New iBuilding: Penzeys Spice and Everything Nice

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Penzeys Spice and Everything Nice

MENLO PARK
During my recent jaunt down to the Peninsula, I made a point of visiting the nearly 1-year-old Penzeys Spices store in the heart of downtown Menlo Park.

Apparently, there’s a real cult following for Penzeys Spices, which started out being available only via a mail-order catalog out of Wisconsin. They now have 42 stores across the country and three in California. The Menlo Park store is the only one in Northern California.

I’d never heard of Penzeys until I read about it on THE South Bay foodie blog, Food Gal. And I’d been waiting to see it first-hand ever since.

Let me just say that downtown Menlo Park is soooo Main Street USA, which seems like the perfect spot for a Penzeys. The store itself is spice heaven, but in a very orderly fashion. The clear aisles display countless jars of spices, but all organized in ways to help the home cook.

Looking for something to grill? Check out the spices in the grill section. Want something to sprinkle in salads? Look under the big photo of a big bowl of salad. Want something to jazz up your cookies? Walk into the make-believe homemaker kitchen in the center of the store and check out the cinnamon and vanilla extract.

Shopping for spices is a lot of fun for me because I love the visuals of the different colors of the spice. What’s cool about Penzeys is that not only has it gathered unique or hard-to-find spices, but it also has created several spice combinations to get your creative juices running.

For example, taking Food Gal’s lead, I picked up a jar of Singapore Seasoning because I wanted to eat it out of the jar (it smelled like walking into a Singaporean restaurant). I also got a jar of Galangal, a spice used in Thai cooking and Penzeys seasoned salt because it was, well, so pretty.

As you can tell, there are snuff jars all over so you can smell the spices and let your imaginations run wild. You can definitely get lost here for a whole afternoon.

Penzeys Spices, 771 Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park. PH: 650.853.1785. Open 10 a.m.–6 p.m., Monday–Saturday; 9 a.m.–3 p.m., Sunday. www.penzeys.com