April 18, 2012

From the Streets to Startups: A Q&A with Sataysfied Founder Feldo Nartapura

By Steffi Wu

Feldo Nartapura, founder of Sataysfied, knows how to hustle. While I mean this in the sense that he works swiftly and with great energy, apparently the slang meaning of “hustle” -- earning one’s living by illicit means -- also used to apply. When I met with Feldo a few weeks ago he told me the story of starting Sataysfied, remarking with a mischievous grin:

“Back in the day when I was selling satays in the street I had to duck from the cops!”

True story.

Feldo considers Sataysfied a startup, not unlike the startups he feeds on a regular basis.

“Just because my product is not software, an iPhone app or a social game doesn’t mean Sataysfied is not a startup,” he said. “Currently my company is self-funded but we're open to VC funding. We have a lean team that's picking up traction with a variety of 'users' (eaters) and we have plans to scale things up!"

The following Q&A is part one of a series of blog posts we’ll be doing with Feldo. Read on to learn about Feldo’s startup journey thus far: from getting laid off to selling satays in the dark with the help of his trusty headlamp, from serving at Outside Lands to sataysfying (sorry, we had to) ZeroCater customers!

SW: Start at the beginning. You used to work at a startup?

FN: Originally from Los Angeles, I moved to San Francisco to work for an affiliate marketing startup. Working in a startup environment was fun but required a lot of long hours. Eventually, our company grew so much that we got acquired by a bigger company and I was forced to move back to LA. The new company was going in a complete different direction that I didn't believe in and many of my colleagues quit, so what used to be a fun startup job became a dull corporate one. The affiliate industry was booming (some people were making 5 figures a day at one point) but at the end of the day I wasn't happy. Eventually my lack of enthusiasm showed and I got fired.

SW: So you were jobless. What happened next?

FN: My parents have been running their own catering business in LA for years using this really amazing satay marinade recipe that my grandmother passed to my father. He started serving to friends, which eventually led to catering gigs, and that's how the satay family business started.

“Satays are our bread and butter, and my parents focused on the authentic Indonesian cuisine that they grew up eating.”

Being jobless and collecting unemployment, I would help my parents sell satays and work the festival route in LA. As you can imagine, working with one’s parents in general can be very difficult. My mom and dad weren’t very organized, lacked marketing skills and didn’t speak great English. Although they were selling a delicious product, they were only selling mainly to the Indonesian community and not to many Americans.

Everybody that got to taste our satays and Indonesian cuisine absolutely loved it so I felt there was a huge opportunity out there to share this type of food with the world. This was also the time when the food truck and street food scene started picking up. So on a whim, I decided to move back to SF to start my little food startup and hawk satays on the streets.

SW: How did you come up with a clever name for your business?

FN: I originally came up with terrible names like “Satay Baby,” “Satay by the Bay,” or even “LA Satay.” After polling my friends via Facebook I got a text from one friend who said how about "Sataysfied?" I immediately fell in love with it.

SW: What was it like the first time you sold satays?

FN: Since I was without a kitchen license, seller’s permit, and insurance, The Pizza Hacker advised me to check out Precita Park down in the Mission. So I brought my little BBQ grill and satays, tweeted to my 40 followers and hoped for the best.

“There were cops patrolling the area so I ducked and covered constantly, leaving all my BBQ stuff to walk around the park! That day I made four dollars because no one bought anything. I had to pass satays out for free and some guy out of pity gave me a $4 tip. Ouch.”

SW: After such a terrible first outing, what did you do next?

FN: I did more homework. I researched street food vendors on Twitter, saw which venues they’d worked, and started pitching. My first official gig at an art gallery called Fabric8, which happened to be the same day a SF Weekly journalist showed up to try my satays. That led to a SF Weekly article, which led to more work at art galleries and my street corner at 20th and Valencia.

SW: Your corner?

FN: Yeah, I spent many freezing cold Friday and Saturday nights from 10 pm to 3 am selling to drunkards in the Mission! I also sold satays in the Castro during Halloween, which was also a little crazy:

SW: What was "working the streets" like?

