Starting a new restaurant can feel like surfing a tsunami. Luckily, the cousin-cousin culinary team behind Snacky Mini Mart has a great sense of balance.
Sandy and Vivian Pei launched their pan-Asian food stall at the Iowa City Farmers Market in spring 2023, cooking under a red canopy and hand-painted signs made by Sandy, one in the shape of a surfboard, another spray-painted onto a tapestry of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, that iconic Japanese art print.
Their menu introduced locals to the jian bing, a crepe-like breakfast wrap and a staple Chinese street food. The Peis fill theirs with five-spice pork, bologna and chive, or veggies and mushrooms, and they often top Snacky Mini Mart’s menu as Tasty Bing Wraps.
“The bing is an homage to being in the streets of Beijing,” Sandy said. “Something like that brings a story and we get to share that — people get the meaning and story behind our food.”
Sandy and Vivian do it all at Snacky, from the marketing and artwork to testing and cooking items to serve at both the market and pop-up dinner events at local restaurants like Marco’s Island and Plated Table.
“The farmers market is something very new to us,” Vivian said. “We’re from restaurant families and we’re going the opposite way.”
Vivian Pei grew up in St. Louis, where her parents owned a restaurant called Yen Ching. Later, they opened a location in Iowa City off Highway 6, and Vivian would visit Iowa often. Before settling down in the Hawkeye State permanently a couple years ago, she had spent much of her career abroad, starting from the age of 19. She earned her professional cooking chops in France before moving to Singapore to run a culinary school and consult for restaurants and bars.
Vivian is a former chair of the World’s 50 Best Bars Academy, which publishes an annual list of the best of the best around the world, and continues to serve as vice president of the Singapore Cocktail Bar Association, which was founded in May 2020 to support the industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“About 10 to 12 years ago I got very involved with cocktails, cocktail bars, craft cocktails specifically,” she said. “I think craft cocktails and cooking are very similar. There’s a lot of ingredient-focus and technique, so I got really nerdy about that… I like to say for myself that I just like all things delicious. It doesn’t matter whether it’s food or drinks or whatever. All things delicious.”
Sandy Pei was born in Korea, where she spent part of her childhood. She’s lived much of her life in Iowa City, enjoying visits from her cousin Vivian. Sandy graduated from City High School before embarking on her own culinary career. In 2002, she opened a restaurant named Snacky in Brooklyn, which she owned and ran for 18 years before deciding to move back to Iowa City. Sandy closed the restaurant, left New York behind to returned to Iowa during the height of the pandemic in June 2020.
Snacky fan Bill Pearis wrote a eulogy for the restaurant on the blog Brooklyn Vegan: “Snacky stood out thanks to owner Sandy Pei’s sense of style and humor, with its shelves of robots, monsters, toys and other cool trinkets; dragon head on its back wall, art that included a much-loved octopus-vs-shark painting, and a TV that showed obscure anime, Asian cinema and kitschy TV series. Snacky’s menu was equally funky, combining Chinese, Japanese and Korean with spins on American classics like pizza, burgers and hot dogs. There was no place quite like it.”
After deciding to partner up with her cousin Vivian on a new food project in Iowa, Sandy wanted to build on the Snacky legacy, as the name Snacky Mini Mart suggests. You can see many of her eclectic trinkets in the menus and marketing materials for Snacky Mini Mart, in particular on their Instagram page, @snacky_mini_mart. You might see a few toys on the table at their stall, too.
Along with bings, Snacky Mini Mart dishes up juicy dumplings with pork or tofu, drawing on a family recipe. You can also pick up Korean japchae, a dish with stir-fried glass noodles and veggies; rotating desserts, such as sesame Rice Krispy treats and butter mochi cakes; iced tea; and occasional weekly specials you should absolutely keep an eye out for.
“It’s not just who we are, it’s also where we come from,” Sandy said of their dishes. “Having been able to travel, for us, food is culture. We’re able to share our culture, our stories. It’s about sharing and eating, representing our culture.”
