Pomegranate Market adds hot bar with help from Mexican food truck owners
Feb. 2, 2022
Pomegranate Market has added a hot bar to its deli offerings, and it features a local Mexican food vendor three days a week.
“We’re super excited about it,” marketing manager Sadie Petersen said of the partnership with Salas Salsas, which is opening a food truck this year. “It’s a way for us to do something for the community.”
The kitchen crew at the locally owned natural foods grocery store at 57th Street and Louise Avenue makes the hot bar items for breakfast and lunch Monday through Wednesday, and Salas Salsas covers Thursday through Saturday.
Breakfast runs from 8 to 11 a.m., and lunch is available from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The hot bar is set up near the salad and soup bar, and it’s also self-serve, with customers paying by the pound at the checkout register. Seating is available in the dining room.
In the morning, customers will find a couple of breakfast sandwich choices at the beginning of the week, and then Salas Salsas breakfast burritos filled with chorizo, potato, egg and cheese in the second half of the week.
“That’s a super-convenient option for people who are going to work,” Petersen said. “They can just swing by Pomegranate because those are grab-and-go.”
For lunch, the in-house offerings include one or two entrees such as a beef-and-cabbage mixture and pulled pork, a few vegetable offerings liked seasoned broccoli roasted with garlic and then a grain like rice or a pasta like mac-and-cheese.
When Salas Salsas is taking care of lunch, offerings include tamales, burritos, enchiladas, rice and beans, said Marcella Salas, who owns the business with her mother, Patricia Burbine. The two started selling salsas at the Brandon Farmers Market in the summer of 2020, expanded into online and retail sales, began catering and are working to open a food truck in the coming season.
On the hot bar, they always make sure to include vegan and vegetarian offerings, like their poblano, black bean and corn tamale, Salas said. They also make a vegan version of chorizo out of soy. Next week, they’re adding empanadas to the hot bar, and one choice will have a vegan spiced lentil filling.
“Taking Mexican cuisine and adapting it to vegetarian-vegan type of cooking is fun. That flavor can translate very well,” she said. “It gives us a perspective of what type of vegan, vegetarian food we can serve on the food truck once that’s finished.”
She’s thankful for the exposure provided by Pomegranate Market, which also has been selling containers of their salsas for a few months.
“Pomegranate is so nice to give us that spotlight,” Salas said. “It’s mutually beneficial for both of us.”
Once the kitchen staff is back to full strength, kitchen manager Trey Oldham said he’d like to expand the hot bar rotation to include another option such as Italian or Indian food.
In addition to the breakfast and lunch hot bar and the salad bar, which is open almost the entire day, the kitchen makes sandwiches and burgers to order. There’s a refrigerated case with take-and-bake items such as meatloaf, and there are grab-and-go items, including the recent addition of salad and grain bowls from Brookings-based Brosia Bowls.
Pomegranate Market hours are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.
