The Vegan Fast Food Revolution

Vista Weekly Popups

The plant-based food scene is growing throughout San Diego. And a big part of this growth is Vegan Food Pop-Up, which now boasts three monthly locations, thanks to the November 12 arrival of its Saturday market in North Park. The farmers-market-style event attracts vendors from all over Southern California, bringing everything from sushi to dog treats (including donuts and jewelry), all of it made within the bounds of a plant-based lifestyle.

Organizer Michelle May launched Vegan Food Pop-Up as a bimonthly event in Encinitas back in 2019. Now having made it past a few Covid-era speed bumps, VFP is expanding toward a goal of hosting a market somewhere in the county every weekend.

The market is currently scheduled to pop up the first Saturday of every month at the Heritage Museum in Encinitas (12 p.m.-4 p.m.), every third Friday at the Local Roots kombucha brewery in Vista (5 p.m. to 9 p.m.), and every second Saturday at the North Park Mini Park (12 p.m. to 4 p.m.), which was recently installed behind the Observatory music venue.

But May—who also operates vegan space ice cream and coconut jerky brand Seva Foods—is not finished. Approaching holidays in November and December preclude launching a fourth weekend in 2022, but the vegan entrepreneur is already on the hunt for additional spots. She says, “I’m hoping that by January we’ll be ready to announce at least one more new location.”

Michelle May Vegan popups

In addition to bringing the plant-based market to additional communities, one of the reasons May wants to increase the number of market days is that she says she’s got a waiting list of vendors wanting to participate. “There’s just such a hunger (pun intended) for these kind of events that it’s been really easy to book them,” she explains.

The pop-up expands mostly by word of mouth. In a tight-knit Southern California vegan community, Los Angeles and Orange County-based vendors have grown to appreciate San Diego’s reliable vegan demand. To the north, May speculates, a higher frequency of vegan events leads to uneven attendance and increased competition between vendors. They’re willing to come south, she says, because “They tend to do better at the pop-up than they do at some of the regular markets in L.A.”

May does her part by carefully curating each event to prevent overlap and prevent food waste. “I’m straddling this very fine line of wanting a great user experience for my attendees,” she says, “I don’t want them to wait in line too long or—God forbid—get there and all the food’s gone.” She invites roughly 50 vendors to the Encinitas market, while Vista and North Park run smaller, about 30 a piece. A few core vendors appear at every market, including plant-based fish substitute SeaCo Catch, Vegan Mirai Sushi, and Maribel y Olivia Cocina, purveyors of vegan Mexican dishes such as jackfruit and mushroom birria.

The vendor drawing the longest lines at each event is OC-based food truck The Donuttery. “I don’t think you can mention the pop-up without talking about The Donuttery,” May says, “They are without a doubt the most popular vendor that we have… the line is usually nonstop.”

While most of the food vendors represent 100 percent plant-based businesses, May is open to omnivores that serve vegan-friendly menus. One example, Sabor Piri Piri Kitchen, appears regularly at farmers markets serving traditional dishes of Mozambique, but for the pop-up it forgoes chicken curries for the broccoli, black eyed peas, and collard greens of its vegan menu.

the-donuttery.jpeg

Similarly, the baker behind market mainstay Bonjour Patisserie has found ways to produce plant-based versions of traditional French pastries including croissants and crème brûlées. “He’s worked really hard to source some really high-quality vegan butters,” says May, noting Bonjour will be one of the vendors appearing in North Park.

Clearly, culinary diversity is a priority at all the pop-ups, but perhaps the best reason to attend regularly is that vendors at the pop-up have been the first to introduce local vegans to a growing spate of plant-based meat alternatives coming to market. The past year has witnessed the introduction of meat replacements by Omni Foods, Next Meats, and Nature’s Fynd, which makes sausage and cream cheese out of mushrooms. Attendees can be the first to try these meaty treats, in addition to activities like tarot card readings, henna painting, and reiki massage.

The Kitchen – sandwich

Ligaya Malones

Chef Rob Ruiz is back. But the notable sushi chef and sustainable seafood advocate needed to grapple with grief and shovel literal fish guts to get here. We’re in between lunch and dinner service at The Kitchen, Ruiz’s new passion project in Vista.

“I learned all these things,” he begins: classical French cooking, Hawaiian Regional Cuisine (including how to slice sashimi from Alan Wong’s team), sushi, fine dining.

“After what all of us have gone through the last couple years, what’s my answer to ‘What could I do for people?’ And I’m like, I’m gonna make ’em really awesome food and I’m gonna do it for seven bucks.”

Welcome to The Kitchen

The Kitchen started as a commissary for Crownview Co-Occurring Institute’s food program, which Ruiz oversees. Crownview, located in Oceanside, shepherds recovery programs for people facing post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and other mental health conditions. Ruiz and team, including some Crownview graduates, make and deliver meals for its programs. On the day I visited, dinner was chipotle shrimp and penne pasta.

