By Khalida Sarwari
Grocery shopping is one of those mundane tasks most adults do after work– beginning with a quick battle for the parking spot closest to the store and ending with sitting in the car in gridlock traffic and hoping the frozen food items don’t thaw.
If you’re lucky, your local grocery store offers a coffee bar and some samples to tide you over until dinnertime. But the idea is to get in, get the items on your shopping list checked off and bolt out.
Frank and Lety Dutro are doing things a little differently in Saratoga. The owners of the new Wildwood Market, 14413 Big Basin Way, are trying to revive the old-fashioned way of grocery shopping, when people would saunter in and have a chat with neighbors over a quality cup of coffee before picking up bread and milk.
For one, they’ve placed a self-serve blending bar at the back of the store, where customers choose a flavor, stick it in a milkshake machine, and voila–an instant milkshake for less than what most drinks go for at Starbucks.
If you’re not a fan of flavors such as peanut butter cup and chocolate malt, not to worry; they have fruit flavors for instant smoothies. The treats don’t end there, either. Kids and kids at heart will find the store littered with goodies beyond the milkshake variety.
Secondly, the store provides two areas designated for lingering, with plenty of tables and chairs on the patio out front and inside the store.
There’s also an entire wall dedicated to frozen food, most of it reasonably priced. A frozen pizza, for example, is priced at $6.49.
The shelves across from the freezer are currently bare, but Wildwood will stock them soon with staples such as pasta, in addition to offering cold cuts and a variety of cheeses, Frank Dutro said.
A grand opening ceremony is planned for September, although Wildwood has been up and running since the end of July.
The ceremony will be a culmination of a year’s worth of work. That was when the Dutros came across the site on Big Basin Way and decided it would make the perfect spot for a neighborhood market.
The building was constructed in 1910 and was a drugstore until 1999, but most recently housed a furniture store. After the Dutros agreed to lease the site, they had the place gutted and rebuilt from the ground up.
Frank, who was raised in Saratoga, was conscientious about maintaining the city’s history, which patrons can see throughout the store in the form of postcards at the cash register and signs and canvases hanging on the walls.
One that reads “Saratoga, Elevation 450 feet” is a reproduction of the original sign from the train depot. The horse head hitching post in the back celebrates Saratoga’s past when equines could be found up and down Big Basin Way.
“I still remember folks riding their horses around town and using [the hitching posts] as late as the 1970s,” Frank said.
The Dutros’ sense of humor is also on display, reflected in a sign that states their store’s pricing policy: “If you can find a higher price, we will match it.” Not surprisingly, there haven’t been any takers, Frank said.
Still, many in the community have been quick to embrace Wildwood, as there is usually a constant flow of customer traffic during the market’s limited business hours.
Frank said that he and his wife opened Wildwood because they saw a need for such a business.
“There’s no handy place for people to go out and grab a gallon of milk and certainly not one that’s nicely put together and well organized and well run, so I think that combination is really welcomed here,” Frank said.
Lety Dutro oversees the purchasing of all the items, and their three children, Charley, 16, Anna, 15, and Santiago, 12, help out at the store.
Wildwood Market is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week.
