With restaurants closed, chefs reinvent their food service methods

Five local chefs are staying busy with pizza and casual pop-ups, fairgrounds drive-thru and home-delivered boxes

By PAM KRAGEN

APRIL 2, 2020 5 AM

Normally around this time of year, Barry Schneider has about 60 employees working for him in food service at the Del Mar Fairgrounds & Racetrack. But there’s nothing normal about this year.

When the fairgrounds’ longtime executive chef returned from a two-week staycation on March 24, he walked into a kitchen idled by weeks of canceled events due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

After 20 years in the job, Schneider wanted to find a way to keep working and provide jobs for some of his longtime chef team. So he came up with a plan to revolutionize the fairgrounds’ food service operations with a just-launched drive-thru meal-delivery service that he hopes will save at least 10 jobs if not many more.

Schneider is one of several San Diego County chefs who are thinking outside the box this spring with novel ideas to keep cooking while delivering their food to customers in new ways.

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Schneider said he got the idea to try a to-go operation from his chef buddy Billy Joyce, who has been doing a good takeout business recently at Surf Side Deli in Point Loma. So Schneider went to his bosses at ASM Global and asked if he could keep a team of eight kitchen crew on and give takeout a try. They gave him two weeks to make it work or shut it down.

After a week of planning and preparation, he launched the no-touch, drive-thru Premiere To Go meal service on Tuesday. Customers can order a family meal for four for $44 and then drive into the fairgrounds via the Solana Gate, where the bagged and insulated food tray will be loaded into the customer’s car trunk.

Customers can choose from three meal options per day, like vegetable lasagna, meatloaf, chicken Parmesan and Cardiff Crack tri-tip. Beer, wine and liquor can also be ordered. Meals can be picked up from noon to 6 p.m. weekdays at premierdelmar.net.

Schneider said he hopes to do at least 100 orders a day, which would enable him to keep his small kitchen team employed. If he can double that to 200 or more orders, he can hire back more workers. One ace in his pocket is an email database of more than 5,000 racetrack and fairgrounds customers.

Until he can prove his concept, Schneider said he’s been doing old-fashioned food prep work in the kitchen that he hasn’t done in many years.

“We have to make it happen,” he said on Monday. “Every day we’re washing the dishes and pots and pans. Today I cut two cases of mushrooms, one case of zucchini squash and one case of cauliflower. Then I took the garbage out.”

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In November, Rome-born chef Marco Maestoso, 33, was forced to shut down his eponymous restaurant in Hillcrest after just 20 months in business.

At the time, he and his partner Dalila Ercolani were devastated. But now Ercolani calls it a blessing in disguise, because the costs of running the modern Italian restaurant in today’s crisis would have crushed them.

Instead, the San Diego couple quickly launched Maestoso Foods, which sells packaged, pre-baked versions of the former restaurant’s signature product, a light and bubbly form of pizza crust called “pinsa.” They were doing a brisk business to restaurants, supermarket chains and at farmers markets until the shelter-at-home order began.

“We had just started our online business three months ago and the business was doing really good. We got high sales from clients and the supermarkets were selling out. Then we got hit again. It was heartbreaking when the whole thing happened,” she said.

So the couple pivoted once again and last week they launched Craft Box Food, an online retail business that sells boxes of San Diego-made artisan food items that are delivered to customers’ doorsteps. Fueled by an active Instagram campaign, they’re now delivering up to 20 Craft Box orders a day, Ercolani said.

Customers who order a $50 Craft Box will get one pinsa crust, as well as packaged food items by six other San Diego foodmakers: Coyotas flour tortillas, Seven Seas Roasting coffee beans, Monzu fresh pasta, Aya Raw Foods kale chips, San Diego Tempeh snack loaves and Surf’s Up Salsa. Ercolani said each individual product item would serve two to four people.

All of the foodmakers providing items for Craft Box are fellow farmers market and food service vendors who were hit hard by the restaurant and market closures. Ercolani said several other product-makers have expressed an interest in being a part of the program.

While the Craft Box program was created as a way to get Maestoso and Ercolani through the quarantine period, if it takes off, they plan to keep it going as a viable mail order business. For information, visit craftboxfood.com.

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Fine dining chefs Chris Gentile and Brandon Sloan are best friends who have long dreamed of opening their own restaurant together.

So when the quarantine shuttered their kitchens — Gentile is executive chef at AVANT at the Rancho Bernardo Inn and Sloan is chef de cuisine at Provisional Kitchen in the Pendry Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter — they decided to make the best of a bad situation.

On March 19, Gentile and Sloan launched Pandemic Pizza. Working from a kitchen in San Diego, they’re making and delivering gourmet pizzas and fresh-made pasta dishes to locations throughout San Diego. All of their marketing and sales is being done via their Instagram page (@pandemicpizza), which they launched two weeks ago and now has more than 3,000 followers.

Gentile and Sloan are focusing on the food — Sloan devised the sourdough, Neopolitan-style pizza crust and all the pasta recipes — and their fiancées, Gabriela Rodriguez and Molly Watson, respectively, are doing the sales, marketing and delivery. The menu changes daily.

The pizzas and pastas are priced from $10 to $14, plus $5 for delivery outside downtown. They have sold well over 200 pizzas since the launch and business grows every day. They’re donating $1 from every pizza sold on Fridays to a charity that changes weekly. Last week it was a program that feeds the homeless. This week it’s a fund to help under-supplied hospital teams in New York City.

Although Pandemic Pizza was created simply to keep the chef buddies busy until this crisis is over, they’re open to the idea of keeping it going even after the quarantine lifts.

“We’re thinking about it,” Gentile said. “Even if the coronavirus dies off, Pandemic Pizza might live on.”

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In November, Jeannette McBrearty purchased Escondido’s beloved Vincent’s restaurant on Grand Avenue, where Brandon Hunsaker has serves as executive chef since his friend and mentor, founding French chef Vincent Grumel, passed away unexpectedly in 2016.

The popular French restaurant, which will soon be renamed Hunsaker at Vincent’s, is serving a takeout-only menu of its classic dishes as well as bottles of wine to go. But with the reduced demands of running a full-service restaurant, McBrearty and Hunsaker have launched a lower-priced, pop-up takeout-only business onsite called The Flying Toad.

“Not everyone is looking for a fine dining at-home at the moment,” McBrearty said. “Our main objective is to serve our community and keep our restaurant family working.”

The Flying Toad, which was Hunsaker’s boyhood nickname, is serving an eclectic menu that includes Kobe beef sesame burgers, short rib burritos, frog legs, fresh-baked pot pies and desserts, with all items priced from $9 to $14. There are also mix-at-home cocktail kits starting at $8.

The virtual restaurant’s website, theflyingtoad.com, features a drawing of a toad designed by Hunsaker’s nephew. When Vincent’s reopens, McBrearty said, The Flying Toad will carry on as a back-alley pickup-only restaurant.

Original article can be found here.