Local eateries finding new routes to serving up fare for the Bay Area by hitting the road.
Isaac Yosef was in Israel when the shelter-in-place first took hold of San Francisco. He caught one of the last planes home on March 16, took a look around his eerily empty SoMA eatery, Frena Bakery & Cafe, which is usually packed with customers waiting for bagels and burekas, and knew he had to do something. Fast. “Downtown was dead,” Yosef recalls. “Half of our business was corporate catering and that was gone, too. We quickly decided that if people can’t come to Frena, Frena will come to them.” During the pandemic, pop-ups and other forms of geographic outreach are becoming an essential way for established San Francisco chefs to reach customers outside the city. Some, like Frena, drive a van to corners across Northern California. Others, like China Live’s George Chen, have opened ghost kitchens — commercial kitchens for delivery-only fare — from Berkeley to Belmont, so loyal customers who used to drive into Chinatown for his dumplings can enjoy them in the comfort of their homes. The tactic is not new, especially for Frena. Before opening their brick-and-mortar shop in 2016, Yosef and his partners cooked their kosher dishes in a commercial kitchen and popped up in San Francisco and around the South Bay. But this roadshow is different, with a rigorous weekly schedule — frenabakery.com/weekly-schedule — that clocks hundreds of miles. At night, they bake and prep everything from falafel mix to pizza babkas, pack up each morning and head to Chabad centers and other gathering places, hitting three to four cities per day. On Wednesdays they’re in San Mateo, Menlo Park and Palo Alto; Fridays in Oakland, Walnut Creek and Pleasanton, often in little to no traffic. Yosef says the response has been amazing and that it currently accounts for the bulk of their business.
“We now have clients who have never been to the bakery. We are lucky to have this supportive community and not have to rely on tourists and business professionals in San Francisco.” — Isaac Yosef, owner of Frena Bakery
“This geographical distribution model has been very good for us. They’ve added more than 30% to our to-go revenue in a very short time. This is here to stay. If you don’t pivot you’re gonna die like a dinosaur.” — George Chen, executive chef-owner of China Live
“We now have clients who have never been to the bakery,” he says. “We are lucky to have this supportive community and not have to rely on tourists and business professionals in San Francisco.” Last week, they went to Morgan Hill, Santa Cruz and Monterey for the first time. “We go where people ask us to go,” Yosef says. On Fridays, Frena synchronizes its stops with the Richmond District’s Hummus Bodega and Walnut Creek-based Afugã Coffee so customers can have creamy, authentic hummus and lattes to go with Frena’s freshly baked pita and chocolate babka. This little culinary pod, at first unexpected, is now a pandemic mainstay, tucked into the suburbs, of all places. “This is probably the first time Israelis are enjoying standing in line,” Yosef says, joking. George Chen considered the food truck model as a way to curb lost revenue during the pandemic. But it wasn’t the right fit for China Live, a massive culinary destination for modern Chinese cuisine. “We have five kitchens. You can’t put giant dumpling pans in a truck. And the heat required? It wasn’t feasible,” he says. Chen ramped up retail with meal kits and condiments, but knowing that 70% of his clientele was driving 10-plus miles to reach China Live before the pandemic, he found a more relevant and long-term solution in Virtual Kitchen Co.’s Local Food Halls. The San Francisco-based company helps restaurants prepare local executions of their most popular menu items. Last month, Chen launched 10 satellite kitchens in neighborhoods around the Bay Area, from San Jose’s Willow Glen to Sunnyvale and Berkeley, offering China Live Signatures (chinalivesf.com/signatures), like the Shanghai-style shen jian bao, for delivery via DoorDash and other apps. To ensure the food meets Chen’s gourmet standards, he adapted some of the recipes so that the pre-finished dishes travel well. He hopes to add kitchens in Oakland, Walnut Creek and Marin County next. “This geographical distribution model has been very good for us,” Chen says. “They’ve added more than 30% to our to-go revenue in a very short time. This is here to stay. If you don’t pivot you’re gonna die like a dinosaur.” That’s why Brandon Rice of the Mission District’s forthcoming Ernest (www.ernestsf. com) is thinking ahead. Rice, the former chef de cuisine at Rich Table, is weeks away from opening his highly anticipated first restaurant — for takeout only. To preview his globally driven cuisine to the San Francisco public, Rice has been offering Ernest at Home dinners, everything from porterhouse steaks to prawn and scallop dumplings. On the Fourth of July, he offered a wildly popular barbecue menu, complete with baby back ribs, buckets of fried chicken and New England-style lobster rolls. But it wasn’t just in San Francisco. Rice drove out to Walnut Creek, popping up near a park where his girlfriend’s sister lives. Naturally, news of a Michelin-cred chef bringing his food to Larkey Park traveled quickly on Facebook. Rice sold out for the holiday and at the two pop-ups that followed. He plans to return to Walnut Creek again, at least until he feels ready to open Ernest’s patio for outdoor dining. “It was great,” he recalls. “We had a ton of return guests. This is a way of broadening your audience, especially right now. And being able to give people something during this time is important.”