November 11, 2011

By: Bernadette Samson

At Reset, we geek out about innovation, especially when it deals with food and entrepreneurship, like Off The Grid food trucks. That’s why we made a mini field trip out to Absinthe in Hayes Valley to snag a pie from the Momofuku Milk Bar and Bill Corbett joint pop-up shop bake sale.

Here are the details: Absinthe is a restaurant in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood. Bill Corbett is a famous pastry chef based in San Francisco. Momofuku Milk Bar, on the other hand, is a popular restaurant that hails all the way across the country from New York.

Cross-Country Collaboration Generates Food For Thought

momofuku-crack-pie-in-san-francisco

A shared passion for delectable desserts brought these three together, but it was the social entrepreneurial ideas behind pop-up shops that brought Momofuku across the country and into a San Francisco restaurant for just one day.

That’s right, Momofuku’s pastry chef Christina Tosi set up shop in Absinthe to sell her “compost cookies” and “gooey crack pies” to San Francisco foodies for just one afternoon (from noon to 3pm). However, it was so popular that the line rounded the corner, and by the time the Reset Team got fifteen feet away from the restaurant doors around 1pm, Absinthe employees were already apologizing for running out of crack pies.

The remarkable demand for innovative and delicious pie not only helped bring new clientele to this local restaurant, but it also introduced a new product to SF foodie taste buds.

And it showed, once again, how social tools can help stimulate our economy and activate spaces – which (other than a powerful hunger) was one of the reasons we came by to see how it worked.

Better yet, a portion of the proceeds were donated to the San Francisco Food Bank. Sounds like a win-win-win situation.

Delicious Partnerships Can Boost The Local Economy

Imagine if this happened every day with various partnerships all across the city – we could help the economy grow through collaboration and sharing of tasty food!

As shown by the Absinthe-Momofuku-Bill Corbett trifecta model, pop-up shops are a quick, effective and social collaboration of quickly attracting attention and spreading ideas – or in this case tasty and colorful desserts – between restauranteurs and foodies across the country. What’s next? Spreading new food recipes through international pop-up shop restaurants and bakeries? That’s got my vote!

Also, the Reset Team is not easily defeated – although we did not get to try the crack pies this time around, we’re still determined to partake in this amazing experience by ordering one on the Momofuku website. Do you have an idea for a tasty SF partnership? Let us know!