Category: Client

Janice Dulce’s wife, Brandi, had to convince her they needed to set a grand opening date for FOB Kitchen, the duo’s new restaurant in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood.

After talking it over, last week they decided to have a grand opening event on Nov. 16 [and officially opened the week of Nov. 25].

FOB Kitchen has been a popular Bay Area pop-up for years, its longest residency being at Gashead Tavern in the Mission. The menu at the FOB Kitchen brick-and-mortar includes the pork lumpia and pork adobo from the pop-up, but now the dishes are served in a larger format, more meant for family-style sharing.

Cali Gold, a 2017 Chronicle Bar Star, created the restaurant’s cocktail menu, which includes a “Juhu Beach Club” option made with Indian rum, chai, lemon, ginger and cardamom.

Openings, closings and more news from the restaurant world

Royal Tee’s Custom Designs and Events

Theresa Wallace discovered her passion for making beautiful things after she was diagnosed with Lupus and had to learn how to live with the pain and suffering of that illness and related ailments. When she met Ericka Scott, Program Coordinator of the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center’s Bayview Women program, Theresa learned that her passion could actually become a business: Royal Tee’s Custom Designs and Events.

Designed to serve women where they are, Bayview Women is connecting local residents who can benefit from the opportunity to learn how to start or grow a small business to one another, as well as to the resources they need to generate more income for themselves and their families. Ericka Scott, who Center Director Marcus Tartt has dubbed “The Connector,” is the inspiration behind the program. “This is about more than business planning,” he says. “It’s a peer support group as well, and Ericka really connects with folks.”

You’d never know that Lieu was 19 when she started Socola Chocolatier in 2001 with her younger sister, Susan. At the time, she had no idea how to turn a profit or even how to make truffles. She did, however, love chocolate.

She also took a business planning course at Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center in San Francisco, where she learned that wholesale alone wasn’t feasible. She wasn’t selling enough volume, and the demos and samples were a lot of effort. It was her sister’s idea to try corporate sales, putting company logos on chocolates, which sell at a higher volume. Around Valentine’s Day, they finished a 3,500 box order for Samsung.

“Renaissance made me realize that I needed to have production and retail sales out of the same space so I only had to pay one rent,” Lieu says. “Plus, I enjoy interacting with customers, so I knew I wanted the kitchen space to be open.”

El Pípila, a family-owned operation led by chef-owner Guadalupe Guerrero and her daughters, Brenda and Alejandra, received an award for Outstanding Restaurant Design.

El Pípila’s win is a change of pace considering the last two San Francisco restaurants to top the category were Michelin-starred fine-dining establishments

San Francisco’s dazzling Mexican restaurant El Pípila and the popular cocktail bastion Bar Agricole were among the stars of Monday’s James Beard Foundation awards ceremony in Chicago, an event the culinary world likens to the Oscars.

Ruth Jordan imagined walking away from the business would be easy. Most of her adult life had been spent operating San Francisco’s oldest black-owned bar, Sam Jordan’s in the Bayview. But lately, with sales seeming to slow down, the work felt like it was coming to an end.

“We’re at this critical point where we have to be more proactive in helping these black-owned businesses by actually going to them,” said Marcus Tartt of the Bayview’s Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center. He has worked with the Jordan family in the past and was surprised to see the property for sale.

Jordan said there are still decisions to be made concerning the bar’s future and how to keep it alive moving forward, but for now, she’s content with taking it off the market. “I now see all of these people who support me, support the bar,” she said. “I thought I was finished, I really did. I guess I’m not.”

What if we didn’t need plastic bottles and toxic ingredients to take care of our hair and skin? This is the premise behind Samudra Skin & Sea, a wild seaweed skincare brand that also cares for the ocean. In this episode we talk with Shilpi Chhotray, an advocate turned entrepreneur who has built Samudra into a thriving, regenerative small business.

Shilpi is a friendly force of nature, and in this episode she shares about the pleasures and challenges of running a values-driven business, about how she leverages the Samudra brand to minimize harm from consumer products and raise awareness on bigger global issues like ocean and plastic pollution, and how she balances it all with her day job.

Somewhere along the line, women, in their infinite wisdom, decided it was OK for them to wear sneakers with everything, including dresses. As travelers, we are delighted to leave our kicks on instead of having to kick them off, no matter what outfit we’re wearing.

The eco-friendly Bendy is part-sneaker, part-flat, fully-perfect! The cushioned footbed is the same as those found in high-performance running shoes. Clearly, you need these to wander sprawling Cairo for days on end without your feet even so much as uttering one complaint.

Rica Sunga-Kwan started her ice cream operation Churn Urban Creamery two years ago in the Outer Sunset, the neighborhood where she grew up. But after trekking her ice cream cart across the city for popups and deliveries to show off flavors made with ingredients from her garden, Sunga-Kwan has found a permanent space for Churn in the Portola District, an area appropriately known as San Francisco’s Garden District in honor of its rich agricultural history.

Churn makes about 10 base flavors, many of them — like rosemary olive oil, lemon thyme, and fresh mint chip stracciatella — with ingredients from Sunga-Kwan’s garden plot, Beach Cottage Urban Farm, in the Outer Sunset.

Amid a rash of food business closures, one San Francisco neighborhood butcher shop has been saved from the brink of demise by an out-of-the-blue, angel investor, but the owner says small-business survival shouldn’t have to rely on such miracles.

Last month, Avedano’s Holly Park Market announced it would permanently close June 30 because of stiff competition from tech companies, uncertainty from the sale of its building and challenges in staffing.

The small-business owner said she now has a silent partner who just wants her to continue supporting small farmers and butchering whole animals for the foreseeable future.

Based in San Francisco, Heidi Gibson’s American Grilled Cheese Kitchen has grilled up a national following that’s boosted by her popular cookbook.

Being this cheesy isn’t easy. There’s little downtime when you’re a new mom, senior director of product management at GoDaddy, a recipe tester for America’s Test Kitchen, as well as a mentor in the small business community and a first-time franchisor with big dreams—but Gibson remains a happy juggler.

Further down the line, Gibson dreams of reaching 50 locations—just 47 more to go—as the inflection point where life gets easier as they move beyond bootstrapping into a place where franchise infrastructure begins to take the lead. In this fantastical future with busywork off her plate, Gibson wants to keep giving back to the “little ecosystem” of small business owners she frequents and maybe, just maybe, dust off that business plan for a biscuit-based concept she wrote years ago.