Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11)
Storied: San Francisco
On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850. In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of . But he’s so, so much more than that. He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco. On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His...
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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street. The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events...
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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10)
Storied: San Francisco
This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer. Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back. One...
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Ask Me SF's Ellen Lo, Part 2 (S7E9)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up with Ellen's life after she graduated from Washington University. Next up was a move to New York City. In the Big City, she consulted for a financial services company. It was 2007, just before the financial crisis of those years. She found the job market tight, so she got a job in Washington, DC, where she lived for four years. Ellen says that during her time in the nation's capital, she behaved like a New York snob, never really giving DC a chance. She'd go back to NYC just about every weekend. Some of her New York friends didn't realize that she'd moved, in fact....
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Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9)
Storied: San Francisco
One of Ellen Lo’s main motivations is to beautify the spaces she’s in. In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs , a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that later in the episode. We start with Ellen’s childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she’s gone back to visit, it hasn’t changed. Ellen’s time in North Carolina wasn’t easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town,...
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Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Nato details the three times he's left his hometown of San Francisco. The first was when he went to college, which was at Reed in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-Nineties. To get us there, Nato rattles off all of the ways that he was a "comedy head" before that was even a thing. At Reed, he met a guy who's dad was the manager of the Comedy Underground in Seattle. Nato's first time doing stand-up on stage was at the Comedy Underground, in fact. As he describes it, to say that he bombed that first time would be an...
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Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 1 (S7E8)
Storied: San Francisco
Nato Green started hanging out at San Francisco comedy clubs when he was in eighth grade. Nato’s parents met when they both still lived in the suburbs of Chicago. They got married in 1968 and moved to San Francisco soon after that. Nato says that they “were in the counter-culture, but bad at it.” What he means by that is they didn’t take their subversive lifestyles all the way like many of their peers did. But they were definitely left-leaning folks. They settled in Noe Valley, which was quite a different neighborhood back then. It was much more working-class than it is today. Think:...
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Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 2 (S7E7)
Storied: San Francisco
Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Barbara had just really become settled in San Francisco and was in what would become a decades-long process of learning the place (I can totally relate, btw). She hung out in the Castro more than the Mission, which in those days was a lesbian mecca. Café Flore (nowadays known as ) was a favorite. Eventually, though, Barbara moved to the Mission. The company she had been contracting with hired her and that provided the security she needed. She called an apartment at 19th Street and Dolores, across from Dolores Park, home. She's quick to point...
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Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 1 (S7E7)
Storied: San Francisco
One set of Barbara Gratta's grandparents came to the US from Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy. The other grandparents came from across the Italian peninsula—Bari. In this episode, meet Barbara. Today, she owns, operates, and makes wine at in the Bayview. But her journey began in White Plains, NY. All four grandparents came to Brooklyn in the 1920s. They all eventually moved north to raise families away from the bustle of New York City. Barbara's grandparents were a big part of her early life, the extended families getting together often for "big Italian Sunday dinners"...
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Whack Donuts' First Anniversary (S7 bonus)
Storied: San Francisco
It's been a damn year, y'all. In this bonus episode, we catch up with friend of the show , owner and creator of . His brick-and-mortar shop in EMB 4 just marked its one-year anniversary (and last year was a Leap Year!), and I dropped by to chat with Vandor about the time since he opened, where things stand now, and the road ahead. This Saturday, to celebrate Whack Donuts' birthday, Vandor is hosting a breakdancing jam event: 5x5 crew breaking battle $1,000 donuts line dancing free giveaways Follow for more info. And if you're able to, please to help offset some...
info_outlineZ had started a family whom he had to leave when he toured for rollerblading. It didn't take long for him to feel that he should be home—both to be there for his newborn son and to assist his partner in raising him.
Being back in San Francisco, Z started searching for the new him, the next phase. Adding to his new role as father, he enrolled in culinary classes at San Francisco Cooking School. Compared with other things he'd gotten into, this was much more intense. Z was learning from others, rather than making it up "on the fly." But he took to the kitchen right away.
He ended up doing mostly knife-for-hire work around The City and the Bay Area. Z shies away from dropping names in the restaurant industry, pointing to the fact that he feels like the people who get credit take all the shine, while those who do most of the work are in the shadows, so to speak. He says that even back then, he decided that if he branched out on his own, he'd do things differently.
Following his stint as a knife-for-hire, Z became a private chef. Then the pandemic hit. In addition to making sure his kids were doing their at-home schoolwork, he'd joined a chef's thread online. It was a space for those in his community to share how they were coping with shutdown and the loss of doing what they love. Like approximately half of us who aren't chefs, many of the people in these forums were making bread.
At first, Z was apprehensive about making bread. But his friends in the industry kept nudging him. Reluctantly, he gave in ... and at first, the results weren't good. He went at it over and over and just wasn't getting it right. Slowly, over time, he started having some success. And then cops murdered George Floyd.
Z talks at length about the effect that Floyd's murder had on him. He stayed out of protests in public for fear that he wouldn't be able to contain all the anger and frustration he felt at that moment. Instead, he turned inward.
And in that solitude, he worked and worked on his bread. It was the only thing, he says, that gave him solace. The bread got better and better and Z got to a point where he wanted to share his creation, first with his community, then with the world. A friend out in Brooklyn asked Z to ship a sourdough. The day after he did that, orders exploded.
It didn't take long for Z to scale his operation up. A bigger mixer, a second rack ... it all allowed him to keep up with demand. Then he began adding flavors to the bread, at first just for himself. One of the first of these was called The Ninth Ward, a loaf with Louisiana hot sausage inside it (yum ...). Next, he added blackberries to a loaf, which are tricky because of how wet they are and how much they stain.
People started to notice ... people like food writers. One such writer from the Chronicle asked if she could buy a loaf and hang out and talk with Z. He didn't know she was a writer, and they sat down and chatted.
By this time, Z already had the name Rize Up. He had taken his kids to see Hamilton, which has a song about rising up. It was the summer of 2020, and people were actually out in the streets protesting racial injustice. And of course, bread rises as it bakes. The name was perfect.
Once vaccines came around and it got safer to leave the house, Z moved into a bigger kitchen facility, one that allowed him to hire and be able to deliver bread to stores and other customers. Rainbow was the first grocery store to carry Rize Up. Z developed the ube loaf for Excelsior Coffee.
Z talks about those ingredients and flavors he puts into many of his loaves. In the bread world, they're called "inclusions." "Our inclusions are inclusive," he says. They are intentional and reflect his love and appreciation for his community and his neighbors.
We end the episode with Z's take on this season's podcast theme: "We're All In It."
Photography by Jeff Hunt