News Article | 1/10/2007

Upscale Bay Area grocery to open Dallas store, sort of

If you’ve toured the Napa Valley, you’ve probably stopped at Oakville Grocery, that quaint and expensive little specialty market on Highway 29.

It’s been around for 125 years, developing quite a cult following among gourmets as the place to pick up a wine-country picnic lunch.

You also may have visited one of the other three Oakville Grocery stores around the Bay Area, in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Healdsburg, Calif.

Now, Oakville Grocery is coming to Dallas’ upscale Victory development with a 7,000-square-foot store plus a 1,600-square-foot patio. It’ll be at the corner of Lamar and Victory, in the ground-floor retail space of The House by Starck and YOO, the 28-story luxury residential building that’s expected to open in 2008.

However, according to Oakville Grocery’s corporate offices in Napa Valley, the planned Dallas Oakville Grocery is not an expansion of the four Bay Area stores, per se. Rather, it will be “a licensed Oakville Grocery,” an upscale specialty market owned by Woodside Capital Partners of Nevada. Woodside Capital has bought exclusive rights to license the Oakville Grocery concept.

The store will feature imported and domestic specialty foods, cheeses, gourmet pizzas and sandwiches, an artisan bakery and charcuterie, organic produce, specialty chocolates, coffee drinks, specialty wines and beers, and chef-made takeaway salads and entrées.

So it will look, feel and be priced very much like the original Oakville Grocery stores you may know and love. But, technically, “it is a licensor-licensee relationship” with Woodside, according to Oakville’s corporate spokesman, Ron Cho.

Just in case you wondered.