Jeff Mason just makes sandwiches.
Hovering over rows of split rolls, Jeff Mason is alone behind the counter of Pal’s Takeaway. Behind him, chicken glows between spinning grates in a hellish rotisserie. Piled empty takeout containers appear to sprout onion and cauliflower pickles.
“Are you those guys with the big order?” Mason asks.
Behind me, three Uptown Oakland office workers shrug, unsure.
“OK,” Mason says to us all wearily. “It’ll be a while.”
I’m in a hurry, so I come back a day later at the moment Pal’s opens. If Al Swearengen from “Deadwood” were a crotchety fairy godfather with a trimmed white goatee and kindly blue eyes, he’d resemble Mason, who similarly shows extemporaneous creativity with the f-word.
“I’m a little behind here,” he apologizes as the rotisserie whirs. Behind it, caterers, pastry chefs and picklers pinball around Forage Kitchen, the Oakland co-working foodpreparation and community space that Mason occupied for several months until late September.
I wait, wondering how Mason copes, unassisted, with a legitimately grueling lunch crush. I don’t find out. Save for one guy at the counter barking at his cell phone between bites, the place is empty.
I do find sandwiches though, and so I order enough for three lunches.
Aunt Malai’s Almost Famous Lao Sausage Sandwich annihilates internal conflict for firsttime customers trying to decide what to order. Mason roasts funky Lao sausages and splits them on rolls with a cucumbercilantro relish, greens and a vibrant homemade mayonnaise. The excellent East Oakland restaurant Vientian Cafe hooked Mason on the sausages when he lived in nearby Maxwell Park.
“I couldn’t make them right myself,” Mason admits. “I tried getting someone else to do it, but no one had time to try.”
Between bites at Vientian, Mason begged the women in the kitchen for help, but they would just laugh and walk away as his pleas grew desperate. Whether charmed, exhausted or simply savvy, they finally agreed to subcontract the object of his obsession.
Or, take Mason’s tuna sandwich. As the “Nicoise” in its name implies, it isn’t a diner melt or your mom’s watery lunchbox staple, but really a salad of subtle flavors and harmonious textures — collapsing, ocean-y, oil-poached albacore, snappy green beans, bursting golden cherry tomatoes — nestled into mayonnaise and bread. In a nod to the source material, Mason slides potato chips under the top piece of bread.
But here’s where the story of a very good sandwich gets interesting.
The last time I had the sandwich, I didn’t see any of the promised sliced egg, and I didn’t miss it. The chips were corn, a minor change, perhaps, but a very different note for a flavor profile otherwise suggesting southern France more than Mission Taqueria. I ate joyfully, but the sandwich didn’t make any sense.
That might be part of the point.
“I start with a simple idea. It’s like a jazz solo,” says Mason, who counts Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra as favorites. “I take a groove that’s known and I build around it with no limitations.”
According to Mason, these elevated grooves — whether a Lao-sausage-stuffed banh mi, a “Nicoise,” or a homey egg salad shot through with curry — aren’t the product of agonized conceptualizing. Components come and go, depending on what’s at hand.
“It’s no revelation that the best ingredients give you creative latitude,” Mason says. “So I go to the farmers’ market. And I drive around, I walk the dogs, I think, I try. If something tastes better than it does in my head, I keep it.”
Casual modifications and all, Mason’s method reflects the essence of sandwich. Whether mediocre or phenomenal, sandwiches are often improvised concoctions repurposing leftovers. Although, like a clam roll or a cheesesteak, they may conjure up specific places, they are often eaten in transit or over a keyboard. Even when they cost $12 (like Mason’s) and spill forth rosy Kobe beef or sweet Oregon shrimp, they retain a humble spirit. Like a musician switching instruments and shifting scales, bouncing from one influence to another, Mason borrows liberally, referencing culinary traditions to which he only rarely has personal attachment. The result comes filtered through the lens of his deliberately scattershot method and a tiny kitchen.
“I don’t have tweezers,” Mason says. “I’m inspired by seeing nine incredible chefs hover over one dish, but I work in a simple form. I’m in a basement with a bare light bulb and a dirty broken knife.”
Mason doesn’t have a philosophical interest in labor-intensive technique, much less the arsenal of gear, employees and time it requires. Aside from a few weeks in the kitchen of the late Rubicon, he doesn’t have much formal training, either. Growing up in New Jersey, he loved food, but his parents didn’t cook. Unsurprisingly, he says, he ate a lot of take-out sandwiches and rummaged through the family fridge to cobble together his own creations. Mason co-owned DNA Lounge in San Francisco for nine years, but tired of the youthful, druggy scene.
In the mid-’90s, he owned Moxie, a Mission District restaurant and bar that did playful spins on Jewish cuisine before such concepts could fly on the corner of Florida and 17th. It was, he admits, a little ahead of its time. After Moxie, Mason catered, but the 2008 economic downturn wrecked business. Relatively inexpensive and broadly appealing, sandwiches seemed like a way to recover quickly.
The pop-up ethos held no special allure; he just couldn’t afford a more conventional approach. A friend, Bill Stone, co-owner of Dynamo Donuts, connected him with the owner of Tony’s Market & Liquor, a corner store across 24th Street that happened to have an unused deli counter.
