Sharing commercial kitchen space is a little like having roommates. It’s all fun and games, until it comes time to do the dishes.

Iso Rabins came to that realization through experience: He is a founder of Forage Kitchen, the so-called culinary “co-working incubator space” set to open at the end of this month in Uptown Oakland. Over the last eight years operating in the Bay Area as a food entrepreneur, Rabins has been through his share of commercial kitchens, to say the least.

“I’ve worked in a lot of these spaces so I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, and I’ve seen the things that break down — one of them being dishwashing,” he says, explaining the familiar scenario. “There’s one pot in there, no one will claim it, and everyone will get pissed off because they’re washing their dishes but there are all these pots that no one else is washing. And I feel like it’s those kinds of little things that can break down morale really quickly.”

It’s one of the minor “pain points” that Rabins and his business partner (and cousin) Matt Johansen want to address at their sparkling new facility on 25th Street between Broadway and Telegraph, in the heart of Uptown Oakland’s art gallery district. For starters, Forage Kitchen will employ a full-time, on-site dishwasher, in addition to hiring a professional cleaning crew for general cleanup. Reserving table space — another common source of contention in shared kitchens — will be done online, so everything is simple and out in the open. Also, Forage is not just targeting hardcore food professionals — there will be a $99/month “Maker Membership” plan geared toward hobbyists and enthusiasts to use the facility once a week.

Members will also have access to the sort of administrative-related amenities that food entrepreneurs often overlook, including mailboxes for separate business addresses, bookkeeping help and shared office space — “Sometimes you have to use the computer,” says Rabins. Already, the Food Craft Institute, the Oakland-based non-profit that provides educational courses for artisan food companies, is relocating its offices and classroom space into the Forage Kitchen facility.

“The concept of this space,” says Rabins, “is sort of like everything that I wish I had when I started my own business.”

Back to Gallery Forage Kitchen set to launch in Uptown Oakland 2 1 of 2 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 2 of 2 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle



Those businesses placed Rabins on the cutting edge of the Bay Area food scene. His Forage SF leads excursions hunting down local wild edibles such as mushrooms, plants, and seaweed. His Wild Kitchen, in turn, hosts roving underground suppers that highlight those foraged wild ingredients.

Rabins’ greatest claim to fame, however, was Underground Market, a business venture that was deemed just a little too much for San Francisco. Started in 2009, the monthly market served as a platform for food makers to showcase their products to the public, without the bureaucracy — i.e., the costs and delays associated with food production regulations and inspections. With 50 to 100 vendors per event drawing attendees in the thousands, the (quasi-legal) gathering proved immensely popular, until a front-page story in The New York Times led to city officials shutting it down permanently in 2012.

“The Underground Market inspired my desire to open Forage Kitchen,” Rabins explains. “That was a fun event and it gave people a lot of opportunities, but ultimately all I could offer was a space at the market to sell stuff to people. When it came down to going legit — like getting permits and operating a professional kitchen — I didn’t have the bandwidth or the knowledge, really. All I knew about was doing these sort of sub-legal, gray-area events. That was my specialty.”

Rabins decided to hold a Kickstarter campaign to start his own culinary incubator space — above-board this time — and raised an eye-popping $150,000. Since then, it’s been a long, frustrating process to make it a reality. San Francisco rents skyrocketed. Location after location fell through until, four years later, he and Johansen finally secured and built out their current space. (They’ve since reimbursed supporters who were promised kitchen time as part of their donation.)

Ultimately Rabins and Johansen believe it all worked out for the best. While not in San Francisco as originally planned, they ended up smack in the middle of a neighborhood (and city) that has become one of the culinary and cultural hubs of the Bay Area.

For once, however, Rabins is not the first on the scene.

As pointed out by Sophia Chang — who runs her own shared commercial kitchen, Kitchener, just a few blocks away — the field is a lot more crowded than when she opened four years ago. Besides Kitchener, Port Kitchens launched not far away on Broadway last year, while Berkeley Kitchens debuted to much fanfare in 2013.

Just as Rabins is aiming to do, Chang offers not just kitchen space, but also advice on the business end of running a food company. She’s also tried to create a sense of community and connection to the outside public, a way to bring out into the open what can be an insular, isolating endeavor. To that end, she is opening a snack bar window in the front of her business that will feature a rotating selection of foods made by Kitchener members, hopefully by the end of the year.

“It’s so expensive to open up brick-and-mortar store, so my goal is to have a turnkey, flexible cafe operation, so that small businesses can have a chance to get this experience selling their product,” she says. “It’s a chance to get their feet wet while taking away a lot of the risk.”

Forage Kitchen will also have a cafe that operates for lunch. Originally the plan was for it to serve as a kind of rotating residency for members — Jeff Mason of the popular Pal’s Takeaway is making sandwiches out of the space to start, and it sounds like he may stay for the time being — while stocking and selling member-made food items. Rabins also hopes to host periodic markets and to open up the kitchen space to the monthly First Friday crowds.

At its heart, Forage Kitchen is a business to help people with their food businesses. In that respect, it’s an appealing place, says Shay Nowick, who founded cold-pressed juice shop Antidote in 2014. She’s currently considering signing up for space at Forage, attracted by the light, airy interior and the new facility’s amenities — some more so than others.

“A huge thing for us is, as a juice company, we have a lot of cleanup,” she says. “So the best is the dishwasher — that’s kind of a game changer.”

Forage Kitchen: 478 25th Street, Oakland, foragekitchen.com. On August 14 from 4-7 p.m., there will be an open house for potential vendors and people interested in seeing the space. Forage Kitchen’s opening date is currently set for August 29.