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Sushirrito’s co-founder is crafting a lot more than sushi burritos at his newest restaurant – he’s producing fresh pastas, milling wheat berries for French Riviera-inspired pizzas and making tortillas for seafood tacos.
These dishes represent three of at least 12 different concepts Ty Mahler is planning for one 90-seat restaurant space, dubbed Colander Kitchens. Located in the former Three Craft Kitchen & Bar space in Draper University in San Mateo, Colander Kitchens currently offers espresso beverages, pasta, simple French salads and Sushirrito’s sushi burritos. Mahler hopes to roll out at least another 10 concepts by the end of the year.
“Over the years, I just came up with all these different brands that I never got to do with Sushirrito,” he said. “The idea is to finally take all these ideas that I had, and then pull them off inside of one kitchen collectively.”
Customers can order from any of Mahler’s concepts online or at one of two kiosks near the entrance of Colander Kitchens. Each concept offers four to eight distinct menu items.
There are three seating areas within Colander Kitchens. The first is the bar, which is not open yet and is pending a full liquor license. The bar features seven taps for beer and wine and will serve “curated drinks,” Mahler said. While details have not been finalized, he’s also considering creating a separate tiki drinks menu.
“It’s not going to be normal beer and wine – ‘here’s a Manhattan or here’s a martini,’” he said.
The main seating area at the front of the restaurant features ample natural light streaming from the near floor-to-ceiling windows facing out to East 3rd Avenue. The room is loungy, featuring a mix of wooden tables and chairs as well as a large brown leather chair and a plush green velvet chair with wooden side tables. Black panels accent the exposed brick wall, and potted plants hang from the ceiling.
The focal point of the room is the pastel mint green 1969 Italian Lambro outfitted with a 1958 La Marzocco Leva machine. Colander Kitchens offers a succinct coffee menu of espresso, latte macchiato, espresso macchiato and cappuccino. All coffee drinks are made with Caffe Vergnano beans, which are 80% Robusta and 20% Arabica. And if you want your coffee to go, Mahler suggests going elsewhere.
“(In Italy), they don’t do coffee to go,” he said. “You have it there or you don’t. And I love that.”
Go beyond the main dining area to find an open kitchen concept in the back. Mahler plans to add more seating to this area, and he’s considering making the back more loungy and the main dining area in the front more dining-focused.
The kitchen is subdivided into stations, each delegated for a specific concept. Mahler’s Pasta Everyday concept allows guests to choose from eight housemade pasta shapes and pair it with their choice of in-house sauce – wagyu beef and pork, spicy pork tomato, cheese, basil and pine nut, sauteed mushroom or pink ($9.99).
Ty Mahler scrapes fresh, homemade pasta off of a pasta extruder at Colander Kitchens in San Mateo. Photo by Anna Hoch-Kenney. 
Fresh, homemade radiatori pasta at Colander Kitchens in San Mateo. Photo by Anna Hoch-Kenney. 
Ty Mahler holds up a piece of fresh, homemade radiatori at Colander Kitchens in San Mateo. Photo by Anna Hoch-Kenney.
The French Style Salads concept offers 10 salads ($9.99), including niçoise, chèvre, poichichade, betterave, Lyonnaise and more.
In addition to Pasta Everyday and French Style Salads, Sushirrito is also available at Colander Kitchens. Mahler may even experiment with new Sushirrito flavors not available at other locations.
“It’s funny how many people come in every day and are like, ‘Why are you serving Sushirrito?’” Mahler said. “I’m like, ‘Well, I’m one of the co-founders.’ And then that’s 50-50 met with, ‘Oh my gosh!’ or more skepticism…I’m hoping there’s a tipping point where it all makes sense, and that’s just on me to make the food good enough for people to come back.”
An employee prepares Sushirrito rolls at Colander Kitchens in San Mateo. Photo by Anna Hoch-Kenney. 
Ty Mahler, the co-founder of Sushirrito, offers sushi burritos at his newest restaurant concept, Colander Kitchens. Photo by Anna Hoch-Kenney. 
Ty Mahler is considering experimenting with new flavors of Sushirrito at Colander Kitchens in San Mateo. Photo by Anna Hoch-Kenney.
