An Edible Ode To Art Nouveau: Merchant Roots' New ‘In Bloom' Menu Redefines Edible Flowers

Forbes

02-05-2025

Jasmine Tea Smoked Duck
Merchant Roots has long carved out a special niche in San Francisco's dining landscape—an intimate culinary theater where imagination and fine dining converge. Since opening in 2018 as a hybrid artisanal market and café, the concept quickly evolved under Owner/ Chef Ryan Shelton's direction.
'After years of being the chef at restaurants that were always trying to be bigger, open more hours, more a la carte options, full cafe and bar offerings, I realized that what I wanted to offer was something different,' Chef Shelton says. 'I just wanted to create an intimate space where I could cook something I was proud of and present it to the guest myself.'
By 2019, Merchant Roots had fully transitioned to a destination for highly creative, themed tasting menus hosted at 'The Table at Merchant Roots,' a communal experience for just eight guests per evening built around storytelling themes. The first one? Elements, where each course embodied a celestial force.
Themed, experiential dinners quickly gained a loyal following, leading Chef Shelton to close the café and focus entirely on The Table—building the momentum that eventually fueled Merchant Roots' expansion to a new SoMa location in August 2024.
Now, with its new location, Merchant Roots continues to redefine experiential dining with its latest menu, In Bloom. The premise is simple: an entire, beautiful menu built around edible flowers. But at Merchant Roots, flowers aren't just tossed on as a last-minute garnish—they take center stage.
Diners experience the full spectrum of floral potential, from nuanced, aromatic sauces made with jasmine and rose to hearty courses showcasing flowering vegetables like artichokes, cauliflower, and asparagus.
Triple Black Sea Bream
Each dish pushes the guest to rethink the role of edible blooms, highlighting their flavor, complexity, and unexpected versatility. For example, the centerpiece course is a Jasmine Tea Smoked Duck which features jasmine tea glazed duck; duck and jasmine pho; chioggia beet pickles; jasmine candy and milk pudding; and chrysanthemum leaves. This course is served in three dishes, presented with a mini gold greenhouse that's filled with billowing jasmine tea 'smoke' from a bronze watering canister.
For Chef Shelton, the theatrical aspect of the experience isn't just aesthetic or for vanity—it's essential to deepening the connection between diner and dish. 'I've always considered guest engagement to be the 'secret sauce' of a dining experience,' he explains. 'If I can connect dishes in a way that the guest either anticipates or remembers after the fact, the menu becomes more vivid to them.'
Rather than relying on unexpected ingredient combinations, Merchant Roots crafts menus designed to evoke memory, nostalgia, and retroactive enjoyment—making the dining experience resonate long after the final course.
Past menus have transported guests through mushroom-centric foraging journeys in enchanted forests, Victorian novels, monochromatic adventures through all the colors of the rainbow, and Wonka-style candyland fantasies, but In Bloom offers a more grounded, sensory journey through nature's fleeting beauty.
It's another powerful example of how Merchant Roots, fueled by creativity and a dedication to meaningful guest engagement, continues to evolve past the traditional tasting menu format—and remains one of San Francisco's most captivating culinary experiences.
Spring Picnic
As the team at Merchant Roots developed In Bloom, they found themselves drawn to the philosophy that cooking, much like art, is a kind of alchemy—a transformation of ingredients, techniques, and influences into a sensory experience greater than the sum of its parts.
The idea of challenging and expanding diners' perceptions of edible flowers sparked an exploration not just of flavor, but of presentation and meaning. In seeking a creative framework, they found inspiration in the Art Nouveau movement, which similarly sought to integrate form and function in a way that honored the natural world.
Just as Art Nouveau offered a striking departure from the rigid, revivalist styles of the 19th century, In Bloom reimagines how flowers can function in cuisine—going beyond simple decoration to become a central, transformative element of each dish.
We chatted with Chef Ryan Shelton on his unique restaurant and dining concept, legacy menus, the creative process and more. Here's what he had to say.
I've always considered guest engagement to be the 'secret sauce' of a dining experience. If I can connect dishes in a way that the guest either anticipates or remembers after the fact, the menu becomes more vivid to them.
