No end in sight to popularity of SF pop-ups

Within two days of moving to San Francisco, Laura and Sayat Ozyilmaz had found cooking jobs at upscale restaurants — Laura at Saison, Sayat at Mourad. Within three months, they had a pop-up on the side, too.

Last month, the dining room of the Mission restaurant formerly known as the Tradesman was packed with attendees at one of Istanbul Modern ’s brunches (they serve dinners, too). Although both Laura and Sayat work 60-hour weeks, they tacked on a few dozen extra hours beforehand to prepare Turkish-inspired dishes like dense farmers cheese coated in eggplant jam, poached eggs in yogurt sauce and a flaky, rolled pastry with salted honey cream and persimmons.

Eight years ago, pop-ups — temporary restaurants housed in another restaurant — were curiosities, an of-the-moment response to the recession, or boom-time rents, or both. Many from that first generation have moved into permanent spaces, but the supply hasn’t diminished. Nor has interest from diners. Pop-ups, temporary by definition, have become a stable part of San Francisco. But in a city with 7,600 permanent restaurants, why are the ephemeral ones so popular?

From the perspective of the people who organize them, many pop-ups start as a chef’s mechanism for letting off steam: a way to pursue a creative endeavor while working at someone else’s restaurant.

That’s the case for the Ozyilmazes, who are Mexican (her) and Turkish (him) by birth. The couple met at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and staged at 25 restaurants around Mexico and the United States on their honeymoon. Istanbul Modern gives them a way to use those experiences to come up with their own style of food. “The open-mindeness (of diners) allows us to experiment with some very inventive, new flavors while delivering quality and telling the story of the food and the region,” Sayat says.

Through the Kitchen Window , which holds monthly dinners around town, has similar origins. A year and a half ago, Alexis Katsilometes, catering manager at Nopalito, all but dared Nopalito sous-chef Joji Sumi to throw a dinner together on the restaurant’s patio. Their initial sit-down dinners have evolved into a raucous, traveling party.

Clearly inspired by dim sum houses (and, by extension, State Bird Provisions), waiters circulate Sumi’s takes on Cantonese daikon cakes as well as more free-form poke tostadas and pork spare ribs glazed with a tart chile morita sauce. At first, the dinners drew their industry friends, but once Katsilometes listed tickets on EventBrite, strangers showed up, too, their proportion of the crowd increasing with each dinner.

“Both of us had convinced ourselves we don’t want to open a restaurant,” Katsilometes says. “But we realized in doing this, (a restaurant) is all we want.”

Other pop-ups can serve as a holding place for a restaurant that isn’t yet ready to be born. Emily Lai, who throws Masak Masak dinners every one to two months, is a food consultant for tech companies and former owner of the Rib Whip barbecue truck. She started cooking Malaysian dinners at Biondivino wine boutique in Russian Hill two years ago after she wanted to prepare food she couldn’t find in the Bay Area. Biondivino owner Ceri Smith became convinced that her Italian wines would pair beautifully with the heady aromatics and heat of Lai’s densely spiced beef pies and coconut curries.

When no more diners could squeeze into the window-box seats in Smith’s minuscule store, the dinners moved to a friend’s business in the Mission. A restaurant may be the end goal, but in the meantime the pop-up’s irregular schedule lets Lai spend time with her small children, and has inspired her to package the sambal (chile paste) she makes for Masak Masak to sell in stores.

The most common reason cooks start a pop-up, however, remains building a business and a fan base. While it’s not a required step on the path to opening a restaurant, it has become as common as sharing construction photos on Instagram.

One of the longest-running pop-ups in town, Rice Paper Scissors , has finally found a permanent location in the Mission after chefs Valerie Luu and Katie Kwan watched many of their pop-up peers make the same move. In the six years they have spent looking for a space, Rice Paper Scissors has grown into a catering operation that serves as many as 500 bowls of noodles at a time.

