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The skillet-fried chicken served with Scotch bonnet pepper sauce at Holder’s House, the newest venture of restaurateur Sarah Kirnon.

Chef Sarah Kirnon prepares the skillet fried chicken, a favorite from Miss Ollie’s, at Holder’s House.

Sarah Kirnon has photos of their grandmother (right) and other family members in Barbados at Holder's House.

Holder’s House is a secret; a blessing; a refuge. A passion project by a chef who fully intends to leave the Bay Area in the next few years, the pop-up shimmers with an anxious sense of ephemerality. While basking in the sunshine on the patio, gulping sharp rushes of ginger limeade, you might wonder with a touch of sadness, will I ever be able to have fried chicken this good again? Well, you still have some time.

Despite the many accolades to their name, Oakland chef and restaurateur Sarah Kirnon’s latest project is extremely under-the-radar — and that’s by design. Kirnon is best known for opening Miss Ollie’s, a critically acclaimed Afro-Caribbean restaurant that was also a fixture for Black and brown queer people in Old Oakland. Since the 10-year-old restaurant closed earlier this year, Kirnon has split their time between short-term gigs, like a guest chef residency at cocktail bar Elda, and working with Sanctuary, the nonprofit they founded. This pop-up, hosted at Oakland’s Forage Kitchen event space, has no phone number and loose hours, with the final shoe dropping in that vague timespace when food runs out.

Caribbean by way of California, the daily menu is limited to eight or fewer items and is fairly ad hoc, determined by farmers’ market bounties and how much Kirnon feels they can handle that day. Kirnon exclusively uses Instagram to announce menus and specials, usually around 4:30 p.m. the day of. One day there might be a cow heel soup, rich with gelatin, okra ooze and the life essence of bone marrow; on another, steamy sweet potatoes, split open and filled with braised red beans and powerfully garlicky tofu. It’s improvisational, stripped-down and highly personal — and, importantly, the food is exceptional.

Skillet-fried chicken ($21), modeled after Kirnon’s grandmother’s recipe, carried Miss Ollie’s, and it continues to be a headliner at Holder’s House. The tantalizingly bronze and crisp coating conceals a secret garden of greenery: a ground-up blend of herbs and vinegar tucked under the skin to perfume the succulent flesh. Peak-of-summer watermelon, cut into nostalgic, rind-on wedges, might tag along on the side, if it’s available. Served in a small metal sheet tray lined with red-checked paper, the pieces of chicken look like they’re lounging on a picnic blanket, enjoying the sun as much as you are.

Chef Sarah Kirnon dredges and fries chicken at Holder’s House in Oakland.

Ordering is simple: Do it at the counter, then relax on the patio. Listen to the radio static hiss of your chicken sizzling as it slinks into a hot pan of grease. Because of the open layout of the space, it’s impossible to ignore that Kirnon is the only human in the kitchen; the other folks, Forage Kitchen staff, run the food and serve drinks, but Kirnon’s the only one cooking. Naturally, the food comes out as it’s ready, and it can take a while.

On one visit, I kept my order to side dishes and got the first volley within 20 minutes. There was a pair of starchy smashed plantains ($8), wide as kid-size flip-flops, topped with a nest of vinegary and hot pikliz. Then came the carbs, a small bowl of brown rice and peas ($8) and a casserole dish of baked macaroni and cheese ($11). The former was well-seasoned and saucy with rouge-colored pot liquor, the red beans perfectly tender, with a depth of flavor earned from a long, gentle braise.

Sarah Kirnon prepares fried plantains as Nelly Juarez-Manrique waits for the order at Holder’s House in Oakland.

The macaroni, made with short round noodles, was so indulgent, supple and creamy that it would have been too easy to fill up on that before the rest of the food came. Bits of caramelized cheese, scooped from the top of the larger dish, were thoughtfully mixed in throughout the portion: I could feel the affection in that gesture, not unlike that act of a parent who cuts the crust from a child’s sandwich.

Kirnon’s seasonal approach is strongest in their saltfish and ackee ($24), a classic of Caribbean cuisine which they enhance with farmers’ market produce. Ackee, a West African fruit exported to the Caribbean in the days of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, is creamy, like egg yolks cooked over medium. In a way, the dish reminds me of Vietnamese-style stir-fried eggs, laced with just-wilted shallots and whipped with a few dashes of fish sauce. In Kirnon’s hands, the dish also winks in the direction of shakshuka, with chunks of eggplant, halved cherry tomatoes and clusters of fresh basil adding plenty of acid and body.

The loaded sweet potato might be on the menu at Holder’s House.

