In 2022, Neil Shankar, a tech designer in the Bay Area, coined the term “shoppy shop”, to refer to the rash of aesthetically pleasing, curated stores stocked with millennial-coded food products like Graza olive oil and Fishwife tinned fish that had descended upon the retail landscape in recent years. Grub Street seized on the trend in a 2023 article with the headline, “Why every shoppy shop looks exactly the same.”
Not so at Food Folk in San Francisco. This six-week-old store on Clement Street in the Inner Richmond is full of brands I have never seen before, some that are only sold there. I stopped by on a recent Sunday and left with a jar of velvety A2 sheep’s milk labneh from Los Angeles, cardamom-spiked pistachio butter from Portland and Little Truc fresh red curry paste that has ruined all other curry pastes for me.
Co-owner Kevin Elmore told me that Food Folk is the only place outside of Lake Elmore, Vermont, where you can buy maple syrup from Elmore Sugarhouse, a tiny, family-run operation he and his wife stumbled onto while in the state for a wedding. (They have a habit of going out of their way to visit anywhere with their last name while traveling.) He’s bringing in bottles of Greg’s Famous Hot Sauce, made by one guy in Savannah in small batches from a wild list of ingredients like squid ink, sumac molasses, candy cap mushrooms and smoked Carolina reaper peppers. Food Folk is also one of the only stores in the Bay Area to carry goat cheeses from Pennyroyal Farm in Boonville…