Mahler may even revive Mochiko Mochi Pizza at Colander Kitchens. The mochi pizza concept debuted in 2023 at the former Sushirrito Burlingame brick and mortar before expanding to the Palo Alto Sushirrito location. Mochiko Mochi Pizza in Burlingame has since permanently closed, and the Palo Alto Sushirrito has stopped selling mochi pizza.
But before he brings back Mochiko Mochi Pizza, Mahler plans to debut a south of France pizza concept inspired by a trip to Nice with his wife. This style of pizza is simple and features a thin crust.
“It was 2 in the morning and we got a pizza, and I don’t know why, it just blew my mind, sitting on a pier with a bottle of rosé with my wife and eating this pizza,” he said.
Mahler’s Brazilian fried chicken concept is inspired by his time living in New York City. Every Sunday, he’d go to Little Brazil, eat feijoada, a black bean stew, and take a nap. Feijoada is typically eaten with farofa, toasted cassava flour, to add texture and absorb the broth. So instead of coating the chicken with regular flour, he’s also incorporating farofa into the crust.
Mahler also plans to roll out concepts featuring British sandwiches (think coronation chicken and sweet-and-sour Piccalilli relish), hand-diced steak burgers with lobster as variations on surf-and-turf burgers, seafood tacos with housemade tortillas, raw sliced fish and sashimi boxes, ramen and Hawaiian pupu bowls.
Mahler was born in Mississippi and grew up in Indiana on Hamburger Helper meals, he said. His first job was cleaning toilets at a country club at 12 years old, but he had always wanted to work in the kitchen. He started his journey in the country club’s kitchen as a dishwasher, eventually becoming a line cook. He graduated high school at 15 and went to the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont at 16.
“I knew this was it. This was all I wanted to do,” he said. “I was the youngest person to go to this culinary school.”
At 18 years old, he was selected to study culinary in France, where he worked at Michelin one-starred restaurant I’Essential.
“It really was like reality TV – things throwing everywhere, knives flying, punching, cursing, kicking,” Mahler said. “But I was 18, so I loved it.”
At 20 years old, Mahler moved to Louisiana to work for Emeril’s, chef Emeril Lagasse’s flagship restaurant. After working in such large-scale production, he moved back to France and worked as executive chef at Le Ralais de Lac Noir for nine months before he no longer felt welcome in France due to tension stemming from the Iraq War.
“One day all of my reservations canceled because I was American,” he wrote in an email. “It was a time when people were dumping French wine in America and calling them ‘freedom fries’ and I guess it really pissed off a lot of French people.”
Back in the U.S., he became chef-partner of Roy’s Hawaiian Fusion in San Francisco, where he was tasked with changing the menu every day. His experience with large and variable menus at Roy’s makes Mahler confident in his ability to create diverse offerings at Colander Kitchens.
Two years after leaving Roy’s, Mahler launched Sushirrito with co-founder Peter Yen. The fast-casual fusion restaurant now has brick-and-mortar restaurants in San Francisco and Palo Alto, as well as licensing deals with San Francisco International Airport and Local Kitchens, which has Peninsula locations in San Bruno, Cupertino, Campbell and Los Gatos.
“I think when I was expanding Sushirrito, I never felt in place, ever,” he said. “I never felt like I was a part of any one area, but I always found myself coming here (San Mateo) anyway, and going to the Japanese gardens, or going to the park.”
When the Millbrae resident saw the empty space within Tim Draper University, he knew it was the perfect size for his next restaurant project, named after an app he developed to help restaurant owners retain staff, improve operational efficiency and scale businesses.
“I can do some sort of in between where I can take down a bigger space…but I get to do whatever I want in it and just be as creative as I can be, and just get back to making food again,” he said.
Mahler does not plan on using third-party delivery services at Colander Kitchens, which he calls “the destroyer of restaurants.” But Mahler understands the need for takeout, so he’s developing every recipe with dine-in and to-go orders in mind. He plans to eventually expand hours to include dinner service and weekends.
Ultimately, Mahler hopes to push himself to make each concept at Colander Kitchens expandable, but he doesn’t have any intention of expanding them beyond the San Mateo location himself.
“If I can incubate the space here and completely perfect the concept and someone else wants it, great,” he said. “It’d be like having a bunch of children and seeing how they grow up in different nature-nurture environments.”
Colander Kitchens, 50 E. 3rd Ave., San Mateo; 415-997-0024, Instagram: @colanderkitchens. Open Monday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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