Stanlee Gatti, gourmet grocer.
For more than 30 years, Stanlee Gatti has dazzled clients and guests with his exquisite designs for thousands of high-profile parties, weddings and galas. He’s now decided to morph into a neighborhood grocer and dazzle Tenderloin denizens at his justlaunched Meraki Market.
This new-school neighborhood deli, created by Gatti and business partner Bill Grzywacz and years in the making, opened last month to enthusiastic artisanal food fans and a few online lobs of “gentrification.”
Nestled among hand-crafted wood shelves and gleaming display cases are offerings such as house-made fried chicken, tins of Tsar Nicoulai caviar and organic produce identified by hand-calligraphied signs.
Yet amid the opening-day crush of shoppers ferrying home pounds of mouth-watering goods tucked inside Meraki’s distinctive mauve shopping bags, one particular sale thrilled Grzywacz the most. Weaving through the crowd, he exclaimed: “We just sold our first broom!”
To the left of Meraki’s heavy plate-glass door is a stockpile of green-organic household sundries, including Meswak toothpaste, dish-washing brushes and toilet paper.
While the Tenderloin garners buzz as the “next new Mission,” it retains an urban grittiness and is home to the city’s largest population of families with young children. And as any apartment dweller knows, especially those without cars for big-box market trips, few urban institutions are more treasured than the around-the-corner bodega with an “open” sign glowing late into the night.
“Truthfully ‘gentrification’ means affordability to the masses,” says Gatti, who first lived in that neighborhood, in an apartment building just across the street from Meraki, when he moved here in 1978 from Raton, N.M. “Even on budget, working people can afford good food. I believe every neighborhood deserves a welcoming place that serves good, healthy food in a nice environment.”
Over the last four years, Gatti designed and built out his market on the bones of a 1938 brick Craftsman building at 927 Post St. Until the 1960s, it housed an auto-carburetor shop. Then a dry cleaner moved in. When that business closed in the early ’90s, the building sat fallow, slowly rotting, until Gatti bought it in 2010.
The 1,000-square-foot jewel-box space retains its original red brick interior, now accented by more brick. In the back, past a wine rack and cheese station, a wood-fired stove and rotisserie are crowned by slabs of mauve Terrazzo.
Gatti also excavated 12 cubic-feet of dirt and built a new concrete foundation to add a downstairs prep area, where chef Mouhssine Benhamacht and his crew man a small battalion of Hestan gas ranges and create weekly specials like homemade meatballs or fried trout sandwiches.
So far, the product flying off the shelves is a humble corner-shop staple: milk. Available for the first time in a retail setting, Alexandre Family Eco Dairy Farms (from Crescent City in Del Norte County) is no mere beverage. It’s a 6 percent organic milk fat, low pasteurized cream-top beauty from cows generating the more digestible A2/A2 protein.
It’s exactly the kind of product Gatti takes pride in. That’s why he meticulously wraps his patrons’ purchases in colored paper and ties each package with twine — a treasured memory from his small-town childhood when his mom asked him to run to the nearby corner store for a head of lettuce.
“In the ’50s, Raton had a population of 6,500. There were no urban centers nearby so every neighborhood had a corner market,” he recalls. “We had two Italian markets, like La Rocca’s. Our mom would want ‘just this much Romano,’ ” he says, holding his fingers slightly apart. “The grocer would cut it fresh, wrap it in blue paper and tie it with string. Then we carried our purchases home.”
Straddling the demands of dual careers, Gatti clocks numerous daily trips from his SoMa design firm to Meraki, zipping through the streets on his scooter. In between planning parties, he’s also formulating plans for chef pals like Alice Waters or Angelo Garro to lead cooking demonstrations. But he’ll never use the market as a private event space.
“We’re open every day, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. I’m not closing it, that wouldn’t be fair,” he says. “Meraki is a market for the neighborhood — and anyone who might need a bit of Romano cheese.”