Steven Sadri often recalls a recurring problem from years ago when he lived in Nob Hill. Whenever he needed high-quality Mexican products, he often struggled to find them nearby. Once Sadri and his wife, Emily Sadri, started thinking about San Francisco’s cityscape, they realized that it lacked a Mexican specialty store.  

“Why isn't there a place to pick up fresh heirloom masa made in Oaxaca? Why isn't there a place to pick up hand-pressed flour tortillas? These were questions we wanted to answer,” Steven said.

So they created their own store. The couple founded Tahona Mercado at the corner of Leavenworth and Sacramento streets last August. Since opening the Mexicatessen, Tahona Mercado has stayed true to its ethos of presenting a curated list of Mexican foods made by small, local Bay Area businesses, as well as imported goods from south of the border.   

Stepping inside the tiny storefront, customers are met with a treasure trove of artisan products from Bay Area makers that includes the popular spicy salsa macha from Oakland-based Kuali, crickets from Don Bugito, hand-cut tortilla chips from La Cocina vendor Estrellita's Snacks, and flour tortillas by Xulo. 

A grab-and-go fridge is filled with salty queso cotija, rich mole and fresh masa made with blue and purple heirloom corn by Bolita. Tahona Mercado doesn’t have a kitchen, yet its deli counter offers a small but mighty menu of flavorful tacos, quesadillas and tortas. The latter is prepared with carnitas from Bay Area food truck, Dos Raicez, and bolillos from Norte 54.    

“We love to stock and support local so we can show off all of the incredible products that are available in the Bay Area,” Emily Sadri said.

What Tahona Mercado is best known for, though, is its selection of tequila, rum, gin, whiskey and exclusive bottles of mezcal, which are mostly sourced from the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Durango. This month, Steven said Tahona Mercado has mezcal by 5 Sentidos, which is produced in the state of Puebla. He described the specialty mezcal as a batch made from a rare agave plant that helps deliver a flavor he likens to strawberry shortcake ice cream bars.   

There’s also a shelf dedicated to hard-to-find Mexican wines from Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, Coahuila and Mexico’s wine region, Valle de Guadalupe. Steven, who travels to Mexico at least twice a year, is the expert behind the array of wines that Tahona Mercado carries and frequently guides customers through the rare bottle selections. Among the options is a Sadri favorite: Bruma wine by winemaker Lourdes “Lulu” Martinez Ojeda, who produces wines on the same property as the renowned Fauna restaurant in Baja California.   

The opening of Tahona Mercado has created an additional stage for many Bay Area brands to cast a wider net — especially as several of the aforementioned items are only available online, at weekly farmers markets or at sporadic pop-up events. But housing this curated selection of Mexican goods works twofold, Emily said.  

“We've been seeking out a lot of these vendors since we had the idea of creating this store,” she said. “I've followed them on Instagram since their inception. I think [Tahona Mercado] is a platform, but also, the incredible popularity and beautiful flavor profiles [of these brands] bring people to us. It’s a mutual flow.”

Running a store like Tahona Mercado hasn’t come without its fair share of hurdles, particularly when it comes to prices. It’s not rare for some customers to visit the store and have a misplaced expectation of what a product should cost. It comes with the territory of running the store, Steven admitted. 

“I think that there has been some difficulty with people's misconceptions of what the price of Mexican food or the price of creating Mexican food should be,” he said. “If we think about how long it takes somebody to make homemade pasta and we compare that to the work that it takes to make homemade tortillas from scratch, including grinding the corn, there shouldn't be a difference in pricing. Both are beautiful products in their own way.”

And if you expect to find celebrity-owned tequila like E. Cuarenta Tequila, Casamigos or 818, just turn around. You won’t find them here. Steven said Tahona Mercado will never carry those brands because they’re mass-produced. But, more importantly, they lack the “wide diversity and range of flavors” that he and Emily have worked diligently to showcase through the brands they carry.

“What we're really trying to do is create a platform for these smaller producers who are making their family's recipes the same way that they have for generations,” Steven added. “A lot of these families don't have huge investment marketing platforms or celebrities associated with their brands to help sell their products. So, for us, it's important to be the voice for these smaller producers.”

When a customer asks about a celebrity-linked brand, Emily or Steven simply recommend the closest international variety they believe highlights similar tasting notes — albeit with “better production methods.”

The Bay Area has many established Mexican grocery stores, like the mini-chain Chavez Supermarket, La Hacienda Market and Mi Tierra Foods, among others, that stock their shelves with giant national brands. And while there isn’t anything innately wrong with those options, it’s not a shared goal at Tahona Mercado. Instead, the Sadris hope that Tahona Mercado’s focus on the artisan products by small producers helps showcase a devotion to the craft. 

Before opening Tahona Mercado, Steven and Emily had a short work stint at chef Gabriela Camara’s seminal but now closed Cala restaurant in Hayes Valley. A year later in 2018, the couple moved to San Diego, where they partnered with the owner of a modern Mexican restaurant, Tahona. Steven, who was a bartender at Cala, led the mezcal tastings, and Emily, who was a manager at Cala, helped run the front of the house. Tahona restaurant has since opened more locations in Mexican towns Ensenada and Tijuana.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Steven said that the flagship Tahona location had to reconfigure its business strategy to keep its lights on. The restaurant began to offer cocktail kits to go and virtual mezcal tastings that the Sadris said eventually picked up traction. By the time 2021 rolled in, the couple had their mind set on opening a retail business where they could continue to link and educate customers on quality agave spirits, while also finding a solution to the scarcity of specialty Mexican stores that nagged at the couple years earlier. And they are working toward opening a second Tahona Mercado in National City, Calif.

Every now and then, customers ask the Sadris why they didn’t open Tahona Mercado in a different San Francisco neighborhood like the Mission instead of Nob Hill. Steven smiles and tells them, “Why not a Tahona Mercado in Nob Hill?”

“Great Mexican food can exist in any neighborhood,” he said. “Chinese food doesn't have to be relegated to only Chinatown or Korean food to Koreatown. We found a beautiful location. We fully embrace it because people should know about these special ingredients.”

Tahona Mercado, 1168 Leavenworth St., San Francisco. Open Tuesday through Friday, noon-8 p.m., and Saturday, 11 a.m-7 p.m. 

Editor's note: This article was corrected at 10:12 a.m., Aug. 18, to correct information on Tahona Mercado's carnitas, which are from Dos Raîcez.

- Michelin-starred AL's Place in SF set to close after 8 years

- SF high school fires verbal salvo in farmers market dispute

- Musician alleges he was racially profiled at Napa restaurant

- Why this SF corner store will never sell celebrity-owned tequila 

- Bay Area frozen food giant hit with fine for safety violations

- The most famous Oracle Park snack is a limp letdown

Susana Guerrero is a reporter for SFGATE covering the Bay Area's food scene. She received an M.A. in journalism from USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and earned a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley. She's a Bay Area native. Email her at Susana.Guerrero@sfgate.com