Yet Luu and Kwan haven’t abandoned their long-standing Thursday-night dinners at Mojo Bicycle Cafe on Divisadero. In fact, both say those dinners keep their original vision in sight. “Mojo has the feeling that we hope for our future restaurant: A great neighborhood feel with people of different backgrounds and ages,” Luu says.

Other than a symbiotic relationship with their host restaurants, pop-ups in the Bay Area share few common traits.

Some make rare and elaborate appearances, changing location with each event. Others have permanent residencies. The most formal pop-ups have websites and mailing lists. Others simply post notices on a free Instagram account. They can be cheap — well, relatively affordable, given the Bay Area’s cost of living — or prix-fixe dinners with wine pairings whose check tops $200. (See a partial list below)

Attempts to build permanent spaces to host pop-ups have proved less successful; a half-dozen have opened and closed, the clientele too irregular to cover the rent. The only space with some staying power is Naked Kitchen, a private home with a commercial kitchen downstairs that hosts higher-end pop-ups like Sorrel , Quince alumnus Alex Hong’s weekly $55 tasting menus.

Michael Mina may be one of the few restaurateurs whose restaurant empire is large enough, and popularly acclaimed enough, to fund his own pop-up space to try out concepts for new restaurants he is considering. So far, the Mina Test Kitchen has given Middle Eastern, international barbecue, Italian American, Indian and southern Italian food a go.

Where host spaces have failed, pop-up technology has not. Part of the reason that the Ozyilmazes launched Istanbul Modern so soon after moving to San Francisco is that they found Feastly, which they call a “plug-and-play platform.”

The San Francisco company began as a meal-sharing service, marketing underground dinners cooked in private homes. Though the online marketplace continues to be what founder Noah Karesh calls “agnostic to space,” Feastly has access to five restaurant spaces in San Francisco — some of them vacant spaces looking for new tenants — that it offers to pedigreed chefs like Tu David Phu (formerly of Gather), Francis Ang (formerly of Dirty Habit) and the Ozyilmazes.

Sayat Ozyilmaz says that Feastly has given Istanbul Modern a ready-made market for the dinners. It provides online tools for calculating prices and taxes, guest management software and even connection to other pop-up chefs. “The restaurant industry is still looking at chefs in terms of service workers,” Karesh adds. “We look at every chef as a creative and talent, and that’s how most chefs look at themselves.”

Perhaps the reason pop-ups have become a permanent part of the dining scene is that they’re the purest expression of dining as entertainment: readily available to those in the know, even if that means those who merely know how to use Instagram. They hold an appeal with diners who seek bragging rights for discovering up-and-coming chefs before they break big or who enjoy the fleeting, loose-limbed nature of the events.

They may, in fact, be a measure of the growing fickleness of San Francisco’s dining culture. As Karesh says, “The way that restaurants typically work, it’s all about consistency. We are all about novelty.”

“A lot of the ideas for pop-ups sound exciting and a little bit different,” agrees Katsilometes. “Usually the price point isn’t too aggressive, so you can sample this new cuisine or idea for not that much of a commitment.”

Of course, one-off dinners can remind diners that repetition, not creativity, is the reason restaurants succeed. Signature dishes don’t appear in some middle-of-the-prep-shift eureka: They’re engineered, stripped back down and reconstructed, often over the course of weeks and months. It’s almost expected that every pop-up will include dishes that taste like first drafts.

But the rawness, and the promise it seems to hold, is also part of the appeal.

“There’s a strong intimate feel to most of the pop-ups,” says Emily Lai of Masak Masak. “You feel like you’re part of the process. The chef will come over and talk to you about the cooking and how this is all done.”

“I think people’s personal dreams and passion resonate with customers,” clarifies Katie Kwan of Rice Paper Scissors. “Food is so attractive in so many ways, one of which can be a personal story. There’s someone here who really cares about what they’re cooking. None of us are getting rich off this. We do this because there’s love in it.”