Why Pop-ups Are Popping Off

Recently I was explaining pop-ups to my 96-year-old grandmother, Bam-Bam. I'd brought her a fried-chicken sandwich from McFly's All-Natural, a lunch counter run out of a restaurant-bar called Electric Owl in Los Angeles. Bam-Bam was enjoying the sandwich. It had a kick, and she liked the kick—so much that she was hoping I might bring her another sandwich sometime.

Maybe it wouldn't be there, I warned her. Not the kick, but the restaurant itself. This place—run out of another place—was impermanent, sort of secret. And that was the point. People learned about it through the Internet. On blogs (“What are those?”). Or, you remember that photo thing on the phone (Instagram)? Through that. You follow a chef (in this case Ernesto Uchimura, the guy who invented Ketchup Leather at his L.A. burger chain, Plan Check), or a restaurant, or a food truck, and the chef or the restaurant or the truck posts a photo or sends out a tweet (“A what?”), and you learn about this temporary thing. A pop-up.

In the age of the rock-star chef, pop-ups are their world tours. They even have specially designed posters! And merch! Follow five hot young chefs on Instagram and you'll start to stumble upon pop-ups the way you do Bonobos ads. You'll learn that “pop-up restaurant” can accurately describe everything from a parking-lot cookout to a brand activation to a fine-dining experience. The only through line is that it's temporary—but even then, it might not be. Some pop-ups are sneak previews, market tests of restaurants to come, or offerings from brick-and-mortar spots on another coast. The triumph of modern pop-ups in dining culture, a decade after they first began emerging, post-recession, shows us just how transient our desires are. After a month of eating at pop-ups, I figured out only one conclusive thing about them: They are not so much about the food as they are about all the stuff around the food—how we eat, not what we're eating.

The McFly’s chicken sandwich Photo: Donjkang / Instagram Pork and stuffed plantains at Lalito Courtesy of Zach Lewis / Lalito Chris Kronner’s burger Courtesy of Chris Kronner

The Origin of the Species

Before the pop-up boom came the taco-truck boom. In 2008, Roy Choi and his Korean-barbecue taco truck appeared on the streets of L.A. and made a big, meaty splash. Thousands of enterprising thirtysomethings followed, and soon “food-truck rodeos” were a thing—even though food trucks had been around for at least half a century. The new part was social media, a very good way to keep track of something that's constantly moving around the city.

Choi didn't invent the food truck, just like no one person invented limited-edition dining experiences; he just knew how to promote them at a crucial point in time. My grandmother doesn't know what Twitter is, but she's familiar with the concept of a slightly secret business that offers something extra. Only these days, instead of jazz and booze, it sells ephemerality. As attention spans shortened and experiences became the new status symbols, disappearing restaurants gained more cultural capital than their stodgily static alternatives.

This shift has created entire multimillion- and even billion-dollar real estate interests (malls, mostly) with spaces devoted to pop-up restaurants at New York's South Street Seaport, Platform in Culver City, and Chicago's Merchandise Mart, among others. A company based in San Francisco, called Cubert, manufactures purpose-built pop-up stalls. High turnover is now a virtue. Which means the latest food trend isn't an ingredient or a cuisine; it's a length of time. The most successful pop-up operations are those that can burn brightly, then quietly (and quickly) disappear to make room for something new.

Chefs have adapted to the churn. Time was, an accomplished chef would rarely up and leave a restaurant for something else. Now it happens all the time. Michelin-starred chef Dan Barber decamped from his idyllic Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the Hudson Valley for an international jaunt making luxury meals out of food waste. Chad Robertson, of San Francisco's cultishly loved bakery Tartine, has done so many collaborations that his sourdough starter is everywhere from New York to Stockholm, as iconic as a gurgling blob of yeast can be. René Redzepi has taken Noma (and its dedicated fans) on the road from Copenhagen to Sydney, Tokyo, and Tulum. At Lalito in New York, Gerardo Gonzalez hosts regular pop-ups that often turn into dance parties you see on Instagram the next day and wish you'd been at. I recently ate ramen from Oakland's Ramen Shop without having to leave Los Angeles, which was honestly very convenient. A few years ago, Google hired a whole crew of chefs to run a “world” café pop-up for the tenth anniversary of Google Translate. And last summer, Jessica Koslow, of L.A.'s now iconic breakfast-and-lunch spot Sqirl, started cooking out of the Food Lab, that space in Manhattan's South Street Seaport built specifically for pop-up restaurants. And eaters, well, we lined up around the block, flew halfway around the world, and paid premium prices just for a chance to say we were there.

Roberta’s pizza Photo: @Popeye the Foodie / Instagram Mackerel at the Ramen Shop; Courtesy of Sam White Roy Choi with pizza. Photo: Liz Barclay

The Pop-Up Poster Child

Koslow's food lab residency was an opportunity to test-drive the menu for Tel, her new restaurant, which will open in L.A. later this year. Sqirl, a studio-apartment-sized subway-tiled spot on an unassuming street corner, has built a name for itself as a counter-service restaurant where you can get grain bowls and turmeric tonic that you'll enjoy at wobbly sidewalk tables. The new place will have an actual dining room, where you can get not just breakfast and lunch but also dinner. The menu will be more expansive than Sqirl's, and will include beer and wine. It's bigger, more expensive. And a risk.