There’s always money in the banana stand (opens in new tab).
Sunday’s warm weather and 7 p.m. sunset brought thousands to Dolores Park for an afternoon of picnic blankets, sunbathing, and the not-at-all-discreet consumption of alcohol and cannabis that those grassy slopes are known for.
But this time, there was a new amenity available from a neon-lit cart: bananas dipped in Ghirardelli dark chocolate and rolled in toppings, including pretzels and coconut macaroon almonds, alongside “drizzles” such as caramel sea salt and Bavarian cream.
The mobile kiosk is called Go Bananas (opens in new tab), and each banana-on-a-stick costs $10. That price may be familiar to fans of “Arrested Development,” the cult TV show that centers on the dysfunctional Bluth family, whose real-estate empire developed out of a frozen-banana stand on a Southern California boardwalk.
Go Bananas offers various toppings and drizzles, including Nutella and chocolate. | Source: Astrid Kane/The Standard
In one famous scene, matriarch Lucille Bluth (played by Jessica Walter) exclaims (opens in new tab), “It’s one banana, Michael!” to her son (played by Jason Bateman). “What could it cost? Ten dollars?”
In fairness, Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana didn’t offer Nutella or butter toffee pecans. But Go Bananas founders Liisa Laukkanen and Brandon Rowan-Taylor are very much in on the joke.
The afternoon in the park was only the third appearance of the banana stand, after its Feb. 21 launch at the Sausalito Crab Festival (opens in new tab) and a 500-person event at a Silicon Valley corporate campus. They had a bunch of leftover bananas, according to Rowan-Taylor, “so we said, ‘Let’s just go to Dolores and see what happens.’”
Founders Liisa Laukkanen and Brandon Rowan-Taylor did a brisk business Sunday afternoon. | Source: Astrid Kane/The Standard
A private chef by trade, Rowan-Taylor came up with the recipes for the Bougie Hippy (strawberry-vanilla hemp granola with a strawberry drizzle) and the popular PBB&J (banana chips with peanut butter drizzle and raspberry drizzle), which he serves while wearing banana earrings fashioned from keychains.
Laukkanen is an interior designer and architect. The two are “best friends who met on a rooftop in Florence, Italy, eight years ago,” Rowan-Taylor said, and were hunting for a fun project to do together.
Strictly speaking, Sunday’s foray in the park was guerrilla-style. Like the corner-cutting patriarch George Bluth, Go Bananas may not have had the proper permit. Still, the pair plan to be above board going forward.
“We are so unique and memorable that we have no choice but to follow all the rules,” Rowan-Taylor says.
They plan to bring Go Bananas back to Dolores Park but have no dates locked in. In the meantime, Laukkanen and Rowan-Taylor will be at the Union Street Festival (opens in new tab) in June and are looking into downtown’s First Thursdays and Oakland’s First Fridays, along with music festivals like Outside Lands and Lightning in a Bottle.
And if $10 for dessert strikes you as too steep, remember that a crypto mogul once paid $6 million for a single banana, and it didn’t even have chocolate.