Black and Queer-Owned Vegan Pop-Up Electric Kitchen Lights Up Dallas Community

By Yvonne Marquez

Electric Kitchen, a plant-based pop-up and catering company in Dallas, offers a vegan twist on a classic southern staple—biscuits and gravy. Fluffy, delicious pillows of goodness are loaded up with not just gravy but your choice of an array of toppings including: chickpea scramble, sweet potato hash, coconut bacon, non-dairy cheese, potato and cauliflower chorizo, sautéed mushrooms, avocado, tomato, or pickled onions. The result has been a hit with customers.

It’s important for Electric Kitchen founders Chanise Condren and her wife, Ashley Garner, to create recipes that don’t alienate people from vegan food just because it’s vegan. “If we can offer people that sense of home or that sense of comfort—and we know how to make it, and how to make it healthy—that provides me a sense of comfort,” Condren says.

Condren and Garner’s life changed after they switched over to an all plant-based diet in 2016. The couple lost a significant amount of weight and improved their overall health. Condren lost 140 pounds in nine months and was able to get off her prescriptions for severe rheumatoid arthritis. “[Going vegan] literally healed my body,” Condren recalls. Many people were interested in how the couple lost so much weight.

“I started cooking the food and it tasted really good and so we were like, ‘Oh, maybe we can make this for other people,’ and encourage them to at least try and stick with it,” Condren explains.

Electric Kitchen launched in the summer of 2017 with vegan meal prep for individuals. People signed up and Condren and her friend Jennifer Robertson designed a weekly menu with breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks and delivered the meals all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Condren says vegan meal prep was wildly popular from the get-go and she wasn’t prepared for such quick success. “We thought it was going to be grow-as-you-grow. As soon as we launched, it was huge. It was like, ‘Oh crap, we didn’t plan for this,’” she laughs. “We were just home cooks.”

Their business grew further when they started catering for corporate work luncheons and, eventually, they held their first big pop-up event at a Day of the Dead celebration at CocoAndre, a Latina-owned chocolatier, in 2017. That’s when Condren realized how much she loved interacting with people in her community and seeing unlikely faces, like Mexican men in cowboy hats, enjoy their food. “We love being in the community,” Condren says. “We love to bring vegan food to spaces that might not have it otherwise.”

Condren also learned how important it was for her and Garner to be visible as Black and queer business owners at the event. “I’m realizing now, little by little, that by us showing up and being present at more venues—and not just sliding business cards out, but actually forcing people to interact with us—that we are claiming our space,” Condren says. “It’s made me realize how important it is to be more visible.”

Since its launch, Electric Kitchen has been serving up “cultural cuisine” at community events, private dinner parties, luncheons, and, most recently, at AstroWorld Fest, a music festival in Houston. Their menu is eclectic and ranges from street fare like nachos and loaded mac ’n cheese, to customized dinners like Afro-Caribbean–inspired coconut curry jackfruit, rice and peas, and braised kale. “We like to label the menu as ‘cultural cuisine’ because we pull from every type of culture,” Garner says. “It’s pretty fun to do, especially to veganize a culture’s food.”

Condren works full-time for Electric Kitchen while Garner does the marketing for the business and maintains another full-time job. Condren and Garner have cultivated a team that brings various talents and interests to the table, including recipe developer and baking aficionado Jennifer Robertson, and food journalist and chef Ethan Metcalf. “What has worked for us so well is that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Condren laughs. “I have no restaurant experience, no cooking experience, no experience running a business. We don’t know what we can’t do and that means we can do everything. I think that’s also a big part of my queerness: if you just go with what feels right, nine times out of ten, it’s going to work.”

Condren and Garner plan to expand the catering side of the business and their brand via merchandise and on social media. “We’re getting comfortable in the skin of business owners and in our own identity,” Condren says. “This year, Electric Kitchen is putting all those pieces together and really focusing on getting into the right spaces with the people we want to help build our business.”

Keep up with Electric Kitchen at eatelectrickitchen.com and by following them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.