In all my visits, only one dish didn’t work for me: a top sirloin gravy ($12.50), made with shredded beef in a dense, Worcestershire-dominant braise. The salt level was so high, you could probably float in a pool of it. I could see how it would work as something to eat with white rice, but you’d need an incredible amount of starch to avoid blowing out your tastebuds. But all in all, it was a blip in an otherwise excellent series of experiences.

Besides the fried chicken, another dish well worth waiting for is the jerk portobello mushroom ($9). It’s not much — just 2½ caps’ worth of shroom — but I have never had a mushroom like this. Cooked with a thin, allspice-forward marinade, the caps dissolved in the mouth with the ease of a ripe peach. I’ve long favored other mushrooms over portobellos, which don’t usually offer much besides their ample size, but this called me back to the team. I’ve been keeping an eye on the Holder’s House Instagram in the hopes that this appears again. But if it doesn’t, well, I guess that’s that.

Guests drink and dine in the courtyard at Holder’s House, which is located at Forage Kitchen in Oakland.

After the intense, existentially trying first years of the pandemic, during which Kirnon closed Miss Ollie’s, a full-service restaurant in a busy corner spot in Swan’s Market, this back-to-basics approach made the most sense.

“I don’t want to have to fit into the norm of what it means to be in this food industry,” they said. Maybe it sounds careless or selfish to put their own welfare first, Kirnon admitted, but how else do you preserve love in times like these?

The prevailing mentality of “the customer is always right” was shown to be especially toxic during the pandemic, when hospitality workers in high-exposure conditions experienced extreme levels of harassment and even violence from the public over masking regulations and supply and labor shortages. A few weeks ago, hospitality activist Ashtin Berry wrote, “It is the enmeshment of public and private that makes the guest think they are a co-owner of their experience rather than active bystander of a larger one. … we’ve for far too long led people to believe that by leasing a table to enjoy their pleasure of drink, food or a performance they’ve also leased the lives of those caring for them.”

Sarah Kirnon is the only chef working in the kitchen at their new pop-up Holder’s House.

Because Holder’s House is first and foremost a passion project that puts creative freedom and self-care first, the typical stress of the kitchen — panic over wait times, anxiety over not having enough of this or that, maintaining a 20-item menu crafted to appeal to every possible customer — just isn’t there. In a real sense, Kirnon has engineered the whole project to enable them to say “no.” There’s freedom in that, Kirnon said, a kind of freedom that even top chefs in the food industry don’t tend to enjoy.

On a practical level, that means that you have to give up some control. Show up when you have ample time on your hands, and bring a dining companion who you really want to talk to. If you’re thinking of coming by later in the evening, keep alternative plans in mind in case of an early sellout.

In about a year and a half, Kirnon said, they plan to move back to Barbados, where they spent much of their early life. After 22 years in the United States, they’re going back to help out on the family farm: to grow vegetables, raise livestock. But until then, Holder’s House is their last hurrah — their love letter to Oakland. And when it’s over, it’s over.

Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic. Email: soleil@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hooleil

478 25th St. (at Telegraph Avenue), Oakland.

Hours: 5 p.m. until sellout Wednesday-Friday and noon until sellout Saturday and every other Sunday.

Accessibility: No steps. Outdoor only with picnic tables; it can be a tight fit between tables. Separate gender neutral restroom.

Noise level: Low to moderate.

Meal for two, without drinks: $28-$35

What to order: Fried chicken, saltfish and ackee, jerk portobello.

Meat-free options: Plenty, though offerings change day-to-day.

Drinks: Beer, wine and house-made soft drinks.

Transportation: Street parking. Close to numerous bus lines on Broadway and Telegraph Avenue. A half-mile walk from 19th Street Station.

Best practices: Check Instagram before you go: Generally, the menu is posted at 4:30 p.m. on weekdays. Show up when you have ample time on your hands, and bring a dining companion that you really want to talk to. If you're thinking of coming by later in the evening, keep alternative plans in mind just in case of an early sellout.

Since 2019, Soleil Ho has been The Chronicle's Restaurant Critic, spearheading Bay Area restaurant recommendations through the flagship Top Restaurants series. In 2022, they won a Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award from the James Beard Foundation.

Ho also writes features and cultural commentary, specializing in the ways that our food reflects the way we live. Their essay on pandemic fine dining domes was featured in the 2021 Best American Food Writing anthology. Ho also hosts The Chronicle's food podcast, Extra Spicy, and has a weekly newsletter called Bite Curious.

Previously, Ho worked as a freelance food and pop culture writer, as a podcast producer on the Racist Sandwich, and as a restaurant chef. Illustration courtesy of Wendy Xu.