San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
STREET FOOD REVOLUTION:
SAN FRANCISCO DINING IS GOING MOBILE
MMiguel Escobedo raises a blade to his trompo and slices off thin strips of roasted pork, stained red by achiote marinade. He nestles them on tortillas with chunks of pineapple and a sprinkle of cilantro and onions. This part of his business — the pork, the trompo, the magenta food truck painted with the name Al Pastor Papi next to an anthropomorphized spit of smiling, conical meat — is still the same, but two years into the coronavirus pandemic, so much has changed. ¶ No one orders at the window anymore, not since apps made inperson service obsolete. Escobedo’s menu now includes bottled Immunity Hot Sauce and handkerchiefs that double as face masks, and he has partnered with a rotating cast of unemployed DJs, who spin for tips in front of a few dozen socially distanced diners and hundreds more on Twitch.
But the biggest change is his parking spot on Mistral Street in the Mission. The halfblock alley next to John O’Connell Technical High School transformed into a popup dining plaza nine months after COVID19 hit, one of dozens of recurring street markets that have sprouted across San Francisco. Food trucks now line both curbs alongside booths from nearby businesses: Trick Dog’s cocktail cart, a roving flower shop, temporary kitchens from Farmhouse Kitchen Thai and Flour + Water that are now permanently deployed to one streetfood park or another. Steps away, the high school’s soccer field is painted with the familiar honeycomb of socially distanced dining circles; reservable picnic tables form a ring around the perimeter.
Conjure a Friday night in 2022 in your imagination, and it’s easy to picture street food being the hottest game in town.
Many countries around the world have rich traditions of roadside vendors and openair markets. Now, thanks to its nimble setups, relatively low overhead and the decreased exposure risk of outdoor dining, street food seems poised to explode in San Francisco.
A glimpse of that potential future is visible today at Spark Social SF, a food park in Mission Bay. Like much of the city, the space shut down in the early days of the pandemic, but it’s open again — with mandatory masks, sanitizer stations and seating spaced 6 feet apart — focused less on lunch business from nowempty offices and more on feeding the neighbors.
“We’re super lucky,” says Carlos Muela, cofounder of Parklab, the company that runs Spark. “We were basically built for this pandemic.”
“That’s what things could look like in the future,” says Escobedo, who frequently slings his tacos and burritos inside the park. “Everyone’s enjoying themselves and social distancing.”
A former coowner of Papalote restaurant, Escobedo has been offering free food and discounts to inneed community members during the pandemic, but even with those deals, his sales have reached and surpassed precoronavirus levels. Food trucks, he says, are a good fit for these odd, alarming times. “I think that’s a super winning model for COVID.”
As the pandemic drags into its sixth month, and Bay Area residents digest the idea that we’re not going back inside anytime soon, more businesses are looking to the street. In San Francisco about 400 new parking spots and sidewalk areas are open for restaurant use through the Shared Spaces initiative, says program head Robin Abad Ocubillo. The city has also approved 10 applications to close portions of roadways for openair dining and retail.
“It’s definitely exciting,” says Abad Ocubillo. “San Francisco and other cities are reimagining the potential of their public realm. … I think we’ll see more of this in the near and far future.”
Muela envisions a growing culture of street food for San Francisco, with miniature Sparklike plazas springing up in parks, parking lots and alleys. “I think we have to blur the lines between public and private space,” he says, taking inspiration from the markets of Spain (where his parents are from) and his experience at Spark (which operates on public land).
Matt Cohen agrees. The CEO of Off the Grid sees an opportunity to experiment with public space, to bring strippeddown versions of his food truck parties into residential areas with a mix of vendors on wheels and local brickandmortar businesses venturing outdoors to meet customers where they are. Already many restaurants are seeking food trucks so they can be untethered from their physical space, and Cohen sees mobile operations branching beyond beer trucks and rice bowls to include shopping and services. “There’s a whole universe of mobility that works for neighborhoods that is really unexplored,” he says. “Everything from dog stores to drugstores to groceries.”
He pictures alleys morphing into commercial corridors, complete with public art, retail and, when health orders allow it, places for people to come together. “Where do new community centers form?” he asks. “As it becomes safe to do so, we’re super excited to think about what that looks like.”
But not everyone views the street as savior. Azalina Eusope is the chef and owner of Azalina’s and Mahila, a Malaysian restaurant that opened last year in Noe Valley. She has three other brickandmortar projects in various stages of development.
Eusope has deep love and respect for street food. She comes from a family of vendors, and Mahila specializes in Mamak cuisine, dishes from Malaysia’s Muslim Indian community sold on the streets of Penang.
At home, she says, “We don’t go to restaurants. We go to street vendors, and they make one dish for the whole of their lifetime.” Her father sold two types of noodles and illegal moonshine to nonMuslim friends. “He died as a poor man with no assets whatsoever,” Eusope says. But when he passed away, “the whole island came to say goodbye.”
In San Francisco, Eusope started her business on a plastic table at the Alemany Farmers’ Market and Off the Grid Fort Mason. With two young kids at home, it was exhausting work. When she thought about opening a restaurant, “we were upgrading ourselves,” she says.
On Friday, Azalina’s closed at the Twitter building in preparation for a new location at 499 Ellis St. Meanwhile, Eusope is serving takeout from Mahila and selling turmeric noodles by the pound. She wants the government to increase financial assistance for small businesses and for insurance companies to cover rent for restaurants largely shuttered by the coronavirus who’ve been paying into policies for years. She says she has to make it work with her current projects. She’s trying to keep her staff employed and is spread too thin to invest in something like a food truck, which could cost from $50,000 to upwards of $200,000.
For Cohen, that tension feels familiar. Off the Grid was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, and whatever emerges tomorrow will be the result of a similar stew of economic instability and ingenuity.
“The lower the cost of entry the more interesting the ideas that can happen,” Cohen says of the street food future. “Sometimes in San Francisco we can overthink things to death. It would be great if there was more of a willingness to say, ‘wouldn’t it be cool …’ and persevere through the challenges, give it a shot and see what can happen.
“This might be louder than we expect. This might not look perfect. But it might add something unexpected to our collective community.”
Many countries around the world have rich traditions of roadside vendors and open-air markets. Now, thanks to its nimble setups, relatively low overhead and the decreased exposure risk of outdoor dining, street food seems poised to explode in San Francisco.