When Bi-Rite Market owner Sam Mogannam took over his family’s Mission District business in the late ‘90s, he had a Manhattan-based grocery called Balducci’s firmly in mind.
“I saw the store in 1990, when the family was still involved,” says Mogannam. “They had all the great services—old butchers and produce people in there who knew everyone. They were part of the community.” The result — a popular, densely packed neighborhood market that puts all the services of a larger store into a space the size of a single urban flat — is a rare sight on the West Coast.
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