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Omnivores

Flash Mob for Foodies

Lori Eanes

Everyone’s Hip to the East Bay’s Pop-Up General Store

     The clock strikes 5 p.m. and it’s any old evening in Oakland’s Temescal District: A man dressed head to toe in white painters scrubs, self-bedazzled and looking like an extra from Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo stands in the middle of West Street freelancing traffic direction. And Truck 18 from the Oakland Fire Department heaves up 47th, pulls alongside an otherwise unassuming old Temescal streetcar depot, and offers unbidden pointers on foodie crowd control.
     Yes, foodie crowd control.
     “I sort of expected this to happen,” says Samin Nosrat, as an unrelenting swarm of amateur food aficionados descend on her Pop-Up General Store, which is sprawled this early evening across the parking lot and into the main building of Grace Street Catering. Though a flinty fear is in her eyes, a look caught by one over-zealous attendee who’s panning the room with a handheld Flip video camera and at this moment is thoroughly invading her personal space, Nosrat reaches her next proclamation with a hint of Zen resignation.
     “At this point,” says the former sous chef of Berkeley’s Eccolo, “I just have to go with the flow.”
     A fitting philosophy. For that’s pretty much how the Pop-Up General Store, a sort of flash mob for foodies, came to be. Featuring pedigreed meats, produce and specialty eats, the Pop-Up is a sort of temporary high-end food market whose vendors almost all have some connection to either Berkeley’s Chez Panisse or the now-defunct Eccolo. Surfacing every three weeks or so, the Pop-Up has grown from 40 customers who came to its first incarnation last December to the more than 500 who showed up, sweaty and salivating, in early June.
    Why so popular? Because the Pop-Up is truly a creature of the times. Operating without formal advertising, it’s a phenomenon of Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates and Foursquare check-ins. Attendance is comprised of those whose interest was piqued out in the ether, drawn like moths to the flame of glowing iPhones and Blackberries that pulsate giddily with the news that @gigegy scored chicken leg confit for $8.50 a pound.
     “Some food trends really get built up this way: Everyone wants to try it,” says Nosrat. “I mean, look at this crowd! Yes, there are really good English muffins here. There are really good jams, great pasta and pork. We love sharing high-end food with people, and we’ve tried to democratize it. But at the heart of it, it’s only food. We all eat it, every day. But I’m a little nervous what can happen, Internet-wise here. I’m worried people will get mad there’s not enough food.”
     The Pop-Up General Store was never supposed to achieve this rock-star status (indeed, at a Pop-Up this summer, a claustrophobic Dori Marynard of West Oakland grumbled that “last time it was very orderly ... I’m happy for the merchants, but I don’t think I can actually get my orders it’s so crowded,” and another groused that “people are pushing and shoving ... you should see the way they’re acting on the street!”). Conceived by Nosrat and her mentor, Eccolo’s former chef-owner Chris Lee, the Pop-Up was simply a diversion to keep themselves involved in the food community after their restaurant shut down in August 2009.
     After a brainstorming session and the realization they had 1,200 contacts who’d really loved their food in the past (many of whom were Facebook friends of Nosrat’s), the pair decided around the holidays that they’d re-create the traditions they’d instilled at the restaurant — by making hundreds of pounds of boudin blanc sausages and cassoulet upon cassoulet. Nosrat announced on her Facebook page that the pair would make the foods for pre-order and have them available for pickup the day before Christmas Eve in the back room of friend Charlie Hallowell’s restaurant, Pizzaiolo.
     It was a hit.
     “We had no idea what we were doing. No idea what to charge,” says Nosrat of the 20 cassoulets and 100 pounds of boudin blanc sausages she and Lee whipped up. “We cooked for four days and made like $12. But people were so into it.”
     The electronic snowball gathered momentum, with tweets and status updates expressing foodie indignation at being left out of the loop. So in January, Lee and Nosrat did it again, naming their venture exactly what they wanted it to be: A sort-of non-committal, boundary-less “Pop-Up General Store.” While Lee’s sausages were back for an encore, Nosrat churned out orders of ravioli butternut squash. They also pulled in another vendor, former Eccolo cook Chelsea Pence, who was trying to get a foot in the door, any door, selling baked goods. Under the label EBCB, East Bay Cookie Baker, Pence contributed bags of cookies and caramels.
    There was no turning back. Fast-forward to summer, and Nosrat is taking direction from Lee via Skype on how to make his chorizo sausages just so, and making not just 100 pounds, but more than 200, as just one of 18 specialty items available for Pop-Up pre-order (see www.popupgeneralstore.blogspot.com).
    Most underrated about the Pop-Up, though, is that it’s steeped in the spirit of being our brother’s keeper. Or, rather, our chef’s keeper. Because Lee — who saw Nosrat’s passion and potential for cooking when he was the executive chef downstairs at Chez Panisse and she was just a busser — looks out for his own. That mentality has been co-opted by Nosrat, who recently tweeted about being a “proud mama bear” after a cook she cultivated achieved success. So it’s no mistake then, that Sylvan Mishima Bracket, who worked in Alice Water’s office before starting Peko Peko catering, is at the Pop-Up selling 12-packs of frozen pork gyoza for $11; that Chez Panisse pastry cook Siew-Chinn Chin is selling six-packs of macaroons for $9.50; that Pence with EBCB is hawking graham crackers for nearly a buck a rectangle; that Soul Food Farm, which provides compassionately and organically raised poultry for upscale restaurants Coi, Quince and, of course, Chez Panisse, is selling pastured chickens at $6.50 a pound.
    “The cooking industry is so hard. If by the age of 30 you haven’t made it, you’re pretty much washed up,” says Nosrat, 30. “Chez Panisse was a supportive place to work, for sure ... but there’s only so much time you can be a line cook. So this is a way to not only bring food to this community, but to help our community — our cooking community.”
     Long ago, Nosrat and Lee reached capacity and had to turn away vendors, many of whom they’d never heard of before. But the LLC paperwork has come through, which grants the Pop-Up a business license. That alone should quiet some of the disappointed Tweeters in June (@casconed wrote “Oakland Pop-up General Store - great idea. Abysmal execution.”), since it will allow Nosrat to get rid of the central cashier and its snaking, Disneyland-like line and authorize vendors to take their own money and enable credit card exchanges.
     “If you’d asked me in January, I’d never have thought this would happen,” says Nosrat. “To immediately jump in and handle another business wasn’t a commitment I was sure I wanted to make. It was scary.”
    As of summer, though, the Pop-Up General Store had become a commitment, and the only thing left was to write up a formal business plan and a mission statement.
    The mission statement last in the works?
    “Lord, help us all,” laughs Nosrat.