Merchant Roots

Merchant Roots is in the mid-range to upscale side, where you’re seeing some innovation among the top openings in SF. It’s actually not brand new. Merchant Roots is a place I’ve been raving and writing about since January 2019. But it basically was eight seats in the back of a wine shop—​a wine and a tiny little food shop—​just half a block down from Michelin-starred restaurants State Bird Provisions and The Progress. At Merchant Roots, it’s been such a delight of changing restaurant themes. Literally every three months, they change the entire theme of the restaurant. And what’s super exciting is, in August of 2024, they finally got a much bigger space, their own space in SoMa, kind of downtown San Francisco. It’s multi-room, a movable feast—you move from room to room. They only moved from eight seats to twelve seats. So despite dramatically increasing the space, they still are keeping it intimate and that dinner party feel that we all loved about it. I’m hoping a few more people will get to experience it this way. There’s a couple of seatings a night. There are art and video installations; there’s a ceramics shop in the back. They make much of their own plateware because what they’re doing is so creative and out of the box. And it is a tight, creative little team. Chef Ryan Shelton and his team will do themes like Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s novel, explored from class— high/low class systems of the time and mores of the time—and they will do certainly Willy Wonka. They did California’s Great Trees, where we were literally eating elements of the trees—the great sequoias and redwoods of California—and studying them and eating them in different forms. They currently had a Humpty Dumpty theme, which is about eggs and broken things and everything. It’s super creative, whimsical, over the top, and deeply studied. They really study their themes and their subjects. And it’s actually educational but never stuffy. It’s playful and fun. Even with the Humpty Dumpty, they’ll come and throw an egg on your plate at one point and then make a French onion egg drop soup out of it—crack it in front of you, splatter it in front of you, and make a French egg drop soup—or do, a butter mochi duck confit musubi with egg, and just creative stuff. It’s really delightful, and the best part: delicious. In its new space and much more dramatic digs, I hope the awards will ensue and the world will come to know it. I’ve been to almost every theme once a quarter, which is hard for me to do, but this place is so special I go out of my way to do it.