We saw five people already lining up, waiting for me to open. 20 people, 50 people. I just put my head down and started to work making tortillas. Boom, boom, boom, boom. There’s no other way. There’s no other way. According to the National Restaurant Association, in 2021, nearly 90,000 restaurants across the US closed. The pandemic changed everything. The restaurant industry was especially vulnerable. People were unemployed. They had time on their hands, but they were also really strapped for cash. And it pushed a lot of people to develop pop-ups. In 2022, there were 105% more temporary restaurants, or pop-ups, than there were in 2021. And in 2023, there were 155% more than in 2022. While the pandemic certainly didn't create the pop-up, it did lead to an explosion of them. So what does it take to make a pop-up restaurant successful, and is this business model sustainable? I was a sous chef at 11 Madison Park.

I worked in fine dining for almost ten years. That was always my goal, to open my own fine dining restaurant. We were working at a restaurant in Las Vegas. From Las Vegas, they moved us to Brooklyn to open another restaurant before the pandemic. My name is Eric Huang. I am the chef and founder of Pecking House. Jorge Aguilar, and I’m the chef and owner of Border Town. Amanda Rosa and I'm the co-owner of Border Town. I left 11 Madison Park in January of 2020, and then all of a sudden lockdown happened. Everybody's stuck at home. We were unemployed and just had the time. It occurred to me to roll the taquitos in aluminum foil. And I went to try and sell them in the street. I went to Home Depot and carwashes. People try them and say: “These ... these are really good!” Around here, almost nobody has tried tortilas made from this type of flour. And that’s how we started.

Traditionally, people would have thought of a pop-up as more of a space you go to, but due to the circumstances of the pandemic, it became this pop-up that came to you. The pandemic pushed Jorge and Amanda to take to the streets to bring their specialty tortillas and tacos to people, while Eric decided to sell pop-up Sichuan-style fried chicken deliveries from the back of his car. One day we just replied to an ad on Craigslist. That was our first pop-up we ever did. We were like, let's just go for it. And once he kind of got the taste for being able to do our own thing, we just kind of went from there. Instagram specifically has become the biggest tool for pop-ups. Once I committed to the fried chicken recipe, we just told people about it via Instagram. And then it just kind of slowly spread from there. It's the only marketing we've ever done is through Instagram. And again, it was very little by little.

And we got a couple press hits, and it just took off like wildfire. That Rob Martinez video that went viral on Instagram. It's called Border Town. Smoky, spicy, rich. Let's support Jorge’s business and come out next week. Yeah. The following pop-up that next Sunday was lines... The line went until the end of the block. Around the block, it was just two of us making tacos for a ton of people. We could only really deliver to about 120 people a day, which was already a lot. It was crazy and really challenging. The worst thing is disappointing people who have waited. It's just like you never, never want that to happen. And that happened many times... We're at this turning point, though, where a lot of people who were running these pop-ups feel, you know, it was incredible to do it for as long as they've done it, but it's untenable to kind of grow until they decide what the next step is going to be.

Let's take a second to thank our sponsor, Verizon. This month, Verizon Small Business Days are back to help make things a little bit easier. From August 5th to August 11th, you can meet with business experts, get one-on-one advice, free tech checks, and special offers like a free 5G phone when you switch over to their service, so don't miss out. Now back to the video. Pop-ups are incredibly hard to run. It's not everyone's got to be doing that forever. Going up and down, up stairs and down again, setting up tables, all the equipment breaking it down, and then putting it back in the car. That’s the hardest part, I think, the most tiring part of it all. There's not a ton of data on the successes and failures of pop-ups, and that's largely because every small business has different goals. You know, what is the success rate? I can't really answer that.

because I think that's not everyone's goal to be doing a pop-up that turns into a restaurant. There are many pop-ups, like Apocalypse Burger
in Indianapolis, that found success, yet closed their doors to focus on other projects. Or Southeast Roadhouse in Texas, which is a new pop-up from two chefs who previously “popped up” with other restaurants. In some cases,
the limited run is the goal. For so many people, this is the first time that they've ever been able to really dream. The good things about the pandemic is that it shook up the normal order of things. And I think people were just like, oh, we don't... There are no rules. If the pandemic hadn't happened,
we'd probably just be working in someone else's restaurant right now. The pandemic definitely gave us the time, the freedom to just make this happen. There are many storefronts that are opening this year that came from people who built an audience through pop-ups just on Instagram.

which is really exciting. We were kind of a nomadic restaurant for almost a year. It was a whole process of learning how to sign a lease, how to set up insurance, workers' compensation, all these things you never learn as a chef. Then you build a restaurant, and it's, that's a brutal process. The future of Border Town is definitely a restaurant, you know, definitely a brick and mortar. That kind of brought me back to my roots of like, you know, this is what being a chef is really about, is making people happy. I'm very grateful for it. And that's how I met my future wife. So that’s pretty good too. Seeing people’s faces when they eat the tacos, and they say “wow.” And they come and find you to tell you, “Thank you so much, the food was excellent.” When I hear that, I know that my job is done.

Why "pop-up" restaurants are everywhere now

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