Oklava Café, the Turkish bakery and coffee shop known for its busy Palo Alto outpost, is stepping into the long-vacant coffee counter at Saluhall, the IKEA-anchored food hall on Market Street. The new stall is set to pour Turkish-style coffee and serve pastries, pizza slices and salads, with an opening date still under wraps. For a food hall that has already watched several vendors cycle out, a recognizable local operator moving in is being treated as an early test of whether Saluhall can finally stabilize its foot traffic.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, owners Aziz Aslan and Elif Uzun, who launched Oklava in Palo Alto in 2023, are behind the new Saluhall counter, and a press release quotes manager Deniz Soykan on building an accessible, heritage-driven menu. The Chronicle notes that the coffee counter has been empty since March, after the previous operator exited in the middle of a lease dispute. Oklava and Saluhall say they will share a full menu and operating hours closer to opening day.
SFGATE reported that Oklava’s move follows an April shakeup of Saluhall’s beverage program, when Spirited Beverage Co., the beverage arm of Always Fishing Hospitality Group, was brought in to run the hall’s three bars. That same reporting, along with other local coverage, notes that Saluhall has seen steady turnover since opening in 2024, leaving only a handful of stalls in operation and pushing management to test new operators and programming to keep the place lively.
Where it sits
Saluhall is part of the Meeting Place development at 945 Market Street, according to the property’s official site and marketing materials. The 945 Market pages lay out Saluhall’s tenant list and hours and frame the hall as a key piece of Ingka Centres’ downtown strategy, with an upstairs events venue intended to pull a more consistent stream of visitors into the building. For locals, the exact placement tucked inside the IKEA-anchored complex at 945 Market is a big part of the question of whether casual shoppers and nearby office workers will actually wander in.
Oklava's Bay Area track record
Aslan and Uzun already run the original Oklava in Palo Alto, along with a second project nearby: Turquaz in SoMa, which opened in 2025, according to the owners’ site and local coverage. Oklava’s online presence leans hard into its bakery identity, with dozens of baklava varieties, savory boreks and Turkish coffee, a format the partners say they will adapt for the Saluhall counter. That existing neighborhood following could give the new stall an early boost, provided downtown diners are willing to make the trip.
Why this matters for Saluhall
Local reporting and earlier Hoodline coverage of the hall’s launch and vendor churn show that Saluhall opened with big ambitions but quickly ran into headwinds that forced owners and operators to rethink the lineup. IKEA's Saluhall was pitched as a civic-scale experiment; in practice, high rents, shifting management and soft downtown foot traffic have made long-term success a tougher sell. Every new opening now carries outsized weight for whether the hall can pivot toward a steadier mix of more mainstream operators.
What Oklava will offer
The Saluhall project is being described as a combination of the team’s existing concepts, and the Chronicle reports that the counter will serve Turkish-style coffees, salads, pizza slices and pastries. The Oklava Cafe Palo Alto menu leans on baked goods and Turkish coffee, a playbook the owners appear to be scaling for a downtown crowd. Pricing details and a firm opening date were not included in the initial announcement.
What to watch next: Oklava’s official opening timeline, and whether Spirited’s bar program returns on a schedule that lines up with both daytime and evening demand. SFGATE notes that Spirited and Saluhall have not yet set reopening dates for the bars, so the next few weeks of menu news and scheduling updates will go a long way toward showing whether these changes actually shift Saluhall’s momentum.
