This Chinatown Snack Shop Has the Wild KitKat Flavors You’ve Never Tried
Photo of Imperial Fruit awning by Paolo Bicchieri.
The edge of Chinatown and North Beach, where Columbus and Grant avenues meet like two mighty rivers, is one of the most dynamic liminal zones in San Francisco. Few locals spend good time at this dueling precipice, but consider just one block. Sam’s Burgers, Anthony Bourdain’s favorite late-night burger in the city, elbows multigenerational Chinese restaurant 606 while waving at the country’s first paperback publisher City Lights Books which leans on Vesuvio and its decades of Beatnik ballyhoo just behind. At the lip of Jack Kerouac Alley, on the Chinatown side of that estuary, lies Imperial Fruit.
Photo by Paolo Bicchieri.
Just about a year ago a husband-and-wife couple opened this boba tea and snack shop at the westernmost edge of Grant Avenue and no one in the food world seemed to care. That’s because nobody knew Imperial Fruit would be maybe the only spot for the rare chips, mochi, and KitKat that could give the New York Times’s Tejal Rao pause. Huge tables covered in plastic containers of pre-assembled, hard-to-find KitKat and mochi flavors sit on the sidewalk at Billy Mays-esque low prices. Here customers can build their own KitKat bins, grab Thai tea mochi packets, black pepper rib eye steak Lays, and much, much more. Gratefully, the owners’ story is no less fascinating than the wild wares.
The tables out front are laden with larger selections of mochi and KitKat than anywhere else in the city. (Paolo Bicchieri)
Owners Nancy Yu Law and Dennis Law are more than entrepreneurs, though they’re quite experienced in that profession. Chinese immigrants — Dennis from Hong Kong and Nancy from Taishan — the two have lived in SF for more than 40 years. This is their newest business, a trend-spotting win by older entrepreneurs, and is meant, in their words, to aid Chinatown’s health itself. While they’ve been in the area, owning five total businesses in Chinatown and one on Clement Street, they’ve watched friends’ restaurants and businesses shutter. They even took over a boba shop at Broadway and Grant during the height of pandemic in 2021, as the owner who was a friend closed due to a lack of business. But the landlord, who knew Nancy, told her it would be bad feng shui to lose the store due to its proximity to the dragon head by the China Gate. In that same spirit, she and Dennis want to bridge tourists and young people with the neighborhood to keep the economy alive. “We’ve been doing business here since 1988,” Nancy said. “There’s nothing like Imperial Fruit in Chinatown. We believe in it.”
Photo by Paolo Bicchieri.
She seems 100 percent correct on that point. Sure, there are plenty of snack shops in San Francisco’s Japantown and further afield, such as San Jose’s singular chip fandom, where diehards can get their fix. But the sheer variety of options inside Imperial Fruit is heart-stopping for fans of umeboshi-flavored candies and avocado bubble teas. A small-ish shop, there’s a counter near the door for all kinds of to-go drinks while a veritable archive of grab-and-go candies awaits those bold enough to wander through.
Near the rear of Imperial Fruit lies a pagoda of Pocky. (Paolo Bicchieri)
For the KitKat fans, it won’t take much convincing. KitKat is massively popular in Japan, Nancy points out, but the United States standard packaging of four pieces — and only one flavor — was where she sought to disrupt the market. She and Dennis skipped the usual distributors and decided to order straight from Japan, unlocking flavors like apple, raspberry, and premium, which is a strawberry flavor, that aren’t available in the U.S. Further, they decided to make it easier by building containers, like grab bags, of six or 10 or 20 flavors at in and around $10. “We have people asking ‘Do you have more?’ My husband started searching,” Nancy says of those early days. “Customers always want more. Everybody loves KitKat”
There are countless juice and tea combos; one Google reviewing customer says the #58, a medley of mango, honeydew, and dragon fruit, can’t be missed. The 24 Flavors is an herbal blend tea, that customers can get to-go or to take home, meant to promote good health. There’s a bevy of other health products, too, mason jars of teas including the “Anti Allergic Tea” and the “Four Gentlemen Tea” to enhance qi energy in the stomach. Nancy points out there are 36 packaged goods, making it singular in the neighborhood since other shops will require prescriptions. Think of the goods at Imperial Fruit more like the health section at a boujee co-op. The Laws get their goods from a fourth generation Chinese health suppliers, trying to make it as easy as possible for folks in the area to get right in their bodies.
Those who don’t know Imperial Fruit and all its tremendous wares surely will one day. The Laws are helping coordinate the third annual SF Chinatown Car Show & Parade on September 1. From Grant Avenue to California Street neighborhood business owners will host a free-to-attend festival with live music, kung fu, and lion dance. She says the neighborhood went through a peak in 2000, but the pandemic brought on a steady “going down” in these last few years. They’ll keep bringing life to the area, one so hard-hit by the racist overtones of the COVID pandemic, through durian mochi and strawberry short cake KitKat. “To our culture, to our tradition, this is what we do,” Nancy says.
Imperial Fruit
1142 Grant Avenue
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