San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Artistry is just the beginning
Printmaker and selftaught chef in S. F. mixes Basque and Mexican flavors in one-of-a-kind popup
Vannessa Gonzalez’s Outer Sunset house tells a story. An old pinball machine lives in the living room, alongside numerous plants, woven textiles and surfboards. Paper garlands float above the dining table. The kitchen is a hodgepodge of spices, pots, knickknacks and fresh fruit. Then, there’s a “relaxation room” in which excellent lighting lends itself to painting and the kind of eclectic, charming chaos that is impossible to recreate.
Gonzalez, 39, has lived in San Francisco for the past 18 years, and for about the same amount of time she’s been making art in the city and feeding its residents. The house, which she shares with boyfriend Jacob, feels exactly like the place from which handmade postcards, homemade meal kits and BasqueMexican popups emerge into the world. A printmaker and artist who holds food popups on the side, Gonzalez is a selftaught chef — the only one in the Bay Area to incorporate both Mexican and Basque flavors into her cooking, accompanying it with laborious, handdrawn menus and posters. She’s also the embodiment of the COVID19era hustle, surviving the city’s shelterinplace reality with joy and creativity.
Some Bay Area residents might know Gonzalez as Chula and the Crocodile, her illustrated food and art project and, some might say, her alter ego. She started the project roughly four years ago with signs in which she depicts herself as a girl with a crocodile that stands in for a childhood imaginary friend. On a recent Saturday, Gonzalez arrived at Excelsior Coffee in the Excelsior neighborhood to produce a morning popup of her sandwiches. On the menu were a “Fancy” ham and cheese; a Spanish tomato, cheese and ham; and peanut butter and jam, all made with slices of homemade, toastable Basque bread.
Chula and the Crocodile has also popped up at the Holy Water bar in the Mission and other locations in the city. On the menu — always handillustrated, as Gonzalez doesn’t use a computer — are patatas bravas next to carnitas, Mexican wedding cake next to Basque beans with bacon and chorizo.
David Ruiz, the owner of Junior’s, a Mission bar where Gonzalez had done popups, calls her food “super creative and different, comforting but with crazy ingredients.” Gonzalez did artwork for Junior’s original merchandise, and is currently working on art for the wine club at Stillwater, Ruiz’s new restaurant in Fairfax, a depiction of two grapes shaking hands. “If you know her art, there’s a very distinct style to it,” he says, laughing.
Gonzalez’s concept — Mexican and Basque cuisines meet American comfort — goes back to her upbringing and heritage. She grew up in Merced, in the San Joaquin Valley. Her parents met there when her dad, who was born in Mexico, invited her mom — a daughter of a Mexican American and a Spanish Basque — to a quinceañera. When she was 13, the couple split up, and Gonzalez, the third of four sisters, remained with their father. This, in hindsight, contributed to her advancement as a selftaught cook.
“I’d sit there and watch KQED, watching all these great chefs on cooking shows,” she says. “My dad was such a bachelor, we only had what we were going to eat for that day in the fridge. So it was just like, OK, I need to learn how to make something.”
After she moved to San Francisco in 1999 to attend Academy of Art University for printmaking, cooking for a living presented itself soon enough. While renting an apartment for a now unheardof $ 500 a month, she rode her bike all over the city, ran a fancy candy shop in the Marina, and had a chain of personal-cheffing jobs. There were gigs at the butcher counter at Bi-Rite Market, where Gonzalez first perfected the art of the sandwich, and an entry into cooking in the kitchen of the Fatted Calf, then Pier 23, and the nowclosed Hawaiian restaurant Aina.
She describes her cooking “like when you go to your grandmother’s house; very comforting, easy, a big warm hug.” In fact, the very first thing she learned how to make when she was 14 came from her maternal grandmother: flour tortillas. Gonzalez has been learning ever since, on jobs and on the go.
Mixed into Gonzalez’s upbringing were frequent trips to the Basque Country, geographically part of Spain, to visit her paternal grandparents’ side of the family. Relatives still live on a multifamily plot Gonzalez’s greatgrandparents established in San Martin d’Arrossa, a small commune on the Spanish-French border, as well as in Pamplona and Vitoria-Gasteiz, a central city to the Basque community. Gonzalez likes to mix in visits to the vibrant city of Palma de Mallorca as well. The Basque bread and the bean stew are her Basque grandpa’s recipes. “It’s a shepherd’s bread,” Gonzalez says. “It’s meant for a long haul; when they go out into the fields for a week, they’d take this huge round of bread.”
On the day we meet, Gonzalez makes the bread while beans with garlic and onion are bubbling on the stove. Traditional Basque ingredients, espelette pepper and bacalao, dried and salted fish, are also on hand. She hand-presses corn tortillas. “I hope you like butter,” she says, offering me a warm one. She mentions feeding a neighbor for a week for free, and also feeding a friend as a tradein for some art. Spending time with her is like running into a version of San Francisco I only know from being told about by people who have held onto their roots amid the city’s vast and unkind changes. ( Funnily enough, her Basque greatgrandparents met in San Francisco and traveled back and forth, making money in the U. S to support the European compound they’d established.)
In addition to the popups, Gonzalez had a zine, I’d Gladly Pay You Tuesday for a Hamburger Today, and has recently been working on a series of handmade postcards to sell on Instagram. Her drawing style is unmistakably bold, a bit naive, always with a hint of humor, and her art and cooking are infused with casual yet meaningful philosophy.
“I put so much love into them both. Everything is so colorful; cooking is just another form of art,” she says.