Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi are rolling out the second iteration of their “healthy fast-food” concept LocoL with a bakery in West Oakland, set to have its grand opening on March 31.
The LocoL Bakery is at 3446 Market St. in the old Tomm’s Bar-B-Q & Deli space, and will offer super affordable but high-quality fare — think $1 buns paired with a $1 cup of coffee.
The first Bay Area LocoL restaurant opened in May last year at 2214 Broadway in Uptown Oakland with the goal of meeting the needs of underserved communities, both in terms of the food it serves and the staff it hires. It offers dishes priced between $5 and $7, such as fried-chicken burgers ($5), red beanzz and rice ($7) and noodzz, a chicken ramen ($7).
The LocoL Bakery menu is short and sweet and consists of $1 “plain bunzz” (fun names clearly being part of the idea), egg and cheese bunzz ($4), whole pizza ($9), chili ($3 and $7), and a garden salad ($3 and $7). Drinks include agua fresca ($2), black coffee ($1), and green juice ($2 and $5).
Patterson, best known for his associations with high-end restaurants like Coi, Alta CA, Aster, and Alfred’s Steak House in San Francisco, as well as Plum Bar and Haven in Oakland, teamed up with another “celebrity chef,” the Los Angeles-based Roy Choi, to open the LocoL fast-food restaurant chain. Choi created the gourmet Korean taco truck, Kogi and is seen as one of the founders of the food-truck movement.
Speaking to Nosh last year, Patterson, who earned two Michelin stars while at the helm of Coi, said his thinking for LocoL was to approach the food there in the way he had always approached cooking: “We start with whole ingredients and cook them in a way that makes them delicious,” he said, adding that he was sourcing ingredients from the same purveyors he uses for his other restaurants, but that he and Choi would be expanding their roster of suppliers as they scaled up.
The first LocoL franchise opened in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in early 2016. A restaurant in San Francisco’s Tenderloin is on the cards. LocoL also has a food truck that is available for hire.
LocoL Bakery will be open daily 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Its grand opening in on Friday March 31, 3-7 p.m.
