After six years as a pop-up, the women behind the Vietnamese comfort-food venture Rice Paper Scissors are ready to settle down. Valerie Luu and Katie Kwan are now trying to raise $35,000 on Kickstarter to build out the space at the former La Plaza market on 22nd and Folsom streets into a permanent restaurant space.
They’re starting completely from scratch, down to installing a gas line for the kitchen and designing the interior space – “After being a pop-up for six years, we’re used to being scrappy and industrious,” they wrote on their Kickstarter page. The restaurant could be open in as little as a year, pending permitting and construction time.
Financial backers are being offered perks like house-made Asian sauces, a catered event, custom pocket notebooks, a Chinatown-inspired skateboard, or even their own private opening party.
Over their six years of serving up Vietnamese eats, Luu and Kwan have also been catering events and selling food at locations ranging from garages to burger joints to bars to warehouses. For the past three years, the pair has been looking for a permanent location, finding it tricky in San Francisco’s extraordinarily expensive rental market. Rice Paper Scissors’ most recent presence in the Mission included lunch service at Brick & Mortar Music Hall, which ran for two years before the pop-up began taking place weekly at Mojo Bicycle Cafe instead. Luu and Kwan’s first kitchen was at the Mission Latino Vocational School, and Anthony Bourdain interviewed them during a pop-up at a metal workshop on 20th and Folsom streets.
