Ari Louie started cooking at age four. The kitchen always held a certain allure for them. It was a place where magic happened.
“I would always ask my parents to give me food scraps,” Louie said. “And I would try to make soup out of it. I was like, How are they doing that? They’re taking these raw vegetables that don’t really taste like anything and then they’re turning it into soup? There’s something so witchy about that. You don’t believe in magic? Try making soup.”
Louie’s whole life, it seems, has been shaped by food. Louie started a business called Looks Good, Tastes Better around age 11, where they would write about food on the internet. They started selling cakes at that age as well. And they were obsessed with food TV.
“I come from this family that’s very food-oriented,” Louie said. “Each of us is very different from each other, but the thing that brings us all together is that we are all really passionate about food and we love to eat, we love to feed people.”
But if you want to understand Porch Party, Louie’s West Oakland home-cooked, community food project, first you need to know about “The Ladies.”
Video: Ari Louie explains the Porch Party process
The group, also known as the Breakfast Ladies because they’ve been getting breakfast together every Friday morning for the past 20 years in South Pasadena, had a huge impact on Louie’s life. Louie’s mom was one of the ladies. And their gatherings weren’t just for breakfast. They gathered all the time for dinner, often at the Louie family home.
“They must have become friends through the PTA or something, but they’re kind of like the bad bitches of the PTA,” said Louie with an infectious laugh. “And they really like drinking together.”
These were casual affairs, everyone would bring a dish, the host family might not even bother to clean up, so the parties would usually be relegated to the porch.
“It’s like, Don’t go inside, don’t look in there. We’re just going to sit outside where we can drink and not worry about the dishes,” they said.
Louie loved these “porch parties” and being one of the youngest children at the gatherings often would hang with the Ladies, instead of playing with the other kids.
“It was very cool to be raised around them gathering amongst themselves and still having community,” said Louie. “I’m sure that none of them would describe this as a community -building project. It’s very much like a drinking on the porch project to them.”
Because of the Ladies, Louie learned to mix large batches of cocktails from an early age, and also learned to make large batches of cakes and bread and cookies.
“Porch Party is something that I view as the space and community wherein I’m channeling all of my creative energy through food.”
Arie Louie
Louie put those large-batch baking skills to work during the pandemic, after they returned home from UC Berkeley, and began holding bake sales to support social justice organizations in response to the murder of George Floyd. The Louie family ultimately raised and donated $34,000.
The experience showed Louie the power of home cooking, and not long after returning to the Bay Area, they started Porch Party in 2022 out of their Oakland home, intending to create community and awareness. Louie gave it a year to see if Porch Party could be sustainable. Now nearly two years in, Porch Party is still going strong.
But describing exactly what Porch Party is proves to be a little difficult, mostly because Louie is such a multifaceted creative force.
“Porch Party is something that I view as the space and community wherein I’m channeling all of my creative energy through food,” they said. “But I leave the door open for myself to go in the direction of food writing, regular writing, other creative pursuits, artistic pursuits, community projects, any of that.”
Louie abounds with creative energy. They hand-draw every Porch Party menu. They write long, poetic Instagram posts. Their home is beautifully decorated, with food-themed art covering the walls. And Louie’s food itself lives up to their adolescent blog name: looks good, tastes better.
Past menus include “Winner, Winner Chicken Dinner!” with roasted chicken thighs, potatoes with onions and peppers, biscuits, and “cilantro-stewed midnight beans.” The “Hot Girl Fall” menu, created during a particularly balmy week last October, featured “Hot Girl Cake” made with spiced cornmeal, lemon and pistachio topped with ricotta cream cheese frosting, “Queen Bee Salad” with Point Reyes blue cheese, figs, spiced candied nuts with a honey lemon vinaigrette, and a dish of seasonal produce called “Mysterious Girl Roasted Veggies.” The Porch Party Lucky New Year Menu featured black-eyed peas, roasted cabbage, cornbread, and “OG Lucky Louie Chocolate Chip Cookies,” a recipe from Louie’s mom. “These cookies are magic,” the menu exclaimed.
Louie comes up with each week’s menu on Sunday. That’s when they post their hand-drawn menu on Instagram and on the Porch Party website and begin taking orders. They go shopping on Tuesday, usually hitting 99 Ranch, Monterey Market, Berkeley Bowl, and the South Berkeley Farmers Market. They start cooking on Wednesday. And Thursday—pick up day—is a mad dash.
“On Thursdays, I wake up and start cooking like a maniac,” said Louie. “And then I try to put on clothes and become like a normal person again, so that I can put people’s orders together and talk to them.”
Watching Louie cook and greet their customers, it’s striking how different the Porch Party experience is than a normal restaurant, and that is all by design. Louie does have restaurant experience, but in many ways Porch Party is a response to their time working in the industry.
“I had this thought frequently, especially when I was working at my second restaurant, I was like, if I can work this hard for somebody, I can work this hard for myself,” they said.
But Louie still dreams of having a physical space where they can feed people on a regular basis.
“I call that dream of mine, my non-restaurant,” they said. “Because a lot of Porch Party is rooted in me unpacking restaurants and trying to create like a food project that does everything in the world the opposite way of a restaurant. The long term vision for Porch Party is really to bring people together through food and build community through food in the broadest, simplest terms.”
And while Louie does donate some Porch Party proceeds to social justice causes, community is where they make the biggest impact.
“It’s easy to get sucked into the fundraising black hole, but I try not to focus on that as the way that I primarily contribute to my community,” they said. “I think that the main thing I have to contribute is some small, mysterious form of magic which happens through bringing people together over good food for good causes. It’s just amazing how much that improves things, you know?”
Beans were on this particular week’s menu, as they are on many Porch Party menus. Louie is obsessed with beans. Their many failed attempts to create a Porch Party logo usually involves a drawing of beans. And they promote beans the way Nate Dogg once promoted marijuana, with stickers advocating people to “Eat beans every day.”
So after a long interview, as the compostable bag that held that week’s beans broke (as they so often do), and the dried legumes clattered to the kitchen floor, Louie couldn’t help but let out a loud laugh and exclaim: “I spilled the beans!”
