on Market, a 22,000-square-foot food hall and grocery store. It’s going to look like a mashup of Eataly, Mario Batali’s global chain of high-end Italian fare, with SFO’s Napa Farms Market. According to SFGate, a real-estate-and-foodie dream team has assembled to transform some ground-floor space in the former Furniture Mart at Market and Ninth into SF’s biggest non-Ferry Building temple of food porn ever, with Azalina’s Street Food, Blue Bottle, Farmgirl Flowers, and others already signing on.
Twenty-two-thousand square feet is big but not ginormous. (For comparison, the Whole Foods that opened last year on Dolores and Market is 28,000 square feet.) The same team is also building out two other, smaller spaces at the same time: one on Polk and Clay, and the other on Folsom and Main, with more in the works.
The biggest downside will be driving. Not only is there zero parking, you can’t actually drive inbound on Market past 10th Street, either. (And even then, not for long.) That would seem to steer the contents of The Market on Market’s shelves towards high-end stuff for the neighborhood’s new, affluent residents (read: Twitter employees and NEMA residents). But not necessarily, as the equally parking-deprived Civic Center farmers' market two blocks away does a brisk business twice a week, and it’s hardly yuppie town. Plus, Twitter feeds its workers, anyway.
The real point of The Market on Market may be to have a sit-down lunch while picking up fresh ingredients for that night’s dinner, as opposed to filling up the pantry with staples. Judging by the proliferation of food halls (such as 331 Cortland in Bernal Heights and Second Act in the Haight), this seems like the right idea in the right place at the right time. And we can be reasonably certain it won’t be demolished two years later.
[Via SFGate; photos by Sarah Han]
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