The other Sunday night may have been one of San Francisco’s coldest. But inside Cookin’, the 45-year-old kitchenware store on Divisadero, it is warm — even if the woman behind the counter is not.
“Get out!” declares Judith Kaminsky, 80, the famously ornery owner. “No more people are allowed in until more people leave.” At 4-foot-something, she’s dwarfed by her grandfather’s antique gilded register but has outsize opinions about most things. When a twentysomething attempts to enter while holding a Starbucks Venti, she chastises: “No drinks allowed!” The phone rings, and she brusquely explains the store’s hours — “Noon to 6 as always, bye” — then hangs up without waiting for a reply.
A woman plops her purse beside a teetering stack of dessert plates. “Is it true?” she asks Kaminsky. “Are you really closing?”
Kaminsky checks out a line of customers.
It is. San Francisco’s cantankerous queen of used Le Creusets has been threatening to quit Cookin’ for years. But this time — on New Year’s Day — she is closing for real.
“I can’t wait,” Kaminsky says, cracking a smile. “I’m tired.”
She’s tired of cars blocking her ability to unload merchandise. Tired of the construction that’s been “tearing up” the neighborhood and hampering holiday profits. (“They’re not supposed to do work between Thanksgiving and Christmas!” she gripes, on repeat, to all who enter.) She’s especially tired of irritating rules, like being required to post a sign about the toxicity of the paper receipts she hand-scrawls and tracks in her ledger. Though, of course, she has not posted such a sign.
She’s starting to get physically tired too. Although you’d never know it. Dressed in baggy Levi’s and a faded sweatshirt, she scurries around, talks at hyperspeed, and can recall the origins of every butter dish available for sale.
But if Kaminsky is looking forward to closing Cookin’, her customers are not. Because the store is more than just a place to pick up old juicers and hand-cranked meat grinders. It’s also a 2,500-square-foot window into a world that’s disappearing.
At Cookin’, there’s no Apple Pay or algorithms or cookie-cutter anything other than, well, actual cookie cutters. A landline still brrrngs and a cash register ka-chings, while “classical California” KDFC FM plays in the background. There are leaning towers of tarte plates, rainbows of used Le Creusets, and a mottled copper colander that comes with something a new one from Ikea would never have: a history.
There’s also the draw of Kaminsky herself, who presides over the shop like a stern grandmother — and with the curiosity of one, too. She always has questions. “Looking for anything in particular?” she queries every customer who enters. Her more intensive inquisitions usually come while she’s ringing up shoppers, making even the shortest line at Cookin’ long. Anywhere else it’d be infuriating. Here, it’s part of the appeal.
“Who is this for?” she asks a man purchasing a copy of “Aunt Bee’s Mayberry Cookbook.” (A white elephant Christmas party.) “Will there be alcohol?” (Probably.) “How many years has it been going on?” (Three.) “Who’s hosting?”(A friend.) “Good,” she says, handing him a plastic bag with his purchase. “You won’t have to clean up.”
Jodi Beeman browses the eclectic kitchen goods.Handwritten labels adorn merchandise.
Which brings Kaminsky to her biggest complaint: Her clientele, whom she considers elephants in her china shop. “I’m so tired of cleaning up after Gen Z,” she says, though she used to complain about millennials. “They leave everything in the middle of the floor. They put cast iron on top of glass. Cake pans on top of oyster plates. I’m so tired of these little kids.”
They’re not tired of her, though. They’re enamored. Awestruck even. “This place feels like Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement, but for kitchenware,” says Rafi Cohn-Gruenwald, 28, who recently moved to the neighborhood. “I was looking for a skillet,” he beams, holding up a plastic red bulbous thing. “I didn’t come in needing a funnel — but here we are.”
Cookin’ has seen a handful of culinary stars over the years — Quince’s Michael Tusk used to live next door, and cookbook author David Lebovitz (opens in new tab) was an early fan back when he was working in the kitchens at Zuni Café and Chez Panisse. Mostly, though, her customers are amateur cooks, quirky collectors, and loyal neighbors, like Jeff Figone. He pops in en route to the Olympic Club, dressed in a blazer and ascot. Usually, he comes for copper pans and corkscrews, but tonight it’s a coffee percolator. Michael Reeves, a collector of midcentury cocktail paraphernalia, scores a Danish martini shaker for $36. Technically, his fiancée is the regular, he says. She bought all of her mismatched tableware at Cookin’ when she moved here with her ex in 1999.
Ellen Soulis opened the nearby Metro Hotel in the ’80s and has been a regular ever since. That was around the same time Memphis-raised Kaminsky moved here, from Cookin’s first location, in Cole Valley, which she opened with flea market finds following a fleeting career as an English professor at the University of Ottawa.
“I’m sad,” Soulis tells Kaminsky, who is not. After all, she’s not going anywhere. She lives upstairs with her Lhasa apso, Fang, and owns the building. Plus, she wants to install a demo kitchen in the back and a couple of long tables in the front to create a space where people can cook, jam, and host suppers.
For another few days, though, people can do what they’ve always done at Cookin’: irritate a cranky, singular shopowner who possesses vast, firsthand knowledge of her inventory. Shoppers could learn more while aimlessly exploring these crammed aisles than they ever could searching the internet.
I stoop down to examine a pile of blue-gray pottery that suddenly reminds me of Sunday dinners at my grandparents’ house. I didn’t come in looking for a covered serving bowl painted with a pig, but in the moment, I am intrigued. “It’s Hadley (opens in new tab),” Kaminsky says. “People love it for the little messages inside.”
I lift the lid, revealing two words written in a familiar script: “The end.” Sold.
