Do you remember the last act of Hamlet?
Yeah, no one does, but there’s a lengthy denouement after everyone’s slain one another. It’s quite the slog, Ryan Shelton explained to me recently inside his pillow fort. Around us, his staff draped dough over tart tins, chopped ingredients, and, to his discreet ire, messed with the lights repeatedly.
Dining, Shelton said, should be treated like a Shakespeare play, minus the boring part. Every menu should have a four-act structure. “We want to make sure that there's an intro, there's rising action, the action builds to a climax, and then it concludes. And that's it,” he said. The rest is silence.
That afternoon, Shelton and his team at Merchant Roots were in the midst of its slumber party theme. They’d spent the summer guiding guests through an 11-course tasting menu intended to emulate the nostalgia of childhood sleepovers. There is a backpack with a letter from mom on how to build your beet salad, a cosmopolitan interpretation of Lunchables pizza, one porridge among three that might be just right, edible toothpaste, and Peter Piper’s pickled pepper Caribbean escabeche. The evening concludes with milk and cookies in the pillow fort — the fourth act.
Shelton, chef co-owner of the SoMa restaurant, is known for his ability to alchemize fine dining with storytelling. At his Michelin Guide-listed spot, he convenes the precepts of theater, symphony, narration, fashion, and, of course, cooking to create quarterly-rotating menu experiences unlike anything else in the city. Create is the operative word: Shelton crafts the decor and dishware himself in his own very workshop in the back of the restaurant.
“We have the opportunity to do stuff that you only do when you’re a kid, but then you get to do it as a grown-up with a budget, time, power tools and a scaffold,” Shelton said.
To the man with a hammer, everything is a nail; give him an atelier, powertools, and some latitude, and you’ll be surprised what comes of it. For example: nasturtium leaves encased in epoxy; a shockingly realistic tree trunk made of cardboard, spray foam, and four kinds of spray paint; freeze-dried mushrooms sealed with spray decoupage. Some things, like a replication of the Berlin Wall for Humpty Dumpty, are difficult to find at the restaurant supply store. But other things, like plateware, are made entirely from creative compulsion (and concrete).
The Merchant Roots team has been operating out of their current venue at 1148 Mission St. for just over a year. At 5,000 square feet, it’s five times larger than their original Fillmore location and boasts a large kitchen, a plating area, a main dining room, a bar, a wine room, a Wonka-inspired strawberry bubble closet (the best use of a “dumb alcove” ever), a large patio, and of course, the workshop. It is an endlessly fungible space that can be made into whatever its impresario conceives.
The craft room is a tinkerer’s garage-meets-magician’s workshop: a few hardy surfaces littered with tools, shelves of abalone shells, fairy doors hidden in moss, candelabras calcified with wax drippings, broken hourglasses, and ceramics shining with streams of golden kintsugi. On the wall, a block print reads: “Fuck you, I’ll make it myself.”
Shelton has tried his hand at concrete, ceramics, epoxy, glass (never again), graphic design, fabrication, and woodworking. His pastry background has helped elevate the construction and presentation of his dishes; his mother has helped him execute a few sewing projects. Thomas Keller’s law of diminishing returns helped him portion his dishes. Symphony helped him pace them. My recording of this conversation helped me keep track of the cacophony of references and mediums.
All of this stuff that we do, it started with a vision.
Ryan Shelton
Attached to the workshop is what Shelton calls the “fancy cooking room,” a molecular gastronomy lab of sorts. It contains two freeze driers, a rotary evaporator used to distill essences (such as dirt essence), a double-fermentation chamber to make things like kimchi and soy sauce, and a home-rigged charcuterie fridge. A temperature controller keeps the fridge hovering at 56 degrees, while a heater inside is used for curing salami and koji.
“All of this stuff that we do, it started with a vision,” Shelton says. “And then we look on the internet, and it's not there. So, we figured out how to do it. It’s not that we think that we're the best at making plates or whatever. We're good cooks, I hope, but these other things are just, like, because we have to have it this way or it’s not going to be right.”
He swears all of this — including the pillow fort — is in the name of good dinner.
“It’s all for taste,” he explains.
Shelton is led by the understanding that taste is influenced by the entirety of a dining experience. How a dish looks and how the ingredients are arranged, he said, can change the way a guest eats it and experiences the flavors. The plate, both form and function, impacts the food’s presentation. What comes before a dish and after it in the tasting menu impacts the experience.
Narrative, Shelton says, helps to wrangle all these factors, and narrative is supported by the decor and staff behavior. Guests may not take note of when they’re handed a menu, but be assured the staff has manipulated even this detail. (Notably, they do not wear costumes or act: This is not Medieval Times.) “There's always another layer,” Shelton says. “I want to control that. Chefs are all such control freaks.”
Merchant Roots offers just two 12-person seatings per night, one at 5:30 p.m. and the other at 8 p.m. Each menu is set six months in advance and is served for 90 days. Brainstorming and menu creation is an entirely collaborative effort among the staff; while people work different roles under the roof and there is a bit of hierarchy, Shelton insists that everyone has the same job and carries the same weight.
“We all work on everything together,” he says. “The important thing is that we have these little inception points of brilliance that I can see spinning off into a bigger and bigger pitch.”
There are 140 elements of the business that Shelton and his crew must change ahead of a new menu. This includes the playlist, drink pairings, lighting, messaging on the website, and the outfit on the statue in one of the bathrooms. I get the sense that Shelton would choose guests’ outfits, too, if that would make that final bite more memorable.
Much like the rotating menu, Merchant Roots rotates which parts of the restaurant are used for particular themes, allowing the team to prepare for the next one. The patio, for example, wasn’t needed for the sleepover menu, so Shelton used it as an auxiliary woodworking area. (Even the blueberries that grow in a garden box outside, much like their keeper, work in rotations: The taller plant produces in the sunnier months, while the shorter variety is reliable during colder periods.) They take a week between themes to reset and reboot; this next turnover will be just six days.
For their upcoming theme, Feast of Moss Woods, Shelton anticipates utilizing the most space yet, including the patio. In his workshop, large wooden tablescapes were being dressed in moss, some recently foraged and some repurposed from previous projects. His focus for that week included foraging more moss, burying magnets in wooden table runners, putting glass windows on fairy doors, and springloading tiny boxes.
Few chefs are willing to forgo efficiency. Even once-decent chefs have thrown in the apron and replaced their own ingenuity with AI-generated menus. The computer program can take in information, but not internalize it like Shelton, who was inconsolable for eight days after a regular called Merchant Roots’s latest offering “great but not my favorite.”
Soon, it’ll be onto the next theme. While change continues to be a driving impulse, Shelton is thinking about creating a more fixed bar concept to eventually offer simultaneous dining experiences.
“There’s a freaking lot going on; everything is over the limit,” Shelton told me. “The amount of layers and thought and concept that goes in. But that's the stuff for us that makes it fun.”
