Restaurants that blossom without putting down roots

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On Monday, Camello was one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants. On Tuesday it wasn’t, but I keep an eye out. It might be again, any day now.

After a couple of failed partnerships, 31-year-old chef Ronnie Muñoz decided to strike out on his own. But the chasm between employee and owner is wide, and treacherous, and expensive, so he opted for a safer transition than a lease on a permanent place. Muñoz’s dream lives for the moment in his brother’s borrowed Ford Transit Connect van, which he drives from one pop-up location to another, a moveable feast that relies on other people’s restaurants, bakeries and breweries.

Momentum is essential. He opened for business a year ago in the driveway of his home, and by March he was on the road, serving customers in one ZIP code or another as opportunity allowed. Camello is not yet a brick-and-mortar restaurant but more than a portable food stall, a half-step that relies on people who lend his dream a hand.

My first visit was to East Hollywood, thanks to the dual draw of light weekend traffic and flavor combinations I needed to taste to appreciate. Since then, tracking Camello has become a favorite work-break distraction. I am willing to do two things I rarely do — take a drive across the city and stand in line — because tenacity and great food deserve our support, even if the ambience is heavy on street noise.

Muñoz started out with a signature meal-in-a-sandwich, a homemade pita made with Tehachapi Grain Project blue corn flour, stuffed with fillings that reflected both Mexican and Levantine cuisines. He listed every new menu item and location on social media, and by late summer was posting happy photos with messages like, “sold out 60 sandwiches in thirty minutes!” after a stop at downtown’s Boomtown Brewery. He bought a rotisserie roaster for the chickens he intends to add to the menu, and started a conversation with a landlord at what might become a real home.

For now he does his prep work in a rented commercial kitchen and then loads the truck with fillings and sauces he can assemble wherever he’s going, pitas and a pita warmer, a compact refrigerator, a cutting board, and storage containers. In late September he joined the ranks at Smorgasburg L.A., on Sundays; for that he packs a generator as well.

If a restaurant charges him more than his sales warranted, he finds others. Clémence de Lutz, whose Petitgrain Boulangerie in Santa Monica is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays – and who began her own career filling orders out of a rented commercial kitchen – provides a frequent home away from home, Muñoz’s customer line on those days a junior version of the one the bakery draws Wednesday through Sunday.

There are unexpected side benefits to tracking and visiting pop-ups. The drive through neighborhoods, rather than past them on the freeway, is a nice reminder of how many discrete towns there are inside L.A.’s city limits. Supporting an incipient restaurant is something I can do to help make sure a block’s future doesn’t devolve into a repeating row of national food franchises.

At the recent mayoral debate, Mayor Karen Bass equated street food vendors who set up right in front of restaurants with homeless people whose presence there deters customers, a position she quickly recanted after a storm of criticism, her office announcing, “she stands firmly with street vendors.”

Ironically, her qualifier about location might have struck a chord if not for its tone. I’ve heard complaints from restaurant owners for years about unfair competition from nearby vendors who don’t have to pay rent or utilities and can charge less because of it. But the city of Los Angeles occupies almost 470 square miles and is home to almost 4 million people. Surely there is more than enough room for everyone — street vendor, pop-up, restaurant.

There’s conceptual room, too. When I want to be looked after, I head to a full-service restaurant on a nearby stretch of local businesses. When I want to eat at home while I watch the nightly news, I go to my favorite food stall or check out Camello’s latest location. Apples and oranges.

Besides, where does the mayor think the next generation of neighborhood restaurants is going to come from? Some young chefs have name recognition and the investors who come with it. Venture capitalists have lately fallen for restaurants, as though they were adorable rescue dogs — and wouldn’t it feel good to save one? Not everyone attracts financial attention, though, and what seems like good fortune at the start isn’t, always; it can come with strings attached. Muñoz prefers to operate on his own, and, while Camello’s truck and driveway, his experience and contacts, put him a significant step ahead of food stalls, they are all part of the city’s adjunct hospitality universe.

Some will stay where they are because the price of admission is too steep, but some members of this temporary population are poised for the next step. The only difference between them and the previous generation of ambitious chefs, the ones who shot forward too fast and too often flamed out, is pacing. It might be the one thing that saves them, in the long run.

We diners need to slow down, as well. I’ve never before heard so much kill-the-messenger noise directed at restaurants, which boils down to: “I am not going out anymore, it’s too expensive and I can cook this stuff at home instead of being ripped off.” Well, no, you can’t, and service counts for something, and inflation is not a restaurant’s fault. They’re reeling from sticker shock just like the rest of us.

I am not suggesting we have an obligation to dine at ear-splitting, high-concept, table-churning establishments. I am saying we should take care of our good-neighbor food operations, even if it requires a GPS to do so, as they try to take care of us — and try not to get ahead of themselves.

Which brings me back to Muñoz and others like him. I’m hopeful about a next generation that sees modulated growth as a survival strategy, not a consolation prize, even if it means packing and unpacking that truck and commuting to tomorrow’s temporary home.

Karen Stabiner is the author of the forthcoming “Try One Bite: Saving My Life, One Restaurant at a Time.”

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