With hotly anticipated plans still underway for a new restaurant in North Oakland, the husband-and-wife team behind Salsipuedes has signed a lease to first open another restaurant in a different part of the city.
Jay Porter and his wife, Katie Mayfield, are planning to open The Half Orange in the Fruitvale Village transit plaza this summer, with Salsipuedes expected to follow in November, Porter said Tuesday.
The Half Orange will feature handmade sausages, grass-fed burgers and local craft beer, along with “wine and other fun stuff,” he said.
The name of the new business “is a play on our old Linkery logo, which was an icon of a sausage… and looked kind of like an orange half,” said Porter.
The Half Orange will take a similar approach to what Porter did at his San Diego-based restaurant The Linkery, which closed in July: “keeping things simple and focused on hand made sausage, grass-fed burgers and craft beer. We will also have salads from local produce, fries, and some other treats TBD.”
Porter said he and his wife are still working to open Salsipuedes in North Oakland’s Longfellow neighborhood, at 4201 Market St., and see that business as “a complement” to The Half Orange.
“Salsipuedes highlights seafood and wine, THO highlights righteous meat and craft beer, together that makes up the food and drink we love cook and serve,” he said via email. “We’ve been diligently working on Salisipuedes, and then this opportunity came up and we had to take it, even though it wasn’t in our original plan.”
The couple live in the Fruitvale neighborhood and Porter said he’s looking forward to putting down roots in both parts of the city.
The Half Orange — which took over the old Taco Grill spot — will be open for weekday lunch by late June, if all goes according to plan, and will then be open longer hours once a beer and wine license comes through, “hopefully sometime in July or August, if things go well,” Porter said.
Related:
Salsipuedes aims for ‘heartfelt cooking’ in Oakland (01.10.14)
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