As of March, it’s also a fast-casual sit-down restaurant. From the counter, you order simple yet delicious food—delicately battered fish and chips, chicken sandwiches on housemade biscuits, salads, and burgers. All ingredients are either grown at The Kitchen’s farm in Bonsall or otherwise locally produced, which helps keep overhead low. Salads are named for the seeds that spawned their leafy greens, and virtually all dressings, condiments, and baked goods are made from scratch, which also keeps costs down. 

A Tsunami of Humility

Just a few years ago, before The Kitchen, adversity slammed Ruiz from every angle. His signature sushi restaurant shuttered. Death came for someone close to him. Then the pandemic came for us all. Ruiz, like many in the hospitality business, was furloughed. 

Fishmonger Tommy Gomes and team threw him a line processing fish to eke out a paycheck.

 “I was like, okay, put me wherever you want,” Ruiz says. “So they put me on the boat, right. And you’re on the boat, and they have a crane that goes down and picks up like 500 or 600 pounds of tuna at a time. There’s seawater washing through the deck of the boat—it’s in the harbor, but it’s still gonna move. And then you have a cutting board that you’re just hoping to land the fish on because it’s moving. The fish is moving. The crane is moving. You have 10 guys all around you, all moving.

“And my job was to pick up a 100-plus-pound fish by yourself, carry it over, put it down, then get the head off of it, hand the head off, break the fillets off, go all the way and break it down to nothing. And then go run and get another one. You just do that nonstop. And you can’t wash your knife; you can’t wash your cutting board.

 “This is just a few hours. These guys who do that for a living, these guys are beasts. These guys are a different breed. These guys are amazing.”

The point is, the once-rigid Ruiz is more malleable now, more balanced, yet the pursuit for bigger and better is still on. During the decade he spent cooking and surfing on Hawai‘i Island (the Big Island), some coworkers from Oaxaca gave him the kitchen name “El Diablo Sin Cola,” or The Devil Without a Tail.

“I really do things 110 percent,” he explains. He attributes his drive to his grandfather, a former Navy captain, who “always had a high bar of what was expected.” Give him a chapter to read and Ruiz will rip through the entire book, and then some. 

Fine dining is still on his mind, maybe, eventually. So are whole paycheck-worthy tasting menus. Right now though, Ruiz is giving The Kitchen 110 percent.

It’s maddening enough rebuilding your restaurant for pandemic dining. Everyone’s give-up instinct is inflamed. Many of your trusted business practices have been deep fried into oblivion, and owners have to create new ones from the ashes. They have to reinvent with skeleton crews, since the shutdown meant most staff was laid off. It’s at that point that all employees become co-architects of an entirely new model.

“There was an empowering of our staff to step up and own our solutions,” says Kory Stetina, owner of South Park’s vegan death metal restaurant, Kindred. “Including efforts they made to help our other staff out, working with grants and getting employee meals set up.”

Dining During COVID / Kindred Food

Photo courtesy of Kindred

Stetina and his crew’s solution? “Kindred Crypt Sessions,” where they transformed half their space into a restaurant-within-a-restaurant for a series of seven-course pop-up dinners (five food courses, two cocktail courses). So much of Kindred’s appeal depends on the art of its decoration (from the ornate grandma-on-psychedelics wallpaper, to the massive black demon head lording over the dining room). The thought of making it a cubicle farm of social-distance Plexiglas crushed their soul a bit.

“We were a bit skeptical that it would be a diluted version of itself,” he says.

Dining During COVID / Kindred Interior

Photo courtesy of Kindred

Crypt Sessions solves this. By selling tickets ahead of time, Stetina can send the “do’s and don’ts” over email, and doesn’t have to clutter up the environment with handmade lists of rules. Guests enter through a separate side alcove. A few tables in the middle of the dining room have been turned into a plant installation, a lush way to ensure six feet. A chandelier in the bar has been interspersed with pulsing gothic candlelight. Flowers abound. Their pagan church windows are propped open for airflow.

“It’s the answer to ‘What if we throw out all our normal rules of efficiency and really reach for our most experimental and ambitious sense of identity?’” Stetina explains. “We envisioned guests getting lured into our space to have a private meal from these fictitious mystics that dwell inside Kindred.”

What the hell does that mean? Well, Kindred is San Diego’s version of a prog-rock band, infusing their food and drinks with Tolkienian backstory. Practically, it means using more primitive sourcing methods (foraging for local pine for one of their cocktails), ancient cooking methods (grilling, which also helps speed up the cooking process), and older-world spirits (sherry, brandy, fortified wine, Chartreuse). Menus like old archeological stone carvings. Anything to cast the vibe of the night back a few hundred years, to anywhere but now.

