San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Area’s gourmet grazing
Lavish grazing boards & charcuterie in demand for small groups at home.
Remember grazing tables? Prepandemic, these large surfaces, covered with butcher paper or wooden boards and loaded with meticulously rolled up or fanned out slices of charcuterie, cheese, dried fruit and other snackable items, were a mainstay at Bay Area gatherings and parties. People would crowd around, picking up a slice of prosciutto or a wedge of manchego and basking in the plentiful choices.
Such a lavish scenario, of course, is unimaginable in the shade of COVID19, but it turns out local purveyors are still selling plenty of charcuterie boards. Only now, instead of as a backdrop for large events, people are buying them as the center of minuscule gatherings and solo indulging in front of the TV or on a bench at a local park. They’re also the stars of socially distanced gifting, even after the holidays. One company, Ripen Co. in Dogpatch, used to get 90% of its revenue from corporate events, and though it has lost all of that, the business is making the same amount it did last January due to sales of smaller boards.
“Gathering boards seem like such a timely thing to me — they feel defiantly pleasurable among all the ‘crap sandwiches’ we’ve been tossed this year,” says Sophie Speer, the founder of Ripen, which launched in 2018 with a specialty in grazing boards.
Speer makes boards like the Pique Nique, featuring mozzarella balls, halved figs, pickled vegetables and a variety of cured meats decorated with herb sprigs. While small in size, such offerings, adorned with flowers and artfully arranged, retain the element of delight and variety popularized by their larger predecessors. They manage the transition from the assembler’s home to your table thanks to contactless personal delivery in a box that contains the prearranged feast.
Before COVID, the majority of Speer’s revenue was from corporate events at Facebook and Airbnb. Aside from sales of smaller boards, she holds Zoom workshops on assembling grazing boards at home, for which she ships kits all over the U.S. In December, business peaked with the holiday gifting season, and now the revenue is from birthday boards and orders for small spring events.
Sophia Lorenzi of Oakland recently ordered a Ripen Co. board as a gift for friends for watching the family dog. It reminded her of how they used to spend time together.
“That’s how we used to eat naturally, nibbling for two hours when we’d meet,” she says. “It’s just an impressive, thoughtful gesture.”
Other local companies specializing in grazing tables are reporting similar scenarios; as corporate and large celebration orders vanished, individual boards for company Zoom gatherings, picnic boxes and individually portioned charcuterie snacks (sometimes called grazing cones) for drivethrough birthday parties replaced them.
“We have found that the majority of our clients order small boards that serve two to four people, and most of them send these to friends, family, clients and coworkers as gifts,” says Alyssa Gilbert of the yearold Graze + Gather in Oakland.
Trou Normand and Dopo, two Bay Area institutions known for their indulgent charcuterie, may have closed this year due to the pandemic, but the taste for carefully assembled, interesting bites has remained, perhaps as a reminder of happier days filled with live cocktail hours and busy restaurants.
“There’s an added value, like a bouquet of flowers made by a florist — it’s a whole new level of care, a professional putting their heart and magic into it,” says Evan Inada, charcuterie and partnerships director at the Bay Area deli brand Columbus.
In November the company expanded its offering of premade, portioned charcuterie boards in selected grocery stores. Inada is happy to see that individual boards are gaining popularity, whether ordered from others or assembled at home with some remote guidance and supervision. “Charcuterie can be therapeutic, it’s a calming process to assemble a board,” he says.
The popularity of charcuterie boards has even led to offshoots that have nothing to do with cheese and meats. On the Internet, anything from a “charcuterie board” of Mexican foods to meticulous boards of cleaning supplies can be found, sometimes in all seriousness and other times as a meme mocking the ubiquity of the trend.
For some, since no cooking skills are required, the grazing board business has been a new way to supplement income during pandemic times. When Dina Bshara’s musician husband lost all his gigs due to shelterinplace, Bshara, who still works full time, decided to put her assembly skills and accretive eye to a test. Affinage Boards was born in October 2020, offering a contactless delivery of picnic boxes and grazing boards. “Our Personal Graze box is popular because it’s perfectly portioned grazing for one,” Bshara says.
In Bshara’s opinion, people continue to reach for the grazing board because it’s a casual, communal, experiential way to eat, “especially in a time there’s not that much to do.” Another perk: There’s no reheating or rushing to eat while the food’s warm.
“It’s about having a little bit of everything — trying different combinations, enjoying over a period of time,” she says.
Until we meet in person again, time is all we got.