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.
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.
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.
So Koslow needed a place that would temporarily allow such risk and experimentation, a place where diners had “no preconceived notion” of her or of Sqirl. “It felt almost like a safe zone,” she said, “testing out on people who are not the people who will be eating there every day.” And East Coast acolytes of Koslow's got to eat the stuff—creamed yogurt with shredded pickle, quail shawarma, and sturgeon with a green Yemeni curry called sahawek—before their L.A. counterparts.
This was not Koslow's first pop-up; she regularly hosts them at Sqirl, with people like Eric Werner and Mya Henry, of Hartwood in Tulum. The events often have an insidery feel, which is part of the draw: These cool chefs, who seem to be friends, are cooking together for you and your friends, and maybe you're their friend, too? It also forces a kitchen out of its routine. “When Roberta's came to town, we learned how to shape the pizza and what pH they like the dough at,” Koslow said of the blistered, puffy, crisp-yet-chewy crust that makes Roberta's pies some of the best in the country. “You learn by doing, and you learn from the best, and there's real power in that.”
In oakland, Chris Kronner runs a restaurant called KronnerBurger. It's been open for almost three years, and he still does pop-ups all the time: He drops into neighborhoods in New York and L.A. and throughout the Bay Area where he might open a new shop, hoping to learn something about the particular economics of the area. (For instance: “You can sell a burger for $25 in New York and no one fucking bats an eye.”)
But doing this many pop-ups “doesn't help with lease negotiations or who to take investment from.” He sighs. “Unless one day of your pop-up is an accounting class, it can only show you so much.”
Kronner is exhausted, but what choice does he have? Opening a new restaurant is astronomically expensive and equally risky. You have thousands of restaurants, many quite good, to compete with. Pop-ups act as a hedge against the vast and relentless waves of uncertainty.
Out of those hedges grows an infrastructure built for the churn of temporality. When such spaces—like condos and Airbnb-primed homes—are built for the type of people who are craving constant change, who is it for? Tourists, mainly. Investors, too. Like luxury condos pushing low- and middle-income residents out of their cities, spaces designed exclusively for pop-ups run the risk of pushing out neighborhood restaurants for the sake of having a bright shiny thing that visitors flock to for the 'Gram.
I was at a ball field near the beach when I met Long Beach, California's Snapchat-famous Taco Lady. “You can finally find out why they call it ‘sherrific’—which is better than terrific, sort of like scrumptious,” she'd told me on the phone, talking about her tacos. Autumn Collins has been doing pop-ups, selling tacos in lots and bars throughout Long Beach, since January 15, 2012. This was a few months after she got laid off from her nursing job and weeks after passing a restaurant-supply store with two taco grills out front for sale on layaway. She took it as a sign. “And of course I know how to cook,” said the Taco Lady, “because I have about a hundred kids.” (She has six.) At her kids' birthdays, she used to hire a lady to come out with grills and make tacos in her yard for all the kids and families. She was paying close attention. She'd taken classes at the Cordon Bleu for two and a half semesters.
She set up her grills at the Martin Luther King Day parade, marinating $20 worth of sausage and beef with her own mix of spices. The $1 tacos sold out in a few hours, netting the Taco Lady $427.
The next weekend, she set up at a car wash. The week after that, across from the local high school. Within a month, there was a line to the corner. Even though she'd started getting work again as a nurse, she realized she might get to quit that for good and go into cheffing full time, which she did.
Now, even though she caters for Southern California Edison and Warren G, the Taco Lady still mostly operates via pop-ups. Pop-up shows, she calls them. Most of her fans find out about them through her Snaps; I heard about her from a friend of a friend. This pop-up felt pure, more underground than others, and when I visited, the space around the grills looked like a block party: the chatter in the line mixing with the sea air, haze mixing with the smoke from the grills. I bought ten of her dollar tacos, which were peppery, greasy, cheesy, delicious. They filled three plates. I took them back to my grandmother's house, and when she asked where they were from, I said, “They came from the Taco Lady in Long Beach,” and she had no follow-up questions.
I'd seen a snaking line outside the original Johnny Rockets, which had been closed for more than a year. It had reopened, temporarily and with much fanfare, as the Double R Diner from Twin Peaks, where many of the show's characters worked, and many more ate, including the lead detective, who always had pie and “damn good coffee.”
I watched the line from across the street at my local CVS with a mix of disdain and awe. The people in line all had the same look, somewhere between anticipation and boredom. What they waited for was not so much a meal but the deliverance of content. They all had their phones out, waiting, ready. I'd seen a similar line once before. Not for food, but for the feat of engineering masquerading as art that was 2013's viral installation called the Rain Room, at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. People queued up just as much for the photo op as they did for the experience.
Of course I wanted in, wanted to try David Lynch-branded coffee (was it damn good?) and a piece of cherry pie. When I walked up to it a few days later, the line was gone. I went right in and took a seat at the counter. There was no kitchen, just pie and coffee, plus macarons and vegan donuts. There were, however, coffee mugs, hats, pillows, patches, skateboards, action figures, T-shirts, cosplay costumes, and lunchboxes for sale. The pie was significantly overpriced for its size. Leaving, I felt…not cheated, but like I had just thrown money down into a pit, at the bottom of which was Showtime's marketing department.
In the following weeks, I visited many more pop-ups in Los Angeles—a second Twin Peaks pop-up; Roberta's in Culver City; Secret Lasagna in Chinatown; the vegan Cuban spot Señoreata in Highland Park; Roy Choi's Pot Pizza Joint (not a weed thing)—and missed even more of them. Each one was much better, purer, less jaded, more delicious, and a better deal (even when I spent a lot more money) than the Double R in poor old Johnny Rockets' shell. But there was always a nagging sense that there was never not going to be a certain critical mass of people who wanted to experience a pop-up simply because it was there right now and soon wouldn't be. Once everyone—or the critical mass and their Instagram posts—had already been, it lost its sparkle. I never saw the line at the Double R snake down the block again. It had, in a matter of weeks, stopped being a pop-up and become a gift shop. Soon after that, it disappeared.
Ryan Bradley is a writer in Los Angeles.
