Small food merchants find room to grow
The old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is one of the last places you would expect to find small operators cooking up big dreams in the food business. But this is the headquarters of Eclectic Cookery, a communal kitchen operation that is part food community and part incubator for new ideas in the booming Bay Area food scene.
Eclectic Cookery has been around awhile — it started in 1984 with a few clients renting kitchen and storage space. In August, it moved to a new building in the shipyard and now has 86 tenants in small food operations, from an African American-owned soul food truck to a oneperson granola producer who hopes to turn Garrett’s Granola into a big deal.
“I want to produce the best granola in the world,” said Garrett Lamb, who is the owner and sole business partner in Garrett’s Granola. “I make it, I package it and I deliver it,” he said. He sells his granola to offices, tech companies and in stores. Garrett’s Granola comes in several flavors, including one called Dark and Stormy, which has “subtle hints of molasses and blue agave.”
The product, advertised as handmade in San Francisco, is not cheap—Dark and Stormy is $9.50 for a 12-ounce bag — but it earns five stars on Yelp.
Lamb’s is one of the smallest of the small operations that use Eclectic Cookery. Like many others, his is a startup business, one he developed out of his fondness for cooking. He likes Eclectic Cookery because “It’s a place where everyone shares everything, including ideas. It’s a community,” he said.
Sometimes it’s a struggle. “I make a living at it, but it’s hard,” Lamb said. Most mornings, he drives for Lyft to make extra money. “I give granola samples to the customers,” he said. “A good marketing experience.”
More typical of the tenants in the food business is Trop Bon Catering, run by Sang Ae Leblon, who was born in Korea, grew up in France and started the business in San Francisco five years ago. She was making bulgogi in one of the communal kitchens the other morning. She has just expanded her operation to provide meals in jars to the Volcano Kimchi booth at the Ferry Plaza. Leblon and Aruna Lee, who owns Volcano Kimchi, got to know each other at Eclectic Cookery. “We help each other here,” Leblon said, “It’s the perfect place to start your business.”
The Bay Area is a food mecca, with all kinds of niche markets. Some of them are tenants at Eclectic — operations like Pampa BBQ, a caterer specializing in Argentine gaucho food — including empanadas made from “a very old recipe,” according to Francisco Galvez, Pampa’s CEO. There are also firms like Shoulder Dancing, which makes a packaged Ethiopian food, sold in high-end stores. “We cook and package the food here,” said Wonde Haileselassie, who runs the operation.
Up on the second floor are separate areas for baking and chocolate operations. You might say that Basel Bazlamit represents the high end of the operations at Hunters Point. He is a chocolatier, another sole operator, with a company called Basel B.
“I do everything from the concept to the finished product,” he said. He even designs the boxes. He was busy the other afternoon, mixing chocolate in a climate-controlled area. “Not too hot, not too cold,” he said. His Le Darkness line of chocolates comes in 10 flavors. There is a Le Darkness truffle box, all 10 flavors, “not just a sampler, but a way of life.” The price: $66.
On the ground floor is a more familiar food sight. Here Nima Romney and an assistant are getting set to load up her food truck: Soul Bowl’z, which operates in San Francisco and Oakland. She does a lot of the preparation at Eclectic Cookery, slicing and peeling, getting the chicken ready. “I have a deep fryer and a grill on the truck,” she said. “It’s like a kitchen. We can make jambalaya to order.”
But the communal kitchen is her home port. “It is convenient. It’s wonderful.”
Eclectic Cookery is a commercial operation, not open to the public. A communal kitchen like this was the brainchild of Bill Roberts and three partners, who saw the need for some sort of cooking, storage and base operation for the hundreds of food merchants who were small, but thought big. And in recent years the mini food scene boomed — farmers’ markets, brewpubs, high-end food stores.
“It’s really taken off,” said Roberts, who spent years as a chef at the Palace Hotel.
One cloud on the horizon is the discovery of more contamination from the old industrial shipyard at Hunters Point. However, the Eclectic Cookery partners say their operation is nowhere near the contaminated area. “This place is the future, like Mission Bay not long ago, like Dogpatch,” Roberts said. “The city is coming our way.”