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For 42 years, Specialty Foods, Inc., a small specialty market in Oakland, has been the East Bay’s source for Jamaican ackee, saltfish, shito sauce and other reminders of home for African and Caribbean immigrants living in the Bay Area
It was the first grocer of its kind in Northern California, with a loyal following of home cooks and chefs, who came from as far as Arcata and Chico. By the end of the month, it will close its Old Oakland doors for good.
“I’ll miss our customers and the joy our work brings to them,” says second-generation owner Nina Cruz, who is closing the shop to focus on her growing family. “Food is a universal language and for decades we have brought people together at the table to connect and bond. I’ll miss being able to do that for them.”
The closure is part of an unfortunate trend, as established ethnic markets continue to close in the area, including La Borinqueña, a beloved Mexican market in Old Oakland that shuttered in 2015.
What makes Specialty Foods, Inc. particularly interesting is that it didn’t start out as an African-Caribbean market. Cruz’s parents, Baltazar and Adelaida Castro, opened the shop in 1977 as Oriental Lucky Mart, to serve the neighborhood’s Filipino community.
By the 1980s, however, the couple noticed a shift in the area, with an influx of immigrants from Africa and the West Indies moving into the neighborhood, and nowhere to buy their groceries.
“We had Filipino regulars bringing their African co-workers into the store to find staples, like plantains and cassava, that our cuisines share because our countries are both located near the equator,” recalls Cruz, 35. “It was an ‘aha’ moment for my parents.”
To meet the demand, Adelaida went to the public library and pored over New York City phone books looking for suppliers that could import the food products her customers were asking for, like Ghana’s shito sauce and Scotch bonnet pepper sauce.
“Through her legwork, that’s how we ended up carrying some of these foods,” Cruz says.
After Baltazar passed away in 2009, Cruz, then a recent college graduate, took over the business and changed the name. “I had no experience and learned everything from scratch,” she says.
In the month since Cruz announced the news, legions of multi-generation customers and chefs, including Nigel Jones of Kingston 11, have shared how much the shop has meant to them, and how much they’ll miss it. Specialty Foods isn’t the only African and Caribbean market here — Minto Jamaican Market and Man Must Wak are also in Oakland — but its selection, variety and customer service were unparalleled.
Alameda’s Illyanna Maisonet, a Puerto Rican cook and food writer, called Specialty Foods’ closure “the end of an era.”
“Before I found Specialty Foods, I’d have to visit several different locations to acquire ingredients to make a single Puerto Rican dish,” says Maisonet, who discovered the store when she was shopping for her pop-up in 2016. “One place for achiote and gandules, one place for culantro (cilantro’s punchy cousin), one place for yuca.”
Although some stores, including supermarkets, now carry these products, she says she still couldn’t find bacalao (dried and salted cod), Coco Rico soda and yautia, a tuber similar to taro, anywhere but Specialty Foods.
“To be able to access the foodstuffs of your homeland means to be seen,” she says. “And if you are seen, you have a voice”
But no one in the family can run it now. Cruz’s sisters, Marie and Leilani, work full-time and Cruz is due to give birth to her first child in a few weeks. The family has been approached by several potential buyers and is close to selling the business to a small business owner and longtime customer.
“Hopefully the legacy will continue,” Cruz says. “I’m proud of what my family has accomplished, but I’m definitely going to miss this community.”