Merchant Roots rarely relies on using novel ingredient combinations, instead, we tend to build dishes on flavors that will trigger memory and incorporate retroactive enjoyment. It's a bit of a trick, but the kind that benefits guest and chef alike. The theatrical theme has been a potent tool for us in achieving this, and it has driven us past the traditional tasting menu format.
In terms of Merchant Roots' origins—after years of being the chef at restaurants that were always trying to be bigger, open more hours, more a la carte options, full cafe and bar offerings, I realized that what I wanted to offer was something different. I just wanted to create an intimate space where I could cook something I was proud of and present it to the guest myself.
Hummingbird
Wanting to create this boutique mercantile which showcased the roots of my craft was what inspired the name. The original plan was to focus on food retail, (fresh pasta, charcuterie, jams… etc.) but knowing my background in fine dining, we envisioned periodic themed series where we could flex on some tasting menus. As demand for our fine dining series grew, (and the fun we had creating them) Merchant Roots evolved to what it is today.
I had the unique opportunity to attend an Art School which had a Culinary program as part of its offerings. Unlike most culinary schools, this meant I had to take classes like Art History and Color Theory. I've always found the material fascinating. Knowing that different cultures perceive colors differently due to language and shared experience almost feels a bit like pulling the veil back on reality a bit 'there is no spoon…'
Chefs normally take such pains to make dishes colorful, and the existence of monochrome dishes are so boldly antithetical that they have an even more intense emotional resonance. Looking at other monochrome dishes in books and magazines, I always found it weird to see an all-white presentation plated in a splashy or violent manner. Likewise, it seems odd to me to see an overly manicured or geometric dish in all green.
Our goal was to create a menu of monochrome dishes presented in harmony with their emotional nature, in style and flavor. We had served this menu as a meal kit during the pandemic, which takes a lot of recipe practice and refinement, so we knew it would be a strong menu with which to start at our new space.
A dish from Color Theory
We design dishes as a team in quarterly brainstorming sessions. Our creative process always starts with the theme. First we break the theme out into its various components. Then we list feelings, emotions, aesthetic styles, and flavors that can accompany each color. We then look at the grouping of ingredients and descriptors and try and conceive of a dish that fits.
The amount of iterations varies—for example, our Black course (a mirror-glazed Black Forest moussecake) was pretty much done in one iteration. Alternatively, we had to try 10 or more completely different ideas over the course of months before we found something to suit Blue.
This ultimately became a blue corn grit soufflé with crab and caviar. Blue is probably one of my favorite dishes on that menu now—I love that it manages to feel novel and familiar at the same time. I also love the freeze-dried spinach fonduta flower pot that we made for Green. It's a technique that we developed in house and I think it's pretty special.
I think the strongest move we've made to strike this balance comes from the fact that we all take turns in service. As a chef, when you are stuck in a traditional kitchen - a stainless steel box in the back, it's hard not to get trapped in all the little imperfections of the food and slowly lose yourself to frustration.
By keeping our kitchen exposed to the dining room and allowing the chefs to share the floor with guests, we can break down those barriers and have an opportunity to feel like we are a part of the party. It makes it hard to take yourself too seriously.
Milk & Honey
We say that the themes we choose represent restaurants that don't exist and could never exist again. We hope to select narrow pie slices of culture, shared experience, or the natural world and explore them to the fullest. Our menus are the product of nine months of brainstorming, R&D, and revision, though we only serve them for 3 months.
We've taken these opportunities to immerse ourselves fully in Color Theory, Pasta & Stories, Summer in 42 Plates… etc. We've tried to make immersion easy for our guests with conversation starters on the table during their dinner and a list of continued experiences on the back of our menus. We hope, in addition to a delicious and satisfying meal, that our guests end up with a bit of thematic food-for-thought.