When Paul Miller was scouting locations in the Mission for a new business, something seemed familiar about the location on 3368 19th Street.
“I know that spot,” he recalled remembering. “I used to come into this place to buy Central American beer.” It was the El Salvadoreño Market, which for 30 years occupied the location where he has recently signed a 10-year lease.
“It was pretty thrashed, because he had no one to help him and he is older,” said Miller of the state the Central American market at the time. “There was an unopened gin bottle that was [halfway] evaporated,” he recalled of the many unsold items he tried to acquire, but most of them were old and expired.
In the slightly decrepit space, Miller and his nephew Dustin Miller decided to open the Royal Cuckoo Market. If the name sounds familiar that’s because the Millers have owned the Royal Cuckoo Bar, on Mission Street where it meets Valencia Street, for the past three years and a half.
The market, however, will be “something different.” For starters, the liquor selection has a diverse offering of fernet, absinth and amaro. The wares will be a selection of local and imported items. “People are crazy about local stuff, and that’s okay but I also have no problem with the Italians doing olive oil for the past hundred years,” said Miller of the local and international variety they have now in stock.
Miller goes to the Alemany produce market on Saturdays to buy different kinds of squash, red plum tomatoes and chiles –a few of the items he places on small baskets by the storefront that has been opened for more than a month.
The market will also be selling meat items from Avedano’s Meats, the popular local butchery on Cortland Street.
The storefront catches the eye despite its smallish size –1000-square-feet.
Multiple red little roosters decorate the wooden sandwich board that pedestrians walk by. Next to it, big yellow sunflowers in buckets welcome people into the market that gets a good chunk of sunlight.
The store is filled with chalk-paint and hand-made signs that prompt an item’s price, some of them little burlap bags of goodies. The store feels spacious even with its almost 10 refrigerators and stocked shelves with pantry food items. The cash register counter lines up in front of a shelf with a variety of basic liquor, an orange juice machine, an espresso coffee machine and a seating area for three people looking out the window.
The neatly designed market exterior has been painted red. Ray, who is the market’s manager and also an artist and a friend of Miller, painted the outside sign. His touch is noticeable throughout the store as well as multiple red-painted roosters.
“I had friends and family help me,” he said of how he’s been putting the place together. His nephew and co-owner did all the shelve carpentry and installation, and a friend of his will be making sandwiches in the store once they get the permits from the Health Department.
“It used to look like a Soviet Union one-shelf [store], but now it’s more stocked. We are getting dairy products in today,” Miller said with a smile on his face.
The market is open every day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.