This Oakland Shop Changed the Way Home Cooks Think About Spices
John Beaver recalls trying to find a local spice shop when he first moved to Oakland in the late 2000s. A quick Google search yielded only one result: “Spice Bazaar,” a fictional storefront from the 2006 romantic drama Mistress of Spices, which had been filmed in Old Oakland.
In the real world, Bay Area home cooks mostly had to settle for the supermarket spice aisle. At the time, Beaver recalls, the handful of spice businesses in the Bay Area mostly only sold very large quantities, or had a more medicinal focus.
“As far as a place that would grind and blend the spices in-house, as far as I know, there wasn’t anyone doing it,” Beaver says.
So, Beaver and his wife Erica Perez decided to open their own spice shop in Oakland. That business, Oaktown Spice Shop, quickly emerged as an East Bay staple for both restaurants and ambitious home cooks. Now boasting three Bay Area locations, plus a fourth in Los Angeles, Oaktown Spice celebrates its 15th anniversary this month with a series of local collaborations. Twenty-three Bay Area restaurants and bars have created limited-time menu items meant to show off the vast inventory of spice blends the shop grinds in-house — say, a martini rimmed with shichimi togarashi at Umami Mart or vadouvan-dusted fried tofu at Joodooboo.
Back in 2011, when he opened his first store, Beaver didn’t have experience running a business, but he did have a background in spices. As a high schooler in Wisconsin, and on and off during his twenties, Beaver worked for Penzeys, a family-run spice shop in Milwaukee that would go on to become one of the biggest spice brands in the U.S. Beaver enjoyed talking with customers about what they were cooking and which flavor profiles they liked, and then introducing them to a dried chile, say, or a specific varietal of peppercorn they might not have otherwise considered.
It’s helped for Oaktown Spice Shop’s success, of course, that the market for fresh, high-quality spices has exploded over the past decade. When the shop first opened, few home cooks who weren’t of Arabic or North African descent were likely to keep sumac in their pantries. Now, it’s commonplace. (“You can kind of pinpoint it to Ottolenghi,” Beaver says, referencing the British-Israeli chef whose cookbooks became wildly popular over the course of the 2010s.)
As spice-forward, non-European cuisines became trendier and more mainstream, customers increasingly began seeking out things like berbere and Sichuan peppercorns. They began to understand the world of difference between a freshly ground spice blend and a jar of McCormick’s that had been sitting on the supermarket shelf for God knows how many months or years.
Where Beaver once had a hard time finding even a single dedicated spice shop, there’s now a whole landscape of boutique operations. Diaspora Co., also founded in Oakland, specializes in sourcing spices from small farmers in India. And the Ethiopian restaurant Cafe Colucci now sells East African spices through the importing arm of its business, Brundo Spice Company.
Meanwhile, dozens of Bay Area restaurants regularly turn to Oaktown Spice Shop for help sourcing particularly interesting and hard-to-find spice varietals. The idea behind the “Oaktown Spice Shop x Your Favorite Restaurant” anniversary promotion is for the shop to highlight some of the small local businesses that have been buying spices from Oaktown Spice for years.
“We wanted to show them some love,” says accounts manager Hannah Tobin-Bloch.
It’s also an opportunity for diners to experience the power and potency of a spice or spice blend that’s been deployed in an interesting way. Take the simple peppercorn, for instance. This month, diners might head to Lunette, chef Nite Yun’s Cambodian spot in the SF Ferry Building, to taste the famously intense Kampot peppercorns the restaurant uses for its Khmer salt-and-pepper chicken wings. Or they can try Oakland pasta standout Sfizio’s miso cacio e pepe, which instead highlights the fruity flavors of late-harvest peppercorns.
Popular spice blends like Oaktown Spice Shop’s shichimi togarashi appear in multiple special dishes: as a topping for a cheesy focaccia at As Kneaded Bakery and in a sake-and-gin “Shichimitini” at Umami Mart.
All told, it’s something of a golden age for spice connoisseurs in the Bay Area. As Beaver sees it, the spices themselves have always been appealing. It’s just that these days, people have a wealth of opportunities to experience those spices in a more appealing way.
“Nobody was probably that excited about the spice aisle of the supermarket,” Beaver says.
The “Oaktown Spice Shop x Your Favorite Restaurant” limited-time dishes will be available at select Bay Area restaurants through Oct. 25. See the link on Oaktown Spice Shop’s events page for a full list of participating bars and restaurants and the specific dishes they’ll be selling. The store will also host an anniversary party at each of its locations on Sunday, Oct. 25.