For many new businesses, finding a business model that works for them and their target market can be a daunting task. For Oodloz, which currently serves authentic and innovative Chinese and Asian cuisine at Kitchen Collab in Truckee, it was a process of improvisation and learning.
“I've tried different schedules,” chef/owner Alyssa Flynn says, “I want to have a family, I want to be with my kids. That was my priority, and it still is, but this other aspect was dormant. Then I realized that this kind of thing was good for my mental health.”
The shop is currently open Thursday to Saturday from 11am to 2pm, and customers can order on the website and collect their food from the kitchen – once they arrive, they can ring a bell and Flynn will deliver the food to their door.
“Doing it all by myself was a great learning experience for me, it was a very interesting experience,” Flynn added. “I explored how to work in a brick-and-mortar setting, and I tried dinnertime, but I didn't get home until about 11 o'clock, so I went back to lunchtime.”
Flynn is still figuring out opening hours and whether his approach to food will resonate with the customer base he's looking for.
“For example, we have Chinese taro mochi. It's a traditional dim sum dish and one of my favorites, so we put it on the menu, but nobody knew what it was,” Flynn says. “Obviously, nobody ordered it. So we tried to offer it in a different way: If we offered them a free sample, we thought they'd order it the next time they came.”
Chinese food is something Flynn misses very much. She has talked about traveling to Reno, Sacramento, and San Francisco just to eat Chinese food, and traveling six hours through the snow just to eat Peking duck. This should tell you just how passionate she is about cooking.
“I guess the question is, why don't I sell Americanized Chinese food? Not really Americanized Chinese food,” Flynn adds. “I think that's what people are more familiar with. If I only sold that, I'd do pretty well. But personally, I feel that Chinese food is much more than that, and that expression is not what I think of as Chinese food. So that's what I'm working on.”
Flynn says her passion for cooking comes from her mother, who would cook her dishes that weren't on the menu: comfort foods like dumpling soup, which Flynn describes as similar to gnocchi (but without the potatoes) but with other ingredients added, like daikon radish and Chinese sausage, are all made from scratch.
“She would make her own Chinese sausage, which is like prosciutto. It was marinated in soy sauce and Chinese spices and she used pork belly. Her creations always tasted better.”
Flynn's passion for learning to cook with her mother has been passed on to her own family, where she cooks for her husband and children (ages 15, 13, and 10). It was her desire to cook at home in a place that makes them happy, and the joy of cooking that informed the idea for Oodloz (a play on the phrase Oodles of Noodles). So, in January 2024, she launched the project.
“This is really fun. I feel like a light has been turned on for me,” Flynn added.
While the light may not include all of the same dishes her mother made when she was growing up, Flynn has found a way to blend her roots in Chinese food and other Asian flavors with her experiences growing up in California.
They make their own milk buns from scratch for their barbecued pork baozi with house-made choux sauce, leaven their mantou buns (steamed buns) for their roasted duck sliders, and their hand-made dumplings are also on the menu, pan-fried to a slightly crispy bottom and steamed to perfection.
Flynn adds: “I also love Vietnamese crepes, which are made with mung beans and coconut milk, and then mixed with shrimp, bean sprouts, mint and herbs, wrapped in lettuce and dipped in fish sauce.”
With a regularly rotating menu that also includes bubble tea drinks with special toppings, Asian food lovers are sure to enjoy Flynn's creativity, even if they can only pop in a few days a week for now.
Oodloz is located inside Kitchen Collab at 11357 Deerfield Dr. in Truckee, Calif. For more information, call 707-419-9272 or visit online at oodloz.com.
