Eating at Bill’s: A visit to the Monterey Market

When The Mint Killer arrived in the Bay Area the Wednesday night before Slow Food Nation began, she told me to make sure I kept Saturday morning open.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said.

This is a hard phrase for me to swallow. I’m a girl who adores being surprised, but, simultaneously, a former reporter with a nose for finding out the truth behind the big story.

But I resisted trying to guess all the possible places, and on Saturday morning, The Mint Killer handed me a set of directions to an address in Berkeley.

I will admit I had an inkling of where we might be going, but when we actually arrived at The Monterey Market, I was still surprised…and absolutely thrilled. I first learned about the market back in Iowa City, it was through Eat at Bill’s: Life in the Monterey Market, which I first saw at a Slow Food Iowa City event at The Mint Killer’s house, and subsequently saw again when Edible Iowa River Valley was involved in a screening of the film at The Englert Theatre downtown.

Lisa Brenneis, the filmmaker, is a tangerine farmer in the Ojai Valley of California, and she makes an appearance at the very end of the film. She’d been through Iowa City and Cedar Rapids while I was living there, but because I was on a business trip, I missed her swing through the Midwest, and hadn’t yet met her.

Lisa examines rice from Koda Farms.

But I adored the film, already revered the market, and thought Lisa was amazing for making the movie in the first place. All that said, I still hadn’t visited the market since I moved here. Why? I have no idea. Or, at least, I had no idea. Now, I think it’s because I was waiting for The Mint Killer.

We jockeyed for parking on the street next to the store and wandered in. “I need to call my friend,” The Mint Killer said. She dialed her cellphone, then looked up. “There she is!”

There was Lisa, wending her way through the crowd as if she owned the place. She stopped to talk to regular customers, she led The Mint Killer and I through the produce out front and into the store, and then she said the magic words. “Let’s go in the back.”

The Mint Killer and Bill, in the back of Monterey Market

Thus began a whirlwind tour of what is a very small, but very wonderful and chaotic and amazing, local market. Back there in the stacks of produce boxes? Yeah, that was Judy Rodgers of Zuni Café, checking for what looked good, just like she does in the movie. Bill and The Mint Killer and Lisa chatted about rice as I took pictures (to cover the fact that I was spending most of my time with my jaw hanging open in awe that I was actually IN THE BACK OF THE STORE WITH BILL FUJIMOTO HIMSELF), and we all jockeyed for position as the stockers raced around us with handcarts piled with boxes of produce.

Upstairs and out of the madness, Bill sat down with us, flipped through a copy of Edible Iowa River Valley that The Mint Killer had brought with her, and engaged in a long conversation with Lisa about whether or not he’d carry the Merced-based Koda Farms rice sample she’d brought from the Slow Food Nation Marketplace. (“I stopped there before they were open, when they were all setting up,” she said.)

Bill flips through a copy of Edible Iowa River Valley in his upstairs office.

“Are you all hungry? Have you had breakfast?” Bill asked. “Why don’t we all go to breakfast?”

Later, The Mint Killer said my face, upon hearing that we were going to actually go have breakfast with Bill Fujimoto, absolutely lit up. I repeat what I said before: my jaw? Utterly slack throughout this entire experience. I barely spoke, which anyone who knows me knows is just about unheard-of. I just listened, soaking in the talk of local farms and the products they are able to sell because Bill’s willing to carry them. “If they need to charge a higher price, they need to just tell me,” Bill said at one point about a particular kind of fig. “The market’s there.”

We headed to Picante for a breakfast of chilaquiles, still talking about food products available in various counties in California, and small fruit and vegetable producers, and the state of food in California and the US. Then we returned to the market so Bill could slice some tomatoes for us—he wanted us to taste the difference between a number of varieties—and so we could poke around the amazing array of produce just a little longer.

Because The Mint Killer and I were headed straight downtown, I didn’t buy anything that day, but I will be back, now that I know where the market is located. I’m happy to support this amazing man who has figured out a way to pay producers a fair price while providing amazing, high-quality fruits, vegetables and other groceries to the local community. And, to be fair, I’ll probably always be just a little starstruck.

“This was the best thing of the whole weekend,” I told The Mint Killer later. “Hands down.”