San Jose’s Viral Breakfast Pop-Up Is Reborn After County Attempts to Shut It Down

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icture a drizzly Bay Area afternoon, when you’d rather rain-check your plans and stay bundled up indoors. Picture the gray, dreary sky as you trek down 880 over slick pavement, the tired weight of a wintry Sunday knocking inside your head.

Now, picture all of that instantly dissolving when you take your first bite of a warm breakfast sandwich served by a dude wearing sunglasses beneath a dark canopy tent.

It’s a formula that San Jose’s Brandon Salmon has mastered with his viral breakfast pop-up, Hash N Dash.

Serving a small selection of smash burger–style breakfast sandwiches at any hour of the day, Salmon has carved out a definitive lane as Silicon Valley’s sausage-egg-and-cheese-on-English-muffin god — with regular appearances outside of San Jose’s coffee shops, and occasionally at breweries and wineries around the greater Bay Area.

This isn’t some McDonald’s warmed-in-the-microwave kind of breakfast sandwich with a whimper of Canadian bacon in it. This is a full-on sausage patty mashed onto a searing grill then dressed with maple syrup, griddled sweet onions, Tapatio-spiked mayo, melted American cheese and a yolk-bursting soft-boiled egg, all chewily layered inside a toasted English muffin.

It’s the kind of out-of-body Northern California food experience where — after the smoke-sizzle clears and the flavors have melted into your system — you might hear Mac Dre’s “Not My Job” slapping from a nearby portable speaker. (If Hash N Dash was ever in need of a motto, a remix of what Mac Dre articulated in 2004 would suffice: “I can make you a breakfast sandwich, but anything else, not my job”).

And yet, despite Hash N Dash’s underground success — which peaked in January when a video of its “408 Smash” sando accrued over 1 million views, driving in hundreds of new customers per day — Santa Clara County temporarily banned Salmon and his small crew from operating on February 8.

Salmon says he has been slanging breakfast around San Jose using the same methods since December of 2021. Now, he has to rethink his approach in his hometown, after county officials told him he can no longer run his business in the same way — as a simple pop-up without any infrastructure other than the portable flat-top griddle he sets up at each event.

“It’s been a wild two weeks. The [Santa Clara County] Health Department came for me and said I was illegally vending,” he says. “They said we would need to buy a food trailer or food truck. That’s an expense people can’t pull out of nowhere. We’re just trying to make it in this expensive state and pay our bills. They didn’t provide any tips or resources for anything — just paperwork to fill out. It’s frustrating how they don’t seem to want to help you in the process, and aren’t setting you up for success.”

In his view, the county’s regulations for outdoor food vendors are draconian and inconsistently enforced, singling him out since he “blew up.” Prior to being flagged, Salmon had set up his mobile operation in front of coffee shops around San Jose for over two years without any problem. He says he had agreements with each business he worked alongside, paid for multiple permits and licenses, and fulfilled the county’s health department requirements (such as always being within 30 feet of a bathroom and having access to three compartment sinks).

“I understand the legal process of paying fees; I get it,” says Salmon, who left his full-time job in corporate catering to pursue his passion as an independent food maker. “The problem is that the process is so difficult, and there’s not a lot of room for receiving help to continue thriving and make a living. It’s not conducive to creating a community that says, ‘We care about small business owners.’ It feels the exact opposite. It feels like we’re being driven out.”

Even without this latest obstacle, operating a food business in the Bay Area is far from easy. Between soaring rent, staffing and a variety of unforgiving regional factors, it seems some of the best foodmakers are downsizing rather than expanding while others have decided it’s best to simply pack up. Last year, the San Francisco Chronicle described the Bay Area as being a “terrifying” business environment for local restaurant owners. In that context, starting with a small pop-up seems like it would be the easier, more realistic route.

And yet, at least based on Salmon’s experience, Santa Clara County actually seems to be actively discouraging pop-ups. It doesn’t help that Santa Clara County is among the wealthiest — and therefore most expensive — places to live in the entire country, where owning or renting a brick-and-mortar could account for an exorbitant cost that would paralyze many potential businesses. Factor in the county’s recent rash of violence toward immigrant street vendors, and Santa Clara County may legitimately be one of the harshest places to successfully sustain a food pop-up.

But according to Larry Little, the Santa Clara County Department of Environmental Health Department Communications Officer, “This is more about safety and keeping community members safe.”

“When you get a [temporary] permit, you’re under the umbrella of a larger event that’s happening,” Little says, acknowledging that pop-ups like Hash N Dash, which don’t have a kitchen or a food truck, can’t legally operate in Santa Clara County. “The coffee shop is not a temp event, and they don’t have a permit to sell food there.” 

