By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
With her new food cart and pop-up restaurant Enoki Eatery, Gretchen Stelzenmuller hopes to provide tourists and Sitkans alike with meals inspired by Hawaiian cuisine – but with an Alaskan twist.
Premised on a simple combination of rice, protein and bread, Enoki’s specialty is Sitka-style musubi.
“Musubi is just a food I love,” Stelzenmuller said in an interview. “It’s debatable, but it’s originally a Hawaiian street food. It’s based off onigiri in Japan, which is a similar idea. It’s sticky rice with some ingredient, whether it’s like a piece of salmon or something inside and then you wrap it in nori (dried seaweed).”
While traditional Hawaiian-style musubi involves a canned meat product such as Spam, Stelzenmuller sells hers with options of fish, Spam or mushrooms. Enoki Eatery is named for enoki mushrooms.
“We’re in Alaska, we have like a plethora of beautiful fish and beautiful smoked fish… Smoked black cod and smoked salmon belly has so much fat and salt and sweet and oil and like, it kind of hits the same things that Spam does, but can be more sustainable and healthier,” she said
With Enoki Eatery, Stelzenmuller has incorporated an idea from her time in San Francisco into her business model for Sitka. While it’s mostly a food cart on Lincoln Street, Enoki Eatery sometimes becomes a pop-up restaurant in other places.
“I spent 12 years in San Francisco and that’s most of where my kitchen experience comes from,” she said. “There’s a lot of sharing going on in that city, especially between different restaurants. And so what I learned there is the concept of pop-ups.”
Though she’s spent time in other places, Stelzenmuller was born and raised in Sitka.
A pop-up is a temporary restaurant set up at a location that is already licensed for commercial food service.
After about six months in business, the Enoki Eatery has popped up in local restaurants numerous times, and will operate out of the Backdoor Cafe again this Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. – the cafe closes at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
For a business without a conventional storefront, Stelzenmuller said the pop-up model is a logical solution.
Facing a busy summer tourist season, Stelzenmuller doesn’t work alone. While she’s the chef-owner of the enterprise, local baker Andrew Jylkka has partnered with her and often serves as the eatery’s public face.
“I make the menus, I come up with the recipes, I do the creative side of things in that regard,” Stelzenmuller said. “But he runs our social media and is really good at putting out the right posts and photos and things like that. And he runs the cart. He’s great at it… We’re trying to play to each other’s strengths.”
Stelzenmuller and Jylkka first collaborated in the Sitka Fine Arts Camp kitchen in 2020 and have worked together since then. Jylkka also runs a small local bakery, the Southeast Dough Company. When Jylkka gets back to baking after the summer, Stelzenmuller plans to continue running the eatery.
While many food carts in town close down when the final cruise ship departs, Stelzenmuller hopes to keep Enoki Eatery operational year round.
Looking forward, she’d like to see the eatery become a social venue for Sitkans.
“I want Sitka to have something different and fun, an event. We want to grow this into a night with dinner and entertainment, live music, art displays, comedy. Some all-ages night life,” she said.
