Chefs looking to start small carve out temporary quarters in established kitchens

Facing high risk, stiff competition and the need for expensive startup capital, entrepreneurs opening new restaurants in New Orleans have never had it easy. But now, with the recession causing banks to tighten lending, financing a new restaurant can be harder than ever.

John McCusker,The Times-PicayuneEman Loubier takes orders at his pop-up restaurant, Noodles and Pie, in early November. Noodles and Pie opens Monday nights inside Coulis, a breakfast restaurant Uptown that typically closes at 2 p.m.
Enter the "pop-up restaurant."

A chef "pops up" a temporary restaurant -- usually just one night a week -- inside the shell of another restaurant during its off-hours. Using the host restaurant's silverware, linens and cooking equipment, the pop-up's staff serves customers a limited menu of usually five options. Having swept through New York and Los Angeles, the phenomenon is now emerging in New Orleans.

For some chefs, pop-ups are a way to test-drive the local market and gauge demand before investing in a full-scale restaurant. For others, it's a way to try out life as a chef, while still maintaining a day job.

"Eleven years ago I opened up Dante's, and that was a hell of a challenge," said Eman Loubier, owner of Dante's Kitchen in Uptown New Orleans. "But the timing then was better than it is now. Banks were a little easier with loaning. It was a little easier to get financing."

Loubier recently opened a pop-up restaurant called Noodles and Pie, serving items like braised duck noodle soup and honey-pine nut pie with lavender whipped cream. Noodles and Pie opens Monday nights inside Coulis, a breakfast restaurant Uptown that typically closes at 2 p.m.

"It was really just a matter of necessity, not us wanting to do something trendy or cool," said Mike Friedman, who runs Pizza Delicious every Sunday and Thursday night out of a shared Bywater kitchen.

Technologically nimble

So far, there are about a dozen pop-ups on any given week in the city. Many are so popular that they routinely sell out of food within hours, a lofty goal that many traditional restaurants can only dream of.

That popularity owes much to the rise of social media. Each pop-up has hundreds of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, making it easy to update a mass audience on the upcoming week's location, hours of operation and menu. Even just a few years ago, it would have been nearly impossible for an unofficial restaurant to attract enough customers to stay viable, said chef Peter Vazquez, who runs a pop-up out of Stein's Deli on Magazine Street every Sunday night.

John McCusker, The Times-PicayuneIn a pop-up restaurant, personnel from one restaurant take over the location of another restaurant for one night.
Vazquez's Hush Supper Club Facebook page features weekly polls for its 350 fans to decide what type of food Vazquez will take on the following Sunday. "The people have spoken! Representin' the Philippines!" Vazquez recently wrote after asking his fans to choose between Italian and Filipino food.

"Twitter and Facebook are amazing tools, especially for these morphing businesses that change constantly," Vazquez said. "It's all about adaptability."

That constant contact with customers also enables pop-up restaurants to save money by not opening on days that customers say they can't make it, such as the day of a big Saints game.

Dipping their toe in

All of New Orleans' pop-ups share a similar narrative. Each starts out with a chef having a passion for a certain type of food that is hard to find in the current restaurant scene, such as New York-style pizza, gourmet pies or vegan food. Because the chef isn't sure whether New Orleans customers would go for their niche food, they open a pop-up to test the waters.

"I didn't know how a noodle and pie shop would go," Loubier said. "So it's good to see how the community is going to take it first before I make a commitment."

"The model's really good for testing out the market for something different, which is what we were doing with vegetarian food in New Orleans," said Karen Wang, a partner of Tsai, a Taiwanese pop-up that has opened in the Dragon's Den and people's private homes.

One chief advantage of running a pop-up is the freedom from overhead costs that weigh down traditional restaurants. The high costs of rent, utilities, and maintenance on ovens, freezers and other equipment forces restaurants to charge a premium on their food just to break even.

For pop-ups, the lack of overhead expenses frees up more money to spend on the quality of the ingredients and still lets them charge customers less for the final product. That cheap price for a chef's high-quality food contributes to the popularity of pop-up restaurants.

"I thought the food was very good, especially for the price. I just wonder how they did it for so cheap," said Mark Rein, a recent customer at Noodles and Pie. Most items on the Noodles and Pie menu are between $6 and $10, while an entree at Dante's Kitchen, Loubier's full-time restaurant, can cost $25.

That lower price point was the main reason the pop-up model appealed to Rene Louapre, manager of Most Valuable Burger, a pop-up restaurant that served burgers out of Slim Goodie's until May. Though the burgers were made with steak-quality cuts of beef and served on high-end bakery buns, they sold for only $6 apiece.

"We just wanted to sell $6 burgers," said Louapre. "From a business side, we weren't trying to make a ton of money on it. We were trying to sell a delicious burger in a family-friendly environment. I don't think any of us have regrets about not charging double and making a whole lot more money because that's how much we wanted to charge."

Able to go out in left field

Making the pop-up work can be a challenge. Because of the limited refrigerator space in the host restaurant, pop-ups generally have to do all their preparations off-site, then transfer the food to the host restaurant.

"It's one thing to be able to have a full-powered kitchen where you know where everything is," said Vazquez. "It's a whole other thing to be in someone else's kitchen, where they've got all their stuff, and you're trying to maintain quality, which is its own ball of problems because at that point, you can't thin a sauce, bring something down or reduce it. It has to be ready to go."

But the pop-up model does allow chefs the freedom to experiment and switch up their menu much more than would be possible in a traditional full-time restaurant. Also, the day-to-day management of a full-time restaurant can take away from the fun of cooking, said Vazquez.

"I get excited about doing a different cuisine each week. You can't change your direction 180 degrees every week in a restaurant," said Vazquez. "It's like, if you're writing children's books your whole life, you're like, 'God, can't I just write a horror story?' You want to branch out. This enables chefs to go totally out in left field and do something they've been thinking about. It frees you up so you can actually cook."

That constant evolution has the added benefit of attracting and retaining a good kitchen staff, which is tough in the restaurant industry, notorious for its quick employee turnover.

"This gives my guys an opportunity to grow," said Loubier of Noodles and Pie. "Everybody wants to be appreciated and have opportunities to grow in whatever business you're in. Nobody wants to just pop out widgets all day long."

Restaurants earn rental fee

The pop-up model benefits the host restaurant because it generates revenue during hours it would normally be closed. Most arrangements involve the pop-up paying the host restaurant a flat rent fee each time, though some pay a percentage of their revenue.

Most of the arrangements resulted from friendships between the two restaurant proprietors. Dan Stein, owner of Stein's Deli, said he lets Vazquez use his restaurant space only because they have been friends for 10 years.

"If anybody else asked, I would probably tell them no," Stein said. "But Pete's a Pete thing. I like his food. My customers like his food, so they appreciate that I let him do his thing."

The cash-only enterprises do present some regulatory challenges, particularly if the chef does not own his own restaurant outside the pop-up. Loubier pays sales tax through Dante's Kitchen, but other chefs without a separate company might have trouble accounting for what they sold as well as complying with licensure laws.

After running a pop-up, a chef has a better idea of whether opening a full-time restaurant is a viable option. For some, like Noodles and Pie and Pizza Delicious, it seems only a matter of months before there's a new restaurant on the horizon. The pop-up's popularity also allows the chefs to make a more compelling pitch to investors.

But for others, like Most Valuable Burger, the pop-up helped the managers realize they weren't ready to dive in just yet.

"At the end of the day, it's an important distinction between playing golf for fun and quitting your job to go join the PGA tour. That's a big commitment that we're just not ready for," said Louapre.