Co-owners and chefs Nicholas and Marissa Bowers are hoping to turn a former Henry’s Hunan into a legit destination. | Source: John DuBois for The Standard
“Pasta, wine, chocolate cake.” They’re three of life’s greatest pleasures, to be sure, and the only items advertised on a sandwich board outside Agrodolce Provisions. (opens in new tab)
The 2-week-old project, run by husband and wife Nick and Marissa Sowers, is currently open only for weekday lunch, serving a compact menu of strozzapreti with parmigiano sausage ragu, conchiglie with rock shrimp and orange-and-Calabrian-chile butter, and slices of seven-layer chocolate cake big enough to share.
But the couple, who bought the South of Market building last year and live in the upstairs unit, have bigger ambitions: “We want Agrodolce Provisions to be a marketplace-style lunch spot,” Marissa says. “A loose inspiration would be the Ferry Building.”
Agrodolce Provisions is all about pasta and wine.
The couple are big believers in SoMa.
Marissa Sowers was keen to have a seven-layer chocolate cake anchor the menu.
They’ve already launched a small retail component with wines by the bottle, fresh pastas, and frozen soups by the quart. But they envision that the kitchen will be a shared enterprise, with room for a baker who can start prep in the early mornings, a pastry chef, or someone with a burgeoning jam business. The Sowerses also hope to find small producers who are ready to take that next step but are not quite ready for a stand-alone brick-and-mortar operation.
The Embarcadero’s ever-hotter beaux arts ferry terminal is a much bigger beast, of course. But the Sowerses, who met in culinary school, might have the chops to re-create that success in a former Henry’s Hunan on Bryant Street.
They lived in New York before relocating to San Francisco, where Nick worked at Cotogna and Marissa at The Perennial (now closed). For 10 years, they’ve run a personal-chef business called Sweet and Sowers (opens in new tab), preparing drop-off meals and catering private dinner parties. (Agrodolce Provisions, named for the sweet-and-sour Italian glaze, extends the wordplay to a second language.)
They hope to eventually open the space for occasional dinner parties — whether their own or pop-ups overseen by guest chefs. They spent much of the past year gutting the building’s ground floor. After putting their infant to bed, they’d bring a baby monitor downstairs while they painted or put up wallpaper.
As the buildout progressed, they filled the space with charmingly mismatched chairs sourced from Facebook Marketplace, a wooden communal table that seats 14, and what Marissa calls her “retired cookbooks.” A framed photo of a smiling Szechuan pepper labeled “world’s best” gives a nod to the long-closed Chinese restaurant that previously occupied the space, now given over to house-made bolognese, tagliatelle, and a selection of wines that Marissa Sowers describes as “easy daily drinkers.”
Agrodolce, an Italian sweet-and-sour condiment, grew out of the couple’s private dining business, Sweet and Sowers.
Having lived in three apartments in SoMa over the years, the Sowerses are big believers in the neighborhood, which has yet to fully recover from the pandemic. Aside from the noodle house LetsSweet Kitchen (opens in new tab) next door and Trader Joe’s across the street, the block lacks street culture. It could benefit from a dedicated couple’s elbow macaroni and elbow grease. “It’s so sunny,” she says. “Everyone always says some neighborhood is ‘up and coming,’ but I think this place should be up and coming.”
In the meantime, the sandwich board is positioned on the sidewalk to lure in the curious. “There’s nothing wrong with a simple chocolate cake by the slice,” she says. “I put it on the sign, because if I was walking by, I’d be like, ‘I gotta see this cake!’”