As it stands, then, foodmakers are expected to acquire either “a food truck, trailer, van, the specific mobile food cart [or] the portable units” — in addition to applying for a Mobile Food Facility permit — to operate a pop-up business in the county.

“I don’t want to at all sound like a victim because I’m absolutely not,” Salmon told KQED via text. “But … I do believe it’s a bigger issue. It’s a bureaucratic issue that absolutely needs to be addressed so that steps can be taken to aid small business owners [and give] pop-up vendors the ability to operate as they do in a legal fashion.”

Hash N Dash has paid “around $12k in sales taxes and about $400 in district taxes,” he says. “I’m not trying to do things illegally.”

In Salmon’s eyes, the city has not taken any discernible action towards uplifting or creating pathways for the county’s non-traditional food makers — and some municipalities, he argues, are downright hostile toward small pop-ups like his. Meanwhile, a fine-dining pop-up in Los Gatos organized by a Michelin-starred chef has been receiving rave reviews, with no apparent interference from county officials.

Salmon isn’t the only one who has found the county’s regulations around pop-ups and public gatherings to be strict and often unclear. Freddie Jackson, owner of Enso Bar & Nightclub in San Jose, facetiously told San Jose Spotlight, “Here, it takes like 18 months to get a permit to have a chair in front of your building.” He contrasts that with running a business in San Diego, where he says “They’ll close their streets and let you party for any reason. The wind blows the correct way, and they’ll have a festival.”

It’s not just fantasizing about a year-round Mardi Gras in Santa Clara County, though. In many cases, even the day-to-day basics can be a gargantuan struggle. In fact, a group of San Jose’s councilmembers banded together last year to publicly call for solutions in defense of the city’s most vulnerable food suppliers — its immigrant street vendors, who have faced a rash of harassment and violence. As councilmember Peter Ortiz put it, “[The city needs to] modernize policies that have marginalized this community within our economy.”

In the case of an immigrant street vendor, the lack of a proper support system can be a matter of basic survival. But that need for support applies to anyone trying to make a living outside of the traditional restaurant model. Salmon, for instance, isn’t an immigrant himself, but he knows it’s a demographic that’s adjacent to his line of work.

Haley Cardamon, a San Jose-raised advocate who founded San Jose Day, an annual event that hosts nearly 100 local artists and vendors each year, says, “A lot of small food businesses don’t have the means, or the process is so overwhelming, that it’s hard for them to even try to step into that space.”

She goes on to ask the million dollar question: “Could there be opportunities for the health department or city or county to provide learning opportunities to help our small businesses succeed?”

For Salmon, those “learning opportunities” have only coincided with the county’s attempt to shut him down. But with his fastidious approach and dedication to becoming the best breakfast sandwich provider in the area, he has still found a way to level up.

On March 10, Hash N Dash will reopen as a fixed location inside the Rec Room, a bar in downtown San Jose that will now double as Hash N Dash’s kitchen. Here, Salmon will serve breakfast five days a week, with his headlining lineup of decadent, overstuffed English muffin smashes. The fully equipped commercial kitchen will allow Hash N Dash to — fittingly — add hash browns to their menu. With a larger operation, Salmon also expects to significantly reduce customer wait time.

Despite the turbulent circumstances, it’s a major accomplishment for Salmon, who never envisioned becoming one of the city’s most popular food vendors when he first launched from his driveway with his two brothers. Still, he is concerned for his fellow pop-up operators and street food vendors who haven’t been as fortunate.

As it stands, Santa Clara County doesn’t appear to look kindly on emerging food entrepreneurs who can’t afford a brick-and-mortar or haven’t invested in a food truck or food trailer. The roving, micro-scale food makers who are operating in a limited, impermanent way? In Salmon’s view, the county would simply prefer that they take their business elsewhere.

It makes one wonder: Is street vending a foundational good for the community? Who wins when food pop-ups are thriving, and who loses? And — importantly — how is that measured, regulated and enforced?

“I know that there’s an incredibly rich food scene in San Jose. It’s just obscured by [the] corporate tech DashMart ease of convenience shit,” says Salmon. “So many ‘illegal’ businesses thrive here, but they can’t afford to buy a food truck or rent a brick and mortar. If you just want to start [out] and proof your concept before going all in, it’s very, very hard to do.”

Hash N Dash is relaunching on Friday, Mar. 8 from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Rec Room (1 E. San Fernando St., San Jose), as well as Saturday and Sunday during the same hours. Starting on Mar. 13, it will operate weekly from Wednesday to Sunday. Check the pop-up’s page for more updates.