FN: Working the streets was physically grueling. You could say I was a one-man food truck. I packed the equipment in my car, unpacked it and set up the table and grills. I was the cook, cashier man and salesman, working by a camping light. I barely slept because I was working so much. The money was so sporadic that I was surviving and that was it. Something had to change.

SW: What were some big milestones for you?

FN: I applied to participate in Off the Grid in March 2011 and I got accepted! That was the biggest break for Sataysfied. I started making great revenue and getting known as one of the go-to street vendors to try. Then we were invited to be at Outside Lands, which became one of the biggest highlights for us in 2011. In one weekend at Outside Lands I made more money than I did in one year working in a previous job in LA.

SW: How did you transition from festival-type work to catering?

FN: It took me a while to grasp the concept of catering but it turned out to be simple! I just cooked my satays, wrapped them up and delivered them. No packing and unpacking equipment, setting up tents, or making signs. Plus there’s always a set amount of food to make.

Today I mainly do catering and it’s been a lot of fun. My favorite part is being able to go back to my roots in the startup community. It’s exciting to be able to serve the startup community and talk to everyone from engineers to office managers to CEOs. Every time I drop off food, I ask what kind of startup they are, what market they’re hitting up, and what they are doing to change the world. It's especially fun when I cater to startups whose services I actually use, like WePay, Hipmunk, Outright.com, Milo and others.

“The people at the startups that I feed are always so fascinated that this catering guy actually knows their lingo and loves to talk to them. I’m happy to be contributing to the startups in Silicon Valley in my own way -- I let them focus on working rather than being hungry. Our motto is ‘Stay Full and Keep Scaling.’”

SW: What has been your experience working with ZeroCater?

FN: I’m happy not to be selling on the street any more. I no longer work until 3 am and I often make as much money on one ZeroCater order than I did in a whole night of selling, and often three times more with bigger orders. I also feel blessed to have a stable income, to be able to provide for me and my dog, Sassy.

SW: Look into the crystal ball. What’s next for Sataysfied?

FN: We want to be the go-to caterer for all startups. Crunchbase lists more than 1500 startups in the Bay Area alone and I’d love to Sataysfy all of them. It’s a lofty goal, but I think with hard work, focus and dedication we can accomplish it.

January 12, 2012

Q&A: Sylvan Mishima Brackett’s Journey from Chez Panisse to Peko-Peko

Photo by Fredrika G Stjarne

Sylvan Mishima Brackett is the founder of catering business Peko-Peko and former Creative Director at Chez Panisse. Sylvan and his sumptuous, seasonal bento boxes have been featured in The New York Times as well as Gourmet. ZeroCater is thrilled to have him aboard as one of our vendors; Sylvan experimented with bento boxes made exclusively for our customers before offering them to the general public. We caught up with him recently to ask about his inspirations.

What are your earliest memories of cooking?
I was born in Kyoto and lived there until I was about a year old. Then my father built a house for us in the foothills of Northern California, outside of Nevada City. I grew up on 40 acres surrounded by a national forest and I used to water and weed my mother’s little garden. My mother was a really good cook, and we used to make a Japanese version of shumai dumplings together. Both shumai and gyoza were family endeavors because they require a lot of work: rolling out the dough, filling them with pork and minced onion, wrapping them.

For my senior project in high school I opened a pop-up restaurant and cooked everything I knew how to make, which was a complete hodgepodge of Japanese pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, French onion soup, Japanese curry, all sorts of things. For a high school audience I kind of didn’t know what I was doing and I probably ended up losing money...it was fun, though!

Notably you worked for a long time at Chez Panisse with Alice Waters. Can you tell us more about that?
I worked as Alice’s assistant for six years and then left to work in Japan. When I got back I worked for a year as Chez Panisse’s Creative Director, managing special events and the graphic design (creating menus, invitations and posters that incorporated Alice’s aesthetics). I also helped with dinners for visiting chefs and celebrities like Juliette Binoche and Yo Yo Ma. These days I still do graphic design for the restaurant on occasion -- I met with Alice about their New Year’s card, for example.

