Fabric8 and Street Food…A Match Made in Heaven
Friday night marked the third outing of Indilicious, Brian and my street food cart. We had been invited to set up shop at Fabric8, an art gallery and store in the Mission. Its a great synergistic idea they’ve got; they have an open house/art reception which brings in people, we have our twitter followers to attract people and between us we generate lots of buzz and business.
The vibe for the night was super chill. We set up in the back, which was a sweet brick-paved garden area with trees and art work, and best, a heater. People strolled through the gallery, checking out the art and made their way back to where we and Creme Brulee Man were set up. The owners of the gallery had set up lots of seating and tables so people were able to come, relax, talk in a comfortable atmosphere. Being stationed back with Creme Brulee Man was perfect, as many people came in for dinner (Tikka Tacos) and finished up with a creme brulee (he had flavors such as lavender for lovers, ritual coffee and mint chocolate with candy cane brulee).
The gallery itself is something special and I encourage everyone to check it out. If only to see the bathroom. As I told Steven when he was debating whether to trek in from the East Bay to meet us, the bathroom alone is worth a trip across the bridge. The space is a mix of art gallery and retail shop. They sell t-shirts and knick-knacks in the front and in the back rooms display fun and interesting art. The art is completely stuff you would hang in your own home, but if you were really cool and fairly well-off. I enjoyed quite a bit of the pieces, and the mural on the outside of the building in the courtyard is beautiful and shouldn’t be missed. Anyways, they have Street Food Fridays every week as far as I can tell and its a fun stop-off point on to fit into your Friday plans.
In terms of the cart, the pace was relaxed to the point where sometimes Brian and I wondered if we were actually doing much business. But it gave us time to catch up and hang out together too. Olivia and Anthony, the owners of the gallery, kindly supplied us with drinks the whole night to keep us warm, and we snacked on tikka tacos and creme brulee to stave off hunger.
A reported with MissionLoc@l came by and interviewed us, and we made connections with a couple social media businesses that were looking to spread the word. There was Roaming Hunger, which geolocatings mobile food options on a Google map (pretty cool for the street food crowd) and Bizz.ly, which interacts with Twitter to get your tweets more face time and exposure to a wider audience. Both of these people were really cool and friendly; it was fun to meet them and learn about all the spin off businesses from the street food movement.
By 9pm, we started packing up. We chatted with other vendors and then decided it was time for some real dinner (there’s only so much tikka taco one can eat in a day). Steven had come by then so we walked to El Farolito down on Mission, with Brian singing some song he’d come up rhyming Farolito and burrito. Greasy nachos and big burrito later, we headed home.
It was a great night; we’ve actually started turning a profit and we had lots of fun meeting new people. Hope to see you all out there next time!!
Notes
-
mangalcun liked this
-
pandorasbreadbox posted this