Dining During COVID / Kindred Cocktail

Photo courtesy of Kindred

It also gives the cooks a creative license they didn’t have before coronavirus, when they were too slammed to tinker. “The hope is that we strip away our constraints and do some really fun and wild things with our menu,” he says. “Start to think about some of these dishes as part of our eventual reopening.”

For Stetina, the best part about the Crypt Sessions is, because the more elaborate food requires a ton of prep, he’s been able to hire back almost 100 percent of what he calls the “heart of the house”—the kitchen staff.

“The day I had to furlough my employees was by far the worst day of my professional career,” he says, noting that through the Crypt Sessions and the daily takeout and partial dine-in service, he’s been able to hire about 60 percent of his total staff back. “The good side of all this is the conversation and understanding between restaurants and customers has become more real. We’ve been far more transparent with our financials. They’ve shown a greater desire to learn. They’re asking, ‘How can we help?’”

Kindred

1503 30th Street, South Park

Dining During COVID / Kindred Feature

Photo courtesy of Kindred

If this is vegan brunch, I might bid a pretty unemotional farewell to bacon some day. If this is the vegan scene, it’s drastically more awesome than haters would like to believe. For years, I’ve considered veganism a very good thing and reflexively generalized vegans as smug, sanctimonious blowhards.

To be fair, the badgering went both ways. Vegans (some, not all) accused omnivores of being murderers driven only by our own gluttony, environmental nihilists ushering in doomsday with every callous bite. Omnivores (some, not all) in turn belittled vegans as sickly looking crusaders, just another wacky religious sect, the Scientologists of food. Eventually, I assumed we’d get to a less judgmental middle ground. Someone would give San Diego an exciting vegan restaurant and bar that was less a territorial pissing and more of a come-all plant party.

Kindred in South Park is that place. It’s a restaurant for any human, really, who likes cool things. I’ve been a fan for years. I hadn’t, however, ventured in with their late morning crowd and seen the full evolution. Now that the food is catching up with (or caught up with) the cocktails, Kindred is a force.

Their breakfast strudels are some intoxicating carbs. Our favorite is the savory shaved seitan with tapioca mozzarella and pickled peppers. It’s spicy, meaty, cheesy, bready. The cinnamon and brown sugar strudel with candied pecans and coconut syrup is flaky on the outside, pure molten, thick, and gooey cinnamon roll inside. The pancakes with bruléed bananas, bourbon butterscotch, and whipped coconut cream aren’t good for your waist size, but they are good for your soul. Their hash is also very good, with fried potatoes, black beans, smoked coconut (vegan bacon), soy curls, maitake mushrooms, charred kale, jicama salsa, and Creole aioli.

The vibe has always been modern art. It’s the massive shiny-black demon head that lords over the main dining area. What an elegant, imposing beast. It’s the ornate pink wallpaper that appears cute and grandmotherly until a closer inspection reveals illicit scenery. It’s the gothic windows and the two-top tables that look like desks pulled from pagan Sunday school, or sidecars for Wiccan motorcycles. It’s the sludgy heavy metal on the speakers offset by the flood of fresh, natural light pouring in.

Previously, plant-based restaurants had a reputation as antiseptic prayer rooms for self-serious wellness people. Kindred owner Kory Stetina decided not to do that, and enlisted art-restaurant makers Consortium Holdings (Morning Glory, Born & Raised) to build a noisier temple for more entertaining urges.

In doing so, he positioned Kindred to be the Casbah or CBGB of vegan food and drink.

Because the plant-based movement is not just here to stay—it’s remodeling a sizable wing of the restaurant industry. Overall, the stats are still small. Gallup reports that about 5 percent of Americans claim to be vegetarian, and 3 percent vegan. But a report by The Economist in late 2018 raised eyebrows when it reported a full quarter—25 percent—of Americans in the 25-34 age demo claim to be either vegetarian or vegan.

There’s a good chance some of those people secretly cheeseburger in the dark. But even if they’re pretending to be plant-based, that means the lifestyle is now an aspiration, a status badge for an entire age demo.

If your eyes are open, you know it’s at least partially real. Meatless Mondays have been growing in number for years. Serena Williams and Tom Brady are vegan. So are Ellen Degeneres, Bill Clinton, Joaquin Phoenix, Paul McCartney—just lots of famous people. Plant-based meat companies like Impossible and Beyond are booming. Some of the world’s top chefs have plant-based menus (at French Laundry, we preferred the plant-based menu) or even entire restaurants (like ABCV from Jean-Georges in New York).

In San Diego, Kindred is the weird and fuzzy center of the movement. It’s not a trap meant to get omnivores drunk on Prohibition cocktails and guilt them into declaring legumes the one true god. At least from an outsider’s perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any agenda aside from being an exciting restaurant. And it’s pulling this off.

Kindred’s vision of the future isn’t the only one, but it is one of them. And their brunch is excellent whether you’re omnivore, vegan, or merely ambivalent and hungry.

Kindred, 1503 30th St., South Park