Are there other chefs who inspire you?

There are a lot of young chefs doing excellent work. Off the top of my head:

I like what Danny Bowien is doing at Mission Chinese in San Francisco.
Russell Moore (Camino, Oakland): Everything at Camino is cooked in an open fire, over wood. Russell used to be the chef at the Chez Panisse Cafe and he does food that is even simpler than Chez Panisse but it’s extremely well thought out and perfectly executed. Pretty amazing.
Chris Kronner (Bar Tartine, San Francisco) I’ve done some pop-up events over there and I really like his cooking -- it’s exciting food.

Photo by Aya Brackett

Talk to us about your time in Japan.
Growing up, every three years I'd spend summers in my grandmother’s village outside of Kyoto. When I decided about seven years ago that I wanted to start cooking Japanese food seriously, I started visiting once or twice a year to train, eat and travel.

I worked at a fairly small restaurant called Soba Ro in Saitama, northeast of Tokyo. Chef Kanji Nakatani is a total character who has taken soba to new and delicious places. He buys a lot of stuff from his father-in-law who’s a farmer, and there’s also a super fish market up there. He uses the same soup, made with seasoning base katsuobushi (shaved bonito), for all sorts of other food like dashimaki tamago (rolled omelet, a version of which you see at sushi restaurants) and grilled fish. I use katsuobushi in a lot of the food I make, like my gyudon.

Kanji Nakatani’s approach is similar to Chez Panisse’s philosophy: find good ingredients and make the best of them. He also has a very lusty way of approaching food -- making it really flavorful, colorful, beautiful and balanced. He’s an amazing chef.

I worked at Soba Ro for a summer and I’ve been back for two or three short stints since then. Alice has invited him to do dinners at Chez Panisse a few times and I believe he’s coming again this spring.

Photo by Aya Brackett

You package your bento boxes with so much care. Why did you decide to focus on presentation?

I really like the idea of a bento that is super specific and comes in an exquisite package. A beautiful little contained meal.
The bento boxes I’m making for ZeroCater are inspired by two kinds of Japanese bento. First there’s ekiben, or bento that you can get in the train stations in Japan. They used to be very regional so in one area they’d be famous for chicken, in another it’d be unagi, or squid. The main point was to feature that one ingredient.

I was also inspired by the high-end bento that you can get in basements of department stores in Japan. I don’t want to call them malls and they’re not really food courts. Basically there are a lot of traditional Japanese companies that have branches in department stores. The company that makes the most amazing tonkatsu, 40 different kinds, all with different cuts of pork, might have a little shop in the bottom floor of the department store. Or there may be somebody who makes crackers, Japanese sweets, or gyoza - all very beautifully packaged and delicious...quite expensive, but perfectly worked out. Often when I’m flying home I’ll stop at the station connected to a department store, go down and get a beautiful unagi bento, packed in wood or bamboo husk. Those can run up to $30 per person for a little boxed lunch but they’re perfect and super deluxe.

Had you always planned on opening your own catering business? What was the impetus for Peko-Peko?

The idea of catering and bento was going to be first step toward opening a restaurant so I could figure out all my sourcing. I ferreted out really good rice and meats and vegetables. I found matsutake mushrooms here -- they are super fancy and extremely expensive in Japan but much cheaper here because they don’t have quite the caché. I also found a place to harvest fresh bamboo shoots, as well as places that sell esoteric herbs and spices such as myoga and sancho pepper.

What do you think are the most common mistakes people make when opening a restaurant?
The most basic mistake is not keeping standards high. I understand when you open a restaurant it can be totally crazy and you want to get the food out quickly so you might take some shortcuts, but keeping the food high-quality is so important. Even if you lose money in the beginning eventually people will come around to it.

Of course, you still need to be conscious about keeping costs to a minimum. A lot of people have opened million dollar restaurants but the finances are hard to make work when you have investors who need to make their money back and you can never get yourself out of a hole.