Merchant Roots has redefined itself with its August opening in SoMa, giving us a vast 4,500-square-foot space that’s worlds away from its original tiny digs. Now diners experience the seasonal tasting menus across multiple rooms, including an open kitchen, wine room, and ceramics workshop, where much of the tableware is handcrafted. Though the dinners remain intimate with just 12 seats, the new setting allows for even more creativity and culinary storytelling — all backed by Chef Ryan Shelton’s vision.
I’ve been raving about Merchant Roots’ wildly-changing, eight-seat dinners since chef Shelton launched the first themed menu in January 2019, I’ve felt this magical team and concept should have a Michelin star and more — though they are Michelin-recommended, thankfully.
Wanting to maintain the dinner party feel Shelton started with, he has kept each seating to only twelve diners. But their new SoMa home in the former City Beer Store space — complete with gated front garden, wine room and ceramics workshop where they make much of their creative tableware — is a whole new kind of restaurant. The multi-room space weaves from open kitchen to a dining room illumined by imagery and videos shown high up on the walls above tables facing the kitchen. Seasonally-changing tasting menus remain in a space so vastly different from the former 900-square-foot wine shop; and they’re $180 per person.
This means more will get to discover this unparalleled restaurant and Shelton’s whimsical cooking and thoughtfully researched concepts. I’ve hit almost every Merchant Roots theme, from the childhood dream of a Mad Hatter tea party to inspiring Stone Soup, ideal for pandemic times. Twice I’ve experienced Vanity Fair feast based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s classic English novel, exploring Victorian Era-food with Indian influences as well as class levels and societal expectations.
It’s hard to top their Willy Wonka dinners, complete with strawberry bubbles raining down over you post-dessert. In fact, the bubbles now have a permanent home. Just ask and you’ll be directed to the bubble room where at the push of a button, you can lap up sweet bubbles before they dissipate.
Walking through the restaurant’s front patio inside a blue gate, an open kitchen makes way into a sectioned-off, high-ceilinged dining room, to a long bar where they’ll eventually feature a bites and drinks-centric menu, to a wine room, then the ceramics workshop.
Past Merchant Roots menus form the wallpaper in the bathroom hallway and one returns for the initial launch in the new space: Color Theory. As with any menu they revisit years later, they evolve and grow as they repeat it. We explored 10 courses but 13 bites and colors, as the team explains they not only crafted dishes with those colors in the dish, but pursued the feelings, emotional resonance and mood of the colors, telling a story with each dish, shared as it arrives. The tight team holds vibrant talent I’ve tasted and watched grow over the years, including chef de cuisine, Christopher King. Smartly, each table comes with a card of questions sparked by color memories to share at your table.
A dive into the Color Theory menu and experience
We began with the color gold, a warm corn and 10-week-aged corn miso-filled ableskiver (savory Danish donut), dissolving sweet and savory with local honey, toffee popcorn and shoots direct from the corn plant. Eaten in the wine room, we stood at the central standing table as gold meets pink in a sparkling clarified watermelon gazpacho laced with little pearls of beets and goat cheese. Once again, savory and sweet.
Led to the dining room, we dove into colors via taste, aroma, stories, imaginative tableware and plating, as I’m used to with the “old” Merchant Roots, but also now videos and visuals high above the tables, effects like falling leaves spilling down from the ceiling during the “yellow” course.
White and green each hold joys, like general manager-beverage director Christine Hirtzel’s non-alcoholic “white” pairing of lemongrass, makrut lime and coconut, playing with weight and the term “fleeting.” It drinks light, aromatic and almost silky with coconut. Or the “green” dish that instead of representing green’s common money, luck and envy tropes, explores growth and verdant vitality in an edible, freeze-dried spinach fonduta flower pot we cracked tableside that enclosed baby pea salad, dotted with green goddess dressing, lemon geleé and herbed breadcrumbs.
Orange was a top course all around. Certainly Hirtzel’s simple-sounding but spectacular NA clarified orange juice and burnt almond, drinking toasty, bright and acidic. The dish wows with dehydrated carrot chips, salmon crudo in sherry shallot vinaigrette, pickled mustard seeds, shaved cured egg yolk, trout roe, preserved orange segments and peels. It evokes sunny good cheer and nurture, as well as explosions of flavor and texture.
Shelton’s favorite color, blue, is another dramatic course. Though blue’s emotional resonance is often associated with feelings of sadness, growing up near the Pacific is what chef King explains inspires their exploration of SF life, inspired by the vastness, depth, power and mystery of the ocean. Blue food is tough to come by but they centered the dish around pre-Columbian heritage, South Carolina blue corn hominy from Anson Mills, nixtamalized in-house using ash from their charcoal grill, then milled into grits — what they’re calling “blue-fle” or blue grits souffle. Hell, yes.
Add local Dungeness crab, hackleback osetra caviar and coral twills in beurre bleu or a butter blue cheese and its dreamy, the epitome of Cal-Mexican. The “blu-fle” is cradled among empty clam shells and seaweed with dry ice “Karl the Fog” poured tableside. This “fog” rolls over the mysterious-looking dish as images of waves and jellyfish play above. Damned if they did not evoke the essence of blue.
Highlights continue as colors from red to black roll out. Hirtzel’s NA courses and wine pairings keep step, from cherry ice cream in an herbal house cola float, to a zippy, tart 2021 Kasnyik Rodinné Vinárstvo Brut Natur Tramin sparkling Gewurztraminer from Slovakia.
It’s clear Merchant Roots’ one-of-a-kind team hasn’t missed a beat in the move and massive transformation of their once humble setting. They rocked before but their closet-sized space belied the complex glories of a Merchant Roots meal where you go on storied journey delicious as it is surprising, illuminating, playful. Now they have a space that can amplify their unique vision, one I hope many more will finally get to experience.
// 1148 Mission Street, www.merchantroots.com
Virginia Miller is a San Francisco-based food & drink writer.
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