Noe Valley Voice February 2013
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Store Trek

By Olivia Boler


Store Trek is a regular Voice feature profiling new shops and businesses in Noe Valley. This month, we introduce a juicery with roots (and berries) in L.A., and a family law practice specializing in adoption services.  

 



Offering you a lush variety of bottled fruits and vegetables at the new Pressed Juicery on 24th Street are Richard Venturini, Isaac Fine, and Monica Skelton.    Photo by Pamela Gerard

Pressed Juicery
3901 24th St. at Sanchez

415-285-1515

www.pressedjuicery.com

Like a wink at those with New Year’s resolutions to eat healthy, Pressed Juicery opened its doors at the corner of 24th and Sanchez streets on Dec. 31. Customers lined up to buy the store’s bottled juices, which are made of 100 percent raw, unpasteurized vegetables and fruit—free of sweeteners or preservatives.

The Noe Valley location, which was formerly the home of Tuttimelon, is the first of three Pressed Juicery outlets in the Bay Area. The others will be at the Ferry Building and in Larkspur. There are already seven locations in Los Angeles.

Hayden Slater and his two friends, Carly Brien and Hedi Gores, founded the company in 2010. The three were inspired to open an “everyday juice shop,” as store manager Richard Venturini calls it, for a variety of reasons, but the professed health benefits of consuming juice was central for them all.

“Hedi is a mom who’s looking for ways to eat healthy, and Carly lost her mother to cancer,” says Slater. “I had the privilege of studying with Kris Carr, who is a health and wellness leader and a cancer survivor, and that’s a big reason I wanted to pursue this industry.” 

In addition to the stores, Pressed Juicery has a lifestyle website,www.thechalkboardmag.com, with guest editors from the health and wellness world, like Carr and actress Jessica Alba.

The Pressed Juicery product line is simple: 16-ounce bottles of juice, which cost on average $6.50. Five pounds of produce go into each bottle. The main categories are greens, roots, and citrus, each with four different mixes of ingredients. The most popular, according to Venturini, is Greens #2, a combination of kale, spinach, romaine, parsley, cucumber, and celery.

The store also sells fruit juices for kids, signature beverages like Vanilla Almond Milk, and seasonal drinks such as Watermelon Mint. Certain juices have been grouped into three “cleanse” programs, each more intense than the next.  The cleanses, three- to five-day detox regimens involving daily intake of eight bottles, cost $48.50 a day. Tote bags and coolers are available for the juice enthusiast on the go, and run $5 to $15.  

The produce used is about 85 to 90 percent organic, and one of the company’s goals is to be 100 percent certified organic very soon. The juices are made by a cold hydraulic press at a kitchen offsite and delivered each morning. That kitchen is in Los Angeles, but plans are under way to build a processing facility in Fresno close to organic farms for ease of delivery to both northern and southern Cali­fornia.

Pressed Juicery is open Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

 

 


Anne Gyemant Paris and Michelle Nobriga are the specialists in adoption services at Adopt SF–Gyemant Paris Law on Castro Street.    Photo by Pamela Gerard

Adopt SF–Gyemant Paris Law
1330 Castro St. between 24th and Jersey

415-513-5502

anne@adoptsf.com

www.adoptsf.com

“Stroller Valley” has a new addition: Adopt SF–Gyemant Paris Law, a legal practice that helps individuals and families expand their families through adoption. Open since April 2011, the law office is located in the same storefront as Noe Valley Law Offices between 24th and Jersey streets. Besides adoption, the firm, headed by attorney Anne Gyemant Paris, also specializes in surrogacy and assisted reproduction, such as sperm and egg donation.

“Our goal is to lead families to a safe adoption or surrogacy, and our practice is all about creating families,” Gyemant Paris says. Surrogacy is when a woman is a gestational carrier—carrying a fetus in her uterus—for another woman who cannot do it herself for whatever reason. Often the gestational carrier is not related genetically to the fetus.

Gyemant Paris and her director of adoption services, Michelle Nobriga, work with families as well as pregnant women looking into adoption. Gyemant Paris also does prenuptial agreements and some collaborative dissolution, sometimes called a “friendly divorce,” in which both parties agree not to go to court.  

“We serve a lot of Noe Valley families,” she says. “We work on domestic adoptions, as long as one of the parties is in California, and we can advise on international adoptions.” 

There are several kinds of adoptions, too—newborn adoptions, a stepparent adopting a spouse’s child, a relative adoption by grandparents or other family members, as well as adult adoption. Most adoptions these days are open adoptions, in which the birth mother chooses the family who will adopt her infant, and they continue to have some kind of contact thereafter. “It’s so much better for the children. They learn that adoption is done from a place of love.” 

Gyemant Paris works with several different agencies like egg donor coordinators and fertility clinics, and is happy to give referrals.

The native San Franciscan lives with her husband and two daughters on 23rd Street. She graduated from Convent of the Sacred Heart as well as UC Berkeley and Hastings Law School. To top it off, she’s a third-generation female attorney, and got interested in the niche of adoption law work because of personal experience.

“My parents were both attorneys—my mother is a retired judge—and they met representing kids in Juvenile Hall before there were public defenders,” she says. “They wound up taking some of the kids into our home. Two of them are my brothers.”

Adopt SF–Gyemant Paris Law is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Please call or email first to set up an appointment.