SF dabbles with regulating street food

During my day job I think nonstop about federal financial regulation and maybe an occasional state legislative proposal. So it was refreshing today to experience something different and new to me- local lawmaking at its finest. This morning there was an important hearing at City Hall to discuss how to fix the outdated, confusing, inconsistent, and often illogical nature of San Francisco's mobile vending permit process which is currently a great barrier to many food entrepreneurs who have tried to come out from "underground".

There's been a ton of attention on the street food scene here- see NY Times- which has been blowing up for about a year with new carts like ours popping up all the time. And of course, street food has a long tradition beyond us foodies hawking our goodies in the park. The system needs to preserve old and new food businesses while fostering the new community of mobile food vendors.

The hearing allowed us to get an idea of what the Supervisors were thinking with regards to regulating street food. I came away with a positive impression of the city's intentions. You can read a couple good summaries of what happened here and here. It did not sound like they wanted to immediately crack down on flourishing enterprises. Supervisor Bevan Dufty instigated and led the meeting and promises to have a proposal within a couple months. Let's cross our fingers. I plan to get more up to date on the current regulatory structure for mobile food service and look forward to reading the proposed regulations when they are issued.

Some truly awesome people spoke on behalf of the street food vendor crew: Shakirah Simley who runs Slow Jams, Matt Cohen who runs SF Cart project, Robyn Sue who developed the amazing Smitten Ice Cream machine, Curtis Kimball whose got the famous Creme Brulee Cart, and Paula Tejada of Chile Lindo. I've been nothing but impressed and awed at the great community that we've recently joined. Within 36 hours they gathered hundreds of signatures in support of street food, written on fabulously designed postcards which were submitted at the hearing. It's a true community of very motivated and creative people who will definitely continue being very successful.

This is why SF needs Pearl's Kitchen

Our recent rantings about the challenges of finding schmaltz and kosher meat in San Francisco spark curiosity in my Aunt Julie who lives outside of D.C. in Olney, Maryland. She wondered, are things different on the east coast? Well after a quick stop at her regular old local supermarket, she realized the answer is most definitely yes. It seems that kosher deli food is readily available everywhere you look. And just to rub it in, she took pictures of the deli counter at her local Giant Supermarket.

This is the brand of kosher chicken they sell at Trader  Joe's here. But TJ's definitely doesn't carry Schmaltz.

Kosher corned beef for $7.99/lb. Don't even talk to me about this.

 Noodle Kugel at the supermarket! 

You think Safeway or Whole Foods would ever stock Pearl's Kitchen kugel?

 

Six different types of knishes!

Dill and half sour pickles. 

You can definitely get good dill pickles around here, but a perfect half sour is hard to find. Pearl's Kitchen will be developing a perfect recipe for these come summer when the cukes are in season.

 

Black and White cookies. 

We like to outsource these from our favorite bakery, Sweetface Sweets, if we can persuade her to bake some Jewish deli treats!

So the moral of the story is that you can probably hunt down decent versions of the above items if you spend a lot of time looking and driving to the ends of the earth here in the SF bay area. But nobody is bringing these goodies to your local street corner except Pearl's Kitchen. So come out and grab a taste next time we're serving. Together we can achieve a world where San Franciscan's can find six different types of knishes by just logging onto their twitter account.

How did it all begin?

This whole crazy thing kinda began at last year's Eat Real Festival. We were pursuing the stands and came across ForageSF, which was basically a guy named Iso promoting his version of community supported agriculture (CSA) but with wild foraged food-- a CSF! So every month he goes out and forages in the mountains, forests and street of Northern California, and you get a box of the most local food around. A CSA is the same thing (and much more common), but you're buying a share of a local farm, which delivers a box of their produce to you each month.

Our good friend Sunny Savage is an amazing foraging expert (she even has her own tv show!) and so our interest was peaked- we signed up with his list. Six months later we received an email from Iso that he was interested in putting together a market event that would allow local food producers and home cooks, that have not had the time and money to go through the whole permitting process necessary to serve their goodies at official farmers markets, to come together and sell their stuff- and the Underground Farmers Market was born.

Jon and I had been talking a while about starting a Jewish deli truck. My entrepreneurial grandpa was pushing the idea, by connect us with the guy who runs the deli he visits regularly in Northbrook, Illinois. It was mostly wishful thinking, as we are both a bit too conventional to just up a quit our perfectly wonderful jobs. But then we got encouragement from a family friend who runs a very successful food business in Marin, who told us- keep your day job and start by doing it on weekends!

OK so this Underground Farmers Market was our chance. Not to much financial investment and no city bureaucracy required. We decided to do it. It was on a Thursday so I took a vacation day (Jon couldn't- no surprise) and baked rye bread, cooked 13 lbs of Robert's Corned Beef, and made 4 pans of sweet noodle kugel over the course of 12 hours. (The hourly wage for this job is not the point people!)

Well it was a great experience and an utter success! We sold out of our corned beef sandwiches in less than 2 hours and brought noodle kugel out of the kitchen and into the consciousness of lots of local SF foodies.

SLIDESHOW: Underground Farmer’s Market – Mission Loc@l -- San Francisco Mission District's News, Food, Art and Events

So when Iso decide to do it again a month later (mind you, this was a week and a half ago) we jumped on the chance to participate again. This time there were twice as many vendors and 50 times more people. Lines around the block for hours on end. It was fabulous! We made twice as many sandwiches and again sold out in a few hours. We met some great street food vendors like the Magic Curry Cart and the Pizza Hacker, who came over, introduced themselves and gave us tons of encouragement.

And the rest is -less than 2 weeks of- history. There is amazing network of vendors who communicate and use their combined popularity and social networking skills to introduce more and more people to their wonderful cuisine. We hope to join their ranks with Pearl's Kitchen!

The Launch

We have officially launched Pearl's Kitchen, the aim of which is to bring grandma's Jewish kitchen to the streets! The grandma at hand is Pearl, shown left playing with a wind chime. She was a wonderful cook and we just felt that San Francisco would really benefit from a re-creation of her kitchen, albeit on a folding table in a city park (for now.)

Pearl's Kitchen will explore the cooking regime of this one particular Jewish grandmother as well as recipes enjoyed by Jewish families everywhere. We will also be delving into the Jewish Deli world, which is currently the focus of a very interesting debate here in the Bay Area. What is an authentic Jewish Deli? How does it jive with the goal of serving people organic, sustainable food. Is this a valid debate or is this just the type of thing that New Yorkers point to and laugh as they bite into their delicious "authentic" pastrami sandwiches. We will see.

"We" are Jon and Lauren, who love food and are very excited to join the vibrant underground food scene in SF. Currently both of us are gainfully employed at full time day jobs, but we're gonna do our darnedest to cook and serve up yummy grub in our free time as often as possible. We've already met an amazing group of talented cooks who are out there serving interesting food on street corners, in art galleries and in parks.

This blog will serve as a journal of this experience. Part diary of a street food business, part cookbook, part musings of Jewish food and the underground food scene of which Pearl's Kitchen hopes to become an integral part.

We've signed on with all the requisite social networking outlets, so check us out on Twitter and Facebook, or do things the old fashion way and email us. We'll let you know when we're out next so you can come get some corned beef sandwiches or noodle kugel!