It was there that I place a foggy 9-year-old memory of eating something delicious involving asparagus and a perfectly cooked egg.
The social media-fueled truck, stand, cart, nomadic supper club and pop-up businesses that proliferated in the wake of the recession became trendy only after proprietors like Mason found new ways to stay relevant, creative and solvent. They found a community in the process. Many participants mined family traditions, heritage and personal obsessions for preparations that could occupy unique corners of the market. What began as a way to survive became, as Mason puts it, “a thing.”
“Mission Street Food, Josey Baker, 4505 Meats. People kept coming up with different things to sell. Creme brulee. Cookies. Bacon chips,” Mason says.
Some of the proprietors opened brick-and-mortar establishments around the country or sold products at Whole Foods. Some quit. Some, like Mason, stayed in the same lane, bouncing around to new digs every six months. Most recently, Mason was at Forage Kitchen for nearly 10 months.
“I’ve never gotten rich,” says Mason. “But I’ve managed to hang in there. I just wanted to make sandwiches, not be like Ike’s,” he adds, referencing the growing chain of sandwich shops that began with one popular Castro location.
“Some days, I struggle with motivation,” he continues. “But once I get in the kitchen, a transformation happens. A famous Polish artist in New York was interviewed about inspiration.” Here, Mason lapses without warning into an accented impersonation. “‘Inspiration?’ she said. ‘That’s nothing. You can’t wait for it or you’ll be dead. Me, I get up every day, I paint, and something good happens eventually.’ ”
And so, every day, except on weekends, Mason gets up and makes sandwiches. Something good clearly often happens. But that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. The elephant behind the counter is that Mason is not a young man.
“I’m the aberrant granddad of sandwiches, not a 35-year-old line cook,” he quips.
He’s an actual grandfather, senior to most chefs opting for such a scrappy existence. What I witnessed on my first and second visits to the latest incarnation of Pal’s can’t continue indefinitely. At some point, he’ll need to get some help.
“I want a little lunch counter,” Mason admits. His dream, gently voiced, reflects the food he peddles: humble yet elevated with care and ingredients. A bar to lean over, some stools and sandwiches, of course.
“I like talking and schmoozing,” says Mason. “I’d like to be crankier, but I can’t. I try to make jokes about what people order, but it’s too small a town. I can’t insult anyone. And I’d like to. But everyone’s, you know —”
He impersonates a zombified customer dabbing away at his phone. That might have been me waiting for my sandwich the previous week. And me the day before that, slipping out because 20 minutes sounded like a long time. The message is clear: The culture that encourages people to retreat into their digital selves and carefully curated worlds dampens Mason’s authentic routine. It’s a facet of the same culture that permits entrepreneurs like Mason to attract and maintain devoted customers. And the one that boosts Caviar’s business at the expense of his. Mason may broadcast his sandwich ingredients on Twitter, but what gets him going — besides what might taste good on a roll — is the human interaction that comes with commerce.
Over the course of our conversations, I try to get Mason to drop sandwich master knowhow. I’m hoping for a “golden ratio” of bread-to-meat-tospread and so forth — wonky shop talk, whatever that is. Mason doesn’t care to get that molecular, but he does drop something telling. As a diner tears into a Pal’s sandwich, turns it over, chomps again, and repeats the process, Mason hopes that each bite offers a different tangle of flavors and textures. That makes a sandwich more interesting.
I reference the oft-levied criticism of poorly rolled burritos, a form in which diners prize uniformity, not cold avocado, clumps of rice and juicy salsa in isolated segments.
Mason snorts derisively. “Come on. It’s just lunch. You give someone a little joy and send a few jokes their way. That’s it.”
A minute later, though, he’s excited about a monthly Friday pop-up he’s starting at Temescal Brewing.
“Lamb sloppy joes,” he says. “I’m on a real lamb groove right now.”
I can’t make it for the first Friday, but I come by Forage one day after work. There are leftover sloppy joes, but I order a rotisserie lamb sandwich.
He on a groove, I think, savoring sweet roasted Jimmy Nardello peppers crinkled around the tender lamb and tart, creamy bursts of feta. There are unadvertised sweet corn kernels. There are corn chips, not pappadam — but, hey, that’s the sandwich I was served, and I know Mason’s deal enough to be more than content with that. We shake hands. I drink a soda. I don’t think about my phone.
Mason’s looking for a spot soon, something semi-permanent, but he’ll be back at Temescal Brewing, and doing occasional lunch pop-ups at Cole Coffee in Rockridge, too. He asks if his little luncheonette idea makes sense and suggests an unrelated story for the paper, an intriguing one I’m inclined to chase.
He shifts topics again. Do I know, he asks, that a lot of Caviar customers order from restaurants just a few blocks away from their houses? Who does that? We both rant. It’s just a conversation over a very good sandwich, the kind of thing that ought to happen in little luncheonettes all over town. Mason’s lamb groove is real, but it’s better with a side of this, which is always on this menu, wherever and however it’s served.
“Come on. It’s just lunch. You give someone a little joy and send a few jokes their way. That’s it.” Jeff Mason, cook
Track future appearances of Pal’s Takeaway at www.palstakeaway.com. Andrew Simmons lives in Oakland. He writes for the Atlantic, the New York Times and other publications. Twitter: @adlsimmons Email: food@sfchronicle.com