About Market Hall Foods
What We Do
Market Hall Foods has been sourcing and sharing the world’s best flavors for over 35 years. Our family of businesses include Market Hall Foods in Oakland, California, our recently closed satellite shop in Berkeley and the shops at Rockridge Market Hall, where we are dedicated to finding ever more reasons to eat great food. From our local foodshed to gastronomic destinations abroad, we forage tirelessly, taste with gusto and build relationships with artisan producers to bring food lovers the finest specialty ingredients.
For questions or to learn more about what we're loving to eat right now, visit us at Rockridge Market Hall or contact us.
Who We Are
Our story begins in the bustling Rockridge district of Oakland, where siblings Sara, Tony and Peter Wilson opened Rockridge Market Hall in 1987. They envisioned a European-style marketplace where people could do all of their food shopping in one place. The Wilsons filled the market stalls with a variety of vendors who shared their interest in selling the best quality foods: a bakery, café, wine seller, fishmonger, butcher, produce store, even a flower shop. At the heart of it all was The Pasta Shop (now Market Hall Foods) with its shelves full of handcrafted fresh pasta, tempting prepared foods, cheeses cut to order and specialty groceries for cooks.
Rockridge Market Hall quickly became a community gathering place and a cornerstone of the neighborhood, as it remains today. In 1996, Market Hall Foods opened a second location on Berkeley’s 4th Street (closed in May 2024). Then, nearly 10 years ago, we created markethallfoods.com as an online source for all things Market Hall. Our website offers a thoughtfully curated selection of products that reflect the bounty of world-class foods inside Rockridge Market Hall.
Many things have changed since we first opened—back then, Jarlsberg was the hottest cheese around and you had to look hard to find fine Italian olive oil. But Market Hall Foods is unaltered in the essentials: We are still a family-owned company. The same core businesses continue to cook, pour and sell a variety of exceptional products every day from their stalls in Oakland. And Market Hall Foods remains a hub for the best foods from the Bay Area and around the world.
We are guided by these principles:
Expertise
We strive to be a valuable, dependable resource for our customers. As the middlemen and women between craftsperson and home cook, we are always learning and tasting so that we can tell the stories of our unique products and share advice, uses, recipes and techniques.
Conviviality
We seek to expand the pleasure and possibilities of cooking and eating while promoting the sustainability of traditional and quality foods and ingredients. We do so by building relationships with our customers and producers and by creating and nurturing a community of like-minded food lovers.
Passion
Our devotion to great food leads us in all that we do. We constantly travel, taste, research and investigate in order to bring our customers a variety of the very best specialty foods in existence.