Pop-up popularity: In tight times, restaurants and stores deliberately open and close within a few days

Like most chefs, Alex Pope has always wanted to own his own restaurant.

Pope, 28, spent most of the past decade sharpening his skills in top-notch Kansas City, Mo., restaurants such as The American Restaurant and R Bar. This year, Pope’s reputation went national when he was named among the best new chefs in the Midwest by Food&Wine.

Pope’s experience combined with the buzz surrounding him means it’s the perfect time for him to open his own restaurant. There’s just one (big) thing getting in the way.

“Signing a five-year lease right now doesn’t seem as appealing as it used to,” Pope says. “That’s the nature of — I hate to sound cliché — the economy.”

Recent volatility in the markets combined with anxiety over a second recession is causing investors and consumers to tighten their already firm grip on cash. But Pope, Kansas City designer Peggy Noland and even rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West have found a novel way to loosen locked wallets: Pop-up restaurants and stores that open and close within a few days’ time.

Pop-ups are part of a growing consumer movement that marketing professionals call planned spontaneity. The fact that they’re fleeting gives pop-ups a powerful sense of excitement and urgency that can inspire the stingiest customer to spend.

Pope’s pop-up restaurant, Vagabond, which opened Wednesday in an event space at 1815 Grand Blvd., looks just like a permanent restaurant. It has a full kitchen and a chic, dim dining room furnished with square bistro tables and paintings by local artists. The seven-course menu comes with wine pairings and costs $75 per person. More than 300 people prepaid for reservations at the restaurant, which closed for good on Sunday. Pope says he needed 150 reservations to break even on his investment.

Beth Ann Kaminkow, president and CEO of Dallas-based marketing agency TracyLocke, says that pop-ups have been around forever, pointing to farm stands and Halloween costume shops. When the economy tanked in 2008, she says, pop-ups evolved into a way for businesses to take risks without risking their bottom line.

Pop-up restaurants in particular are piping hot this year: A 2010 survey of 1,500 chefs by the National Restaurant Association predicted that food trucks and pop-up restaurants would be the hottest restaurant operational trends in 2011.

The trend was sparked by celebrity chefs such as Ludo Lefebvre from Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters,” who opened a wildly successful pop-up called Ludobites in Los Angeles in 2009. Pop-ups have since shown up in other big cities and on cooking reality shows.

Pop-up stores are also in vogue.

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Altar Bridal and Bella Bridesmaid teamed up to open a pop-up bridal shop at 18th and Wyandotte streets during this month’s First Friday in the Crossroads Arts District.

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Designer Peggy Noland opened pop-up boutiques in Berlin and New York City in 2009 and 2010, and this October and November she’s opening others in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Even Jay-Z and Kanye West got into the pop-up game: About two weeks ago, the rappers opened a New York City store that only sold copies of the duo’s new “Watch the Throne” CD. It closed three days later.

Pop-ups might seem like a passing fad, Kaminkow says. But they’re going to be around for a long time, especially if the economy continues to putter along.

That’s because pop-ups allow businesses to test the waters of a market before diving in.

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Lululemon Athletica, a Canadian company that sells high-tech yoga and running apparel, opened a temporary showroom last summer in an empty storefront in Leawood, Kan.’s Park Place shopping center. The showroom, which was Lululemon’s first store in the Kansas City area, was a success, so a few weeks ago, the company replaced it with a full-size store in the nearby One Nineteen shopping center.

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“When the economy is not good, there’s less commitment to real estate,” Kaminkow says. Owners of empty storefronts want to lease out their spaces. But finding someone to commit to a long-term lease gets trickier as the future of the economy gets murkier.

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Pope didn’t want to commit to a five-year lease.

Neither did Patrick Ryan, a Kansas City chef who considered opening his own restaurant four years ago, just when the economy went south.

Ryan had lined up a business partner and what he considered the perfect property in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District when he decided the whole thing was going to cost too much money. He put his entrepreneurial plans on pause until this spring, when he started selling gourmet Mexican food from his beautifully restored Airstream trailer. Port Fonda — a cross between a food truck and a mobile restaurant — has since become one of the city’s hottest foodie destinations. On Friday and Saturday nights, Ryan parks it in a lot at 20th and Main streets and starts selling $3 tacos out the window. The chef also accepts reservations from customers who want to dine at the cozy table inside Port Fonda. A four-course meal for six people costs $250.

“We started joking when we opened, telling people this is the hardest table to get in Kansas City,” Ryan says. Now that might be true: Reservations are booked through September, and Ryan won’t even accept reservations for October until Sept. 1.

Port Fonda embodies planned spontaneity: It’s parked at the same location every Friday and Saturday, but because it’s a food truck, eating there feels spur-of-the-moment.

Consumers crave that feeling more and more these days, Kaminkow says.

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Facebook and Twitter, with their constant, instantaneous streams of information, have changed the way we behave, Kaminkow explained. Maybe for good.

Say you read on Twitter that your favorite food truck is down the street. Or you open your email inbox and see a Groupon to your favorite restaurant and — gasp! — there are only 47 left. Both are examples of planned spontaneity.

So is Wayne Coyne’s June 25 visit to Love Garden, a record store in downtown Lawrence, Kan. On a whim, the Flaming Lips frontman decided to drive from his home in Oklahoma City to Lawrence with a box full of records and fetus-shaped gummy candies. The $30 gummy fetuses contained USB drives loaded with new Flaming Lips music.

Love Garden’s owner, Kelly Corcoran, announced Coyne’s impromptu visit that afternoon on Twitter. By the time Coyne showed up at 9:30 p.m., 100 fans were waiting at the store. Coyne talked with fans and signed autographs for three hours. At the end of the night, Love Garden had made $1,000 extra and Coyne and the Flaming Lips had gained lots of positive buzz in Lawrence and online.

Kaminkow says that sense of urgency and discovery you get when you’re in on something exciting — whether it’s a pop-up restaurant or a surprise sale — is a strong motivator to buy.

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That’s why Vagabond probably won’t be the last pop-up restaurant in Kansas City.

Once the weather cools off, Ryan wants to open a pop-up restaurant in a Crossroads Arts District events space with Jenny Vergara, Pope’s partner in Vagabond. Since 2008, Vergara has run a popular underground supper club in Kansas City called The Test Kitchen.

Vergara says she’s too focused on Vagabond to commit to opening another pop-up right now, but she’s fielded several requests from chefs and local property owners who want to open their own pop-ups in Kansas City.

Vergara says she and Pope don’t have any plans to reopen Vagabond later. But they haven’t ruled it out, either. And it’s been a lot of work: Vergara and Pope had to rent tables and dinnerware, find local artists to donate art for the walls and assemble a team of servers and chefs willing to work for five days only. In other words, they cooked up a restaurant from scratch.

Vergara says turning a profit is important, but that it’s not Vagabond’s only purpose.

“This is about giving the chef 100 percent freedom to do exactly what he wants to do,” she says.