Pop-Up Restaurants Are Over

The spaces are bad, the food is uneven, and even the chefs don't know what's on the plate. Columnist Matt Duckor says: Give me a traditional restaurant!

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Four walls and a roof. A kitchen. A Micros system. A long-term lease and regular utility bills. Health inspections. Employees. Managers to make sure said employees are taken care of. Regularly scheduled food deliveries. A backup plan for when your best line cook, back waiter, and star dishwasher all call in sick on Saturday night with 175 covers on the books. These are the building blocks of a restaurant, the gears that make the machines work. I love restaurants, and I spend most of my free time eating at, documenting, and, well, obsessing over them.

In recent years, however, chefs have sought to strip away all or most of the above in favor of something more elemental and transitory--the pop-up restaurant. The idea is cute, if not especially new: a visiting chef takes over another chef's kitchen for a night. I've dined at my fair share of them, and now I'd like to steal a line from my Bon Appetit colleague The Nitpicker and say this:
I'm Sick of Pop-Up Restaurants. Don't get me wrong, I've had some great meals at pop-ups. But most of the time, I leave feeling like a guinea pig or, even worse, like I've just paid a lot of money for a half-baked, phoned-in excuse for a chef to visit town and hang out with his buddies. Pop-ups will never replace restaurants. Here's why:

Pop-ups pop up everywhere from private apartments to coffee shops to retail stores, but usually have one thing in common--the space wasn't originally intended to function as a restaurant. Sure, that Manhattan loft with great art, a long, handcrafted wooden table, and stunning light fixtures is gorgeous, but none of that matters if you can't get past the smell of hot oil and smoke because there's no ventilation. Few restaurant chefs work in their dream kitchens, but not even having the basics puts pop-ups at an immediate disadvantage. Even Ludo Lefebvre, he of Ludobites pop-up fame, just opened Trois Mec, a permanent restaurant in L.A. "Finally," he recently told the New York Times, "I go every day in my kitchen and everything is in the same place, the same stuff. It's my house. I don't live in a hotel anymore."

There's no escaping the hype machine, whether it's focused on traditional restaurants or pop-ups. But although the latest McNally joint gets a ton of press coverage, the highly concentrated dose of hype directed at pop-up restaurants has reached a breaking point. History will point to the summer of 2011--there were no fewer than 13 pop-ups in three months--as the start of all this. There were countless posts about last year's Diner en Blanc, a French concept in which a large number of people wear white and sit outside in the heat. Foreign critics like Jay Rayner have even taken time to review temporary restaurants.This doesn't help anyone. It's nearly impossible for a one-night-only affair to live up to the same sort of anticipation usually reserved for a traditional restaurant opening that's been in the works for months (or years). And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm guilty of this, too.

With some exceptions, most pop-ups are designed to be temporary--that's kind of the point. If no one shows up or things don't go as planned, there are no loan officers or bill collectors making your phone ring off the hook. The consequences of failure are minimal, which lets chefs be creative, sure, but which also means they don't need to hone their creativity--or truly learn from their mistakes. When restaurateurs sign a 15-year lease, however, they have to approach their concept in a totally different way: Will this be something that can stand the test of time? That kind of commitment (financial as well as philosophical) serves as a sort of natural-selection process. The fact is, it's damn hard to secure funding and open a restaurant in a major city like NYC, LA, or Chicago. Everyone from executive chefs to dishwashers put their lives into opening a restaurant, often for several years before the first plate of seared pork belly hits the table. Not that chefs don't put work into pop-up endeavors--and longer-term efforts like the Ludobites and the seemingly expanding Wolvesmouth are slightly different--but they're often not on the same playing field.

At a recent pop-up dinner in New York City, I received plate after plate of food with so many ingredients that even the man preparing this highly anticipated, one-night-only event had trouble remembering which dish had fried zucchini blossoms and which had the compressed beets. In the no-rules world of pop-up dining, plates with 10-plus ingredients are common. When young chefs are left with complete freedom and control--and without a team or partner to advise them and weigh in on decisions--the final product suffers.

Which brings us to the restaurateur, the guy (or guys, or gals, or team) who owns, operates, and is behind the overall vision of the restaurant. Most chefs aren't restaurateurs. Take accomplished New York chef Andrew Carmellini, owner of Locanda Verde, the Dutch, and the recently opened (and heavily reviewed/blogged/tweeted/obsessed over) Lafayette. The man knows how to make food that people crave, as well as a thing or two about operating restaurants. But it's his partners Luke Ostrom and Josh Pickard who complete the package. They're both front-of-house experts who make sure the experience you receive in the dining room matches up with the work Carmellini does in the kitchen. All three restaurants are open throughout the day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and are extremely high-volume yet manage not to feel like food factories. At pop-ups, however, you might be using the same silverware throughout the meal, go without tap water for several courses (and you better not want ice), or find yourself with enough time between courses that you wonder if you should just jump in the kitchen yourself--the kinds of transgressions that you'd never forgive at a traditional restaurant (and that might get some poor busser fired). The most storied empire builders, like Danny Meyer and Daniel Boulud, have this stuff down to a science.

Look, I know: pop-ups aren't supposed to be restaurants. They're designed to provide an evening's amusement and then vanish into the ether. I think it's time for them to focus on the latter.

A Look at Pop-Ups By Nathan Outlaw and Michael Solomonov
The Consumed Archives


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