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Megan Fitzroy Phelan and Patrick Phelan of Longoven (Photo by Stephanie Breijo)
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The Jackdaw team prepping for a Kamayan dinner (Photo by Devon Halbert)
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Chris Fultz of ZZQ (Photo by Stephanie Breijo)
Used to be that a pop-up referred to a chef — out of work and mulling his future, or preparing to open his own place — who commandeers his buddy’s restaurant for a month or two to test out dishes.
Today, it is a slippery, ever-evolving term that refers both to a not-quite-restaurant and a genre that has gone from being a quirky curiosity on the margins to the buzzing center of the scene — forcing everyone who isn’t a foodie insider, which is most of us, to play catch-up. Herewith, your guide to a changing, confusing world.
The Roving Restaurant
This is the most ubiquitous iteration of the pop-up — a one-night-only appearance in a borrowed restaurant or venue, with tickets sold in advance online.
Five years ago, it was generally seen as a way for a young chef to establish a reputation without putting in the time, a way to make a quick impression. Increasingly, it is chefs who have regular gigs who are using the pop-up label to show what else they can do.
Ian Merryman, executive chef at Millie’s Diner, is typical of this class of chef. He says he came up with his popular Jackdaw pop-up series (held at Millie's and, most recently, The Veil Brewing Co.) so that he could express himself outside “the parameters of a box laid out for me.”
In cooking the sorts of dishes he can’t in the context of Millie’s (congee, longganisa corndogs, and pancit with bone marrow), the chef gets to test the waters of his own ideas, with minimal risk.
And if there comes a time when he wants to woo potential investors for a place of his own — and he says he does — then this side hustle, this sometime restaurant, becomes a calling card.
The Residency
What do you call a pop-up that has stretched over three years?
We call that a residency. Nothing temporary or momentary about it.
Mind you, we’re not complaining, nor is anyone who has sat down to the wonderful cooking at Longoven’s Sundays at Sub Rosa Bakery in Church Hill.
The fact that Bon Appetit added this would-be, not-quite restaurant to its Best New Restaurant list last year tells you that, in the food world of 2017, with the lines blurring as never before, you need not be an actual restaurant to be considered a great one.
The Longoven team will move into its long-awaited space early next year in Scott’s Addition, and ZZQ, which has followed a strikingly similar path to opening, will open its doors later this year.
ZZQ co-owner Chris Fultz hopes that being open five days a week will satisfy the growing demand for the outfit’s terrific ’cue, though he acknowledges, rightly, that scarcity is a large part of what makes ZZQ such an attraction.
The Quasi Restaurant Makeover
Jason Alley, who co-owns three actual restaurants in the city, has recently begun to play with the pop-up model.
Five days a week at lunchtime, his Southern restaurant, Comfort, cedes the floor to what he calls The Paulie — a South Jersey/Philly sandwich shop.
Is this a pop-up?
It’s more a kind of restaurant audition — a clever way to test out a new menu in an old place, without having to open an actual location.
Though Alley says his hoagies and cheesesteaks are an “opportunity to do something that you’re into that’s fun that maybe doesn’t have the legs to be a full-on concept,” the long lines seem to suggest otherwise, and he is quick to admit that he has noticed all the attention the pop-uppers around him are getting.
“We’ll do,” he says, “whatever it takes.”
The Meta Restaurant
Here’s how meta the pop-up scene has become: Lately, a backlash against the modern pop-up — a multi-course dinner for three digits — has taken root, led by, wait for it, chefs who are running multi-course dinners for three digits.
Adam Musselman and Joshua Franklin, the principals behind the Ivy Wall pop-up, recently started Cobra Burger — in the very same space.
Their goal?
The anti-pop-up: something fun and unpretentious that reaches beyond the in-the-know and the flush.
“I didn’t want to just keep it to people who could afford to go to Ivy Wall,” says Franklin. “I wanted to feed more people.”
Longoven Chef Andrew Manning says he opened Brasa, a pop-up series he shares with Steven Farr, for similar, populist reasons: “seafood and vegetables on a grill over wood fire, beer cans on ice, people sitting together at a picnic table and enjoying the simplicity of a grill and good conversation.”
Manning calls it an “experience.”
We call it a restaurant, but hey.
