SF deli hidden in a liquor store serves some of city’s best sandwiches

Editor’s note: In this recurring column, SFGATE food writers celebrate the Bay Area’s rich deli culture by spotlighting longtime family-run delis — the neighborhood institutions — and the newer community sandwich hubs.

If James Choi hadn’t taken over the family business, legions of Dolores Park picnickers never would have experienced one of the best sandwiches the Mission has to offer. 

Choi’s parents owned neighborhood liquor store Rhea’s, and he was their only child. But at age 18, he told them he wasn’t interested in a career in the corner store business. 

“Growing up here, there was a cliche of Korean people and corner stores,” Choi said. “One day I went to my dad … and I said, ‘I will not continue the family business because of the cliche.’”

After majoring in computer science and working in sales for a few years, though, Choi was eventually convinced by his father to come work at Rhea’s. It would just be for a few years until he retired, he said. But then, his dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. 

Miraculously, he recovered, and is still alive today. He told Choi the business was his, and that he could sell it if he wanted to. But his dad’s illness changed things for Choi.

“My dad worked 25 years there, like every single day,” he said. “If we sold the place, his life would have just dissipated into nothing and he would have been forgotten. So being the only son, I said, you know what? I owe it to him to let him see me be successful.” 

Choi’s parents became the third owners of Rhea’s when they took over in 1993. The store dates back to the mid-80s, and takes its name from the original owner, a Korean woman named Rhea, according to Choi. But when Choi took the helm in 2006, he wasn’t satisfied with just running a corner store. He wanted to do something he was passionate about: He wanted to be a chef, and he wanted to make sandwiches.

Under his parents, the corner store’s deli offerings were limited to a “really old clunky deli refrigerator that we used to make five to six sandwiches a day out of packed deli meat,” said Choi. As a teenager, he used to make sandwiches for himself out of the deli fridge for lunch, but his culinary skills were limited to those of a home cook. Serendipitously, though, one of his regular customers at the corner store happened to be Ian Muntzert, the chef de cuisine at Michelin-starred restaurant Commonwealth (which closed in 2019). 

“He saw my passion, and he helped me on his day off for about six months,” Choi said.

Muntzert taught him how to make his own aioli and where to buy the best ingredients. Acme bread, he told him, was essential. When Choi tried to get on Acme’s delivery list, though, the wait list was two years long. 

“So the first six months of my business I was driving down to the Ferry Building every single day and picking up bread,” he said. 

A few months after Choi debuted Rhea’s sandwiches in 2009, they blew up. He was featured in SF Weekly, then eventually NPR and KQED’s Check, Please! Bay Area. Weekend lines would often be two hours long. More recently, he even competed in Guy Fieri’s reality TV show “Guy’s Grocery Games.” 

But Rhea’s most famous sandwich of them all – the Korean steak sandwich — was one Choi almost didn’t put on the menu. 

“I had this ego thing where I wanted to be the best deli and I didn’t want it to be gimmicky,” he said. “So I didn’t want to be considered a Korean deli. I just wanted to be a deli that was one of the best in the city.”

However, the Korean steak sandwich, made with marinated ribeye steak, cheddar cheese, house-pickled red onions and jalapenos, lettuce, chili sauce and garlic aioli, served on an Acme roll, was so good he decided to sell it anyway. 

Devastatingly for the steak sandwich’s cult following, Choi retired it in early 2021. For years, he’d been cooking the steak in the apartment upstairs without the proper permitting — the deli is not permitted to install a range hood — and he realized that wasn’t sustainable. Now, its life is limited to a special that appears only a few times a year. 

Nearly three years later, people still ask him about the Korean steak sandwich. 

“I started to get annoyed that I would have to explain this situation over and over,” he said. “But now I’m more grateful that somebody would remember a sandwich from three years ago.”

Even without its most famous sandwich, the deli counter sandwiched in the back of the nondescript liquor store still has a lot to be excited about.  

Some of the shop’s most popular sandwiches now are the Valencia Street (made with turkey, havarti, bacon, avocado, baby arugula, pickled red onions, pickles, tomatoes, garlic aioli and dijon mustard), the Barney Rubble (made with hot pastrami, melted Swiss, avocado, red onions, tomatoes, pepperoncini, garlic aioli and spicy brown mustard) and the Lucca Ravioli Co. (made with mortadella, spicy coppa, sopressa, provolone, pepperoncini, tomatoes, red onion, lettuce, vinaigrette, garlic aioli and mustard – and, yes, named after the shuttered Mission institution). 

The sandwich names are a whole universe unto themselves, each given its place on the menu with a sheet of paper taped to the deli counter. Classic deli sandwiches are named after streets, while funkier options are named after superheroes or villains. A few Mission neighbors are even lucky enough to have sandwiches named after them, like the @Studio_Dad, named after the original Twitter handle of Text Me Records label head Patrick Brown.

There are still a few nods to Choi’s Korean American identity on the menu, too, like The Freak #55 (named after former SF Giants player Tim Lincecum), made with pastrami, grilled kimchi, melted horseradish and chive white cheddar, pickled red onions, baby arugula and garlic aioli. The kimchi is made by his mother, which they also sell by the jar in the shop.

Entering Rhea’s on a Tuesday afternoon, I snaked past shelves of candy and chips and refrigerators stocked with soda and beer. In the back, the deli counter was busy: It was lunchtime.

Rhea’s Deli customers run the gamut, said Choi, from “11-year-olds who come in by themselves to order sandwiches to 60-year-old Latina ladies who don’t speak English but love our sandwiches.”

I ordered the vegetarian steak sandwich, a plant-based version of the retired Korean steak sandwich. Unlike with the original, Choi buys the vegetarian meat pre-cooked from Oakland’s Layonna Vegetarian Health Food Market, so he can actually prepare it legally in the deli. 

Rhea’s doesn’t offer much in the way of seating, but on a nice day, bringing your sandwich to Dolores Park is always a good idea. Otherwise, you can snag one of the five barstools looking out at Valencia Street, which is what I did. Fifteen minutes later, my sandwich was ready. 

Served on a toasted Acme roll, the $12.95 sandwich was sizable but not so enormous that a particularly hungry person couldn’t finish it. It came packed with juicy, tender vegetarian beef smothered in a sweet chili sauce, punched up with a spicy kick from the pickled jalapenos. Shredded iceberg lettuce provided a nice dose of freshness and texture, while the pickled red onions added some welcome acidity. The melted cheddar and the garlic aioli took the whole thing to the next savory, decadent level. 

Before I knew it, I’d finished the whole thing, the only evidence left behind a sticky puddle of chili sauce and errant bits of shredded lettuce.

While the vegetarian steak is a delicious consolation prize, Choi has some good news for those still hung up on the elusive Korean steak sandwich. Five years after shuttering Rhea’s Cafe on Bryant, his youngest kid is a little older now, so he’s finally thinking about opening a full restaurant again.

“I’m still thinking of our next project,” Choi said. “I’m sure that it would probably have a kitchen and, you know, feasibly someday the Korean steak could return. It has to return because it’s such a beloved sandwich.”

As for the future of Rhea’s Deli on Valencia Street, Choi now has three children of his own ranging from six to 16 years old: Ivy, Tanner and Ashton. He said he won’t pressure them to take over the family business, but he tells them the story of how “stupid” he was as a teenager to initially reject the opportunity his dad gave him to take over Rhea’s. 

“I told my kids, ‘Go out and do what you love,’” he said. “I’ll always have a place for them in our company. …That’s actually my goal in life, to have all of my family work together.”