Brunch pops up at Street Kitchen

LANSING — Zane Vicknair is no stranger to brunch.

He's been cooking nearly all his life and made more than his share of brunches during a decade as co-owner of Golden Harvest. 

A year ago, he opened Street Kitchen, a farm-to-table mobile food truck at the corner of East Michigan Avenue and Detroit Street with an "indoor patio" in the adjacent building. It did not serve brunch.

Life was good.

But then something "just kind of happened," he said, and now life is even better.

On Aug. 4, Street Kitchen held a pop-up brunch and just kept holding them.

"Coming up with the menus is a treat," Vicknair said, "getting into that beast mode."

"When there’s a line of people down the block and you're looking at your little tiny stove and you know that you’re going to be feeding a few hundred people, it’s what I thrive doing. I work 12 hours to be open for five hours and feed as many people as I can."

For each of the pop-up brunches, that has been about 200 people.

The brunches don't have themes but Vicknair and his team have always tried to tie in popular cultural references, whether they call a sandwich “tiny hands” or something more complimentary, as they did when Aretha Franklin died.  

"Aretha Franklin was such an influence to everybody and everything in our culture and just a beautiful example of a powerful woman and somebody that we felt needed to be honored. So we did a brunch menu based on some of her more popular songs."

Menu items included the "Respect," the "Dr. Feelgood" and the "Change is Gonna Come" sandwich, which was made with vegan sausage, beet slaw, pickled onions and dairy-free Thousand Island on Stone Circle rye bread.

"Mainly because of Aretha, and because 'The House that Jack Built' was one of my favorite songs way back, I tried the House that Waffle Built waffle," said Ena James, a customer at the Aug. 18 brunch.

"The combination was something I never would have put together, but the chicken, even the blue cheese was on point. I've been to Street Kitchen before, back when they opened. But they made me a believer this time." 

Vicknair is in the process of renovating the building next door to the food truck, where that indoor patio is located, and is converting it into a restaurant.

He hopes to be able to open by Christmas.

Since they've had to shut down on a couple Mondays because of construction for the new restaurant, the thought was to try a pop-up brunch.

Also, customers have said they were disappointed they couldn’t come on the weekends, because they worked Monday through Friday.

"They wanted to try us out, but we weren’t available on weekends," Vicknair said. "That was definitely something we had heard, and people are asking when we were going to start doing breakfast.

"The brunches wasn’t a direct response to either one of those things, but it definitely made our decision easier when we thought about how can we be creative with all the renovation going on." 

They haven't changed their hours officially to being open Saturdays, but there will definitely be a pop-up brunch on Saturday, Sept. 15. The brunches go from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. They know already that they won't do brunch every Saturday in September.

Vicknair and crew are working as a creative team to test new recipes. They're also making their own bacon, sausage and curing their own hams.

"I’m always of the adage that breakfast needs to be fairly recognizable," Vicknair said. "Someone’s not going to want sea bass liver for a breakfast entrée.

"We dwell in the familial realm of bacon and sausage and gravy and French toast, but we’re not doing anything that we had done before. We’re trying to amp it up a little bit, version 2.0."

And while people are breaking bread, Vicknair has noticed something else happening. 

Every other weekend, Street Kitchen does outreach with Punks with Lunch, a community-based nonprofit outreach organization that provides food and other necessities to people in need in the Lansing area.

On the Saturdays they host, Punks with Lunch is in the building, assembling box lunches and personal care item packages. Lately, they're getting them ready for distribution while people are inside the restaurant.

"What I find amazing is that we’ve had a lot of people get out of line and come and volunteer," Vicknair said. "Even if it's only 20 minutes, still, they’re able to participate." 

Vicknair thinks the pop-up brunch customers are enjoying the experience, maybe even more than the food.

"I think it’s that brunch is an institution, and I look out and I see people standing in line, I see people packed around these little picnic tables, and they’re rubbing elbows with each other," he said.

"You're having this unique dining experience underneath the freeway overpass."

Contact Vickki Dozier at (517) 267-1342 or vdozier@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @vickkiD.

Street Kitchen brunch

Find out about future Street Kitchen pop-up brunches on the restaurant's Facebook page: www.facebook.com/streetkitchenlansing.