After a successful two-night pop-up dinner in March 2023 at Marco’s Island in Iowa City’s Northside Neighborhood, the Peis secured a home food processing license to facilitate their farmers market stall. The cousins were initially unsure how local diners would react.
“We started with the bing wraps because it has all the flavors we like to eat and all the different combinations of flavors. There’s nothing really too similar to this here,” Vivian said. “It’s really nice we’re being well received, it’s very encouraging.”
“Of course,” she continued, “that makes you want to make more and better food. Each time we were at the market we asked, what else can we do? So we made the dumplings and started jarring chili crisp.” The result? “The community has been amazing.”
Sandy and Vivian have found success in expanding the average Iowa City palate, especially with their coveted chili crisp, a spicy, oily, crunchy Sichuan condiment. Theirs is meticulously chopped and minced by hand.
“We didn’t dumb it down or anything, we just didn’t want it to blow our heads off with spice. We wanted flavor,” Vivian said. “So we put it on the bing and it came together, we wanted to bring something new to the farmers market and see if people would be into it and people are really excited these flavors are there now.”
So excited, the cousins boast they’ve “created a few chili crisp addicts.”
During the farmers market’s off season, Snacky Mini Mart does menu drops online for their fans to order and pick up (at the Chauncey Swan ramp, the same location as the Iowa City Farmers Market) the Peis’ incredible umami-punched dishes, many you won’t find on their summer menu. This past winter, their offerings included spicy cucumber salad, Snacky yaki noodles, different dumplings and wontons, Yo! fan sticky rice and original rice bowls, to name a few.
This spring, you may have spotted their stall outside the PS1 Close House for the I.C.E. C.R.E.A.M. comics and zine fair during Mission Creek Festival, where their brand’s DIY, artistic flair felt especially fitting. They’ve also held a dinner or two in collaboration with Plated Table, chef/owner Alex Smith’s combination event space, catering business, wine shop and meal-kit service that opened in the former Her Soup Kitchen space on S Dubuque Street in December 2023.
Sandy and Vivian both agreed that the time spent with their customers is their favorite part of their business model, from cooking orders just feet away from market shoppers to providing intimate hospitality during a pop-up event. Getting a little moment with each customer, seeing their immediate reaction to the food — these are perks they worry would be diminished if they had a traditional brick-and-mortar location. Not having a lease also provides independence and flexibility they’re not eager to give up.
Still, this approach requires a lot of planning to ensure things run smoothly, not to mention elbow grease — they must essentially build up and tear down their kitchen each time they set up their stall, and it’s easy to get envious of the food trucks who can simply drive away. Thankfully, other food vendors have been generous with advice over the past year, Vivian and Sandy said.
Encouraged by the reactions in Iowa City, the Peis are considering adding a stall at the Des Moines and Coralville farmers markets, or at least popping up at the occasional event out of town. As to whether brick and mortar are in their future, Vivian and Sandy are patiently waiting for an opportunity to “create something” that may not take a conventional form.
“We want a space that’s small, we don’t want to be open every single day. It’s time for a new idea, something different. We really like the Plated Table model,” Vivian said. “But it’s not that easy to change how people think of restaurants.”
The Peis said they would love to be in a space similar to NewBo City Market in Cedar Rapids, where small businesses can thrive as part of an indoor, year-round marketplace. Their spot might be more shop than restaurant, carrying cookbooks, products and artwork (some created by their friends), reminiscent of a Japanese convenience store.
For now, they’re happy just being snacky. Next time you’re at the Iowa City Farmer’s Market, stop by for a bing, a jar of chili crisp and a chat with these well-traveled women. It’ll brighten their day and yours.
“Iowa City has been going through so many changes, restaurants coming in and out. But you always need an injection of something that could represent more variety,” Vivian said. “That’s what we can do from our side.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s 2024 Bread & Butter special issue.
