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What We Do

Market Hall Foods has been sourcing, making and sharing the world’s best flavors for over 30 years. Our family of businesses includes Market Hall Foods, Market Hall Produce, Market Hall Bakery, Hapuku Fish Shop and Market Hall Caterers in Oakland's Rockridge Market Hall as well as Market Hall Foods in Berkeley, The Pasta Shop fresh pasta company and Cactus Taquerias in Oakland and Berkeley, California. Across all of our businesses we are dedicated to finding ever more reasons to eat great food, sourced from local foodsheds, gastronomic destinations abroad or our very own kitchens.

Who We Are

Our story begins in the bustling Rockridge district of Oakland, where siblings Sara, Tony and Peter Wilson designed and built Rockridge Market Hall in 1986. 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. The Pasta Shop was such a success that the Wilsons opened a second location on Berkeley’s 4th Street in 1996. Then, nearly 10 years ago, we created markethallfoods.com as an online source for all things 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.