Omnivore Books on Food
Celia Sack will hand you a cookbook printed in 1620 and tell you the paper was stronger then. She opened Omnivore in an old butcher shop on Cesar Chavez Street in 2008, after ten years walking dogs. The antiquarian stock is shelved in among the new releases.
Why go
Sack started out as a rare book specialist at Pacific Book Auction Galleries. She collected Victorian manuals on how to open a retail food business. Antiquarian dealers watched her and mistrusted her when she was eighteen, and her own rule is the answer to that. So a 1745 treatise on foods sits on a shelf you can reach. She once bought Jeremiah Tower's own collection, including his Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the splatters still on the pages he used.
The shop is 500 square feet and holds sixty people standing. Sack has hosted close to a thousand author events in it. Eric Ripert came a few months after she opened. Ferran Adria drew 1,400 people to the Castro Theater in 2011 and sold the house out in 72 hours. When a signing overflows she puts folding chairs and a speaker on the sidewalk and pours whiskey down the line.
Sarah Fritsche asked Sack to name the Bay Area cookbooks of her first decade. The answer was a Chez Panisse family tree. David Tanis's "A Platter of Figs" came out in 2008 and Samin Nosrat's "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" in 2017. Chad Robertson's "Tartine Bread" is the third. Before that, she says, it was bacon, then the butcher as a rock star, then produce.
Order this / avoid
- Buy: something vintage. The old and the new are shelved together on purpose.
- Ask: what has come in from a collection recently. That is where the interesting stock is.
- Avoid: turning up late to an author talk, unless the sidewalk suits you.
What locals & experts say
- Celia Sack, owner, to KQED in December 2017, on the antiquarian stock:
All the antiquarian books are mixed in with the new, or at least reachable for people. I'm going to trust my customer to not take the book and throw it across the room.
2 - Sack, to The San Francisco Standard in November 2024, on the queue at a signing:
It's always some good Irish whiskey,
she says.I can't skimp.
1 - The shop's own account of itself: it is
the Bay Area's only culinary bookshop,
specialising in new and vintage books on food and drink.3
Good to know
- Events: free author talks, often standing room only, listed on the shop's own site.
- Where: 3885A Cesar Chavez Street, in Noe Valley. Sack and Paula Harris opened Noe Valley Pet Company in 1999.
Verdict
could-visit — Check the events page first; a quiet weekday is when you can browse.