What’s Next for Pop-Ups?
For chefs and the venues that host them, the business of popups is challenging, and it’s just gotten more so since the early years when all you needed was a knife, a unique food concept and a temporary place to share your food with hungry diners.
SINCE SHE WAS a child, Angela Chi knew the family dinner was ready when she heard her mom’s voice echo through the house. Today, she is on a mission to share the love, care and diversity of nutritious Chinese homestyle food with the larger Detroit community through her pop-up Chi Fan Le, which fittingly means “time to eat” in Mandarin.
Over two years ago, Chi launched her takeout business out of her Woodbridge home following a pop-up dinner she hosted there for 26 Venture for America fellows, of whom she was one. She offered neighbors options like Sichuan-inspired Dan Dan noodles—spicy noodles topped with pork, peanuts, scallions and pickled mustard greens— and her mom’s pork and vegetable dumplings cooked fresh to order. She posted her menus in the Woodbridge neighborhood Facebook group.
“I was assuming that I wouldn’t be the only one missing this food,” she says about her healthy homestyle Chinese meals, which she couldn’t find in restaurants nearby. “People texted me to order food, which I was really grateful for because it was still kind of Covid times. I spent a lot of time highlighting my ingredients and being really transparent with my menus.”
News of her intentionality and tasty offerings spread by word of mouth and social media, and it wasn’t long before 8 Degrees Plato, a beer store and taproom in Midtown Detroit, invited her to pop up in their space, something she had never considered. It would be the first of many events Chi would embrace to share her food and explore this business.
She says doing pop-ups is a lot of work and physically demanding. She usually preps for two to three days before a three-hour event. Every situation is different but, in general, if the event goes well, after supplies and food and outside labor costs she’s able to keep about 30 percent of revenue. As a budding entrepreneur, she’s investing portions of that back into her business, whether for her point-of-sale service or the composting service to reduce her food waste. Still, getting her food in front of customers, testing recipes and receiving instant feedback without incurring high overhead costs is essential.
It keeps Chi Fan Le’s momentum while Chi determines her path forward.
“I’m just trying to take it step by step to figure out if this is exactly what I want,” she says. “I feel like the mentality is that you’re ultimately working up to a restaurant. And I don’t necessarily feel like a restaurant fits every person in every model. I feel like you don’t really know until you do it.”
Chi is one of many pop-up chefs in Metro Detroit who have tested their concepts through ephemeral events that have soared in popularity over the years, helping to launch successful concepts that eventually grew into permanent spaces such as Takoi in Corktown, Midnight Temple in Eastern Market and Baobab Fare in New Center (soon to open a second location in East English Village), to name a few pop-up success stories. But for chefs and the venues that host them, the business of pop-ups is a challenging one, and it’s just gotten more challenging since the early years when all you needed was a knife, a unique food concept that didn’t exist in the restaurant landscape, and a place to pop-up to share your food with hungry diners.
Pop-up burnout
Pop-ups are not new, but they exploded in popularity in Detroit in the early 2010s, with chefs and hosts eager to get into the game.
One of those people was Steven Reaume, a DJ, party promoter, visual artist and cook.
When the food pop-up scene began to take off in Detroit around 2013, Reaume says he helped create and manage a space called Pop on the second floor of Checker Bar in Cadillac Square in downtown Detroit. At Pop, people could test their food and dining concepts free of charge. Several entrepreneurs went on to open a brick-and-mortar, he says.
“Just to see the creativity, the people I met ... a lot of them were [working] on a line at a restaurant, but never had an opportunity to present their vision and what they had to offer. So I think that was the most beautiful part of it for me,” says Reaume, who founded the website The Detroit I Love also based on the idea of uplifting fellow creatives.
“Even as a promoter of parties, my goal has always been to promote the scene as a whole, not just myself, to make sure competition was friendly and that we all lifted each other up. And that was my goal with Pop.”
He also got into the cooking side with his Italian-inspired pop-up NOODL. He’s been a monthly staple at Motor City Wine through the years, cooked large dinners at Pop while it was open and collaborated on food events at places like Grand Trunk Pub, Willis Show Bar, Spot Lite and more.
“Doing pop-ups and being a club promoter both require a lot of expenses,” he says. “With pop-ups, I’ve never paid, and I’d be hard-pressed to do so unless it were a split after a certain amount of profit. As a promoter, if we do well, I’ll split the door. But both of those things require a lot of expenses. And a lot of times, the bars or whatever we do them at are making plenty of money, and I know it’s a draw for them. So, I’ve always had a hard time with people who charge for it.”
He continues to say he does have friends with establishments that charge, and he can understand some have a lot of overhead to cover. But, he says, the deal between both parties is ultimately critical. If the pop-up people aren’t making money, they aren’t going to do it, especially with the amount of work involved.
Since he began, Reaume has seen the pop-up scene in Detroit dwindle. He attributes this to the city “cracking down” in the mid-2010s on pop-ups’ food licenses and whether venues meet commercial kitchen regulations. Also, the rising cost of food and doing business makes the “fast-food window pop-up,” which is common in bars, especially difficult because chefs don’t know how many people to prepare for.
“A lot of us don’t have a lot of money, and so you take a real chance on that,” he says. “You may walk away with a ton of food.”
Reaume has made better profits on sit-down pop-up dinners, where he can presell tickets for 40 or 50 people and budget accordingly. However, he says, it’s still a lot of work, and fewer venues offer that opportunity because of their rising costs.
After nine years in the pop-up restaurant scene, Reaume is taking a break this summer.
“We have other projects. I’m a graphic designer, my husband and I are DJs, we throw parties, so it was just becoming a lot,” he says. “I need to eliminate something from my life for a minute.”
The rise (and fall) of host venues
Since the early and mid-2010s, places that host pop-ups such as Revolver have come and gone. That Hamtramck pop-up space—which played host to chefs who went on to open their own restaurants, such as Brad Greenhill of Takoi—called it quits after seven years in 2020 when the pandemic hit, and communal dining was not feasible.
More recently, in May, Frame in Hazel Park closed for good only a short time after two pop-up restaurants pulled out of their engagements, citing an inequitable profit share. Opened in 2017, Frame initially operated Joebar in the front with pop-up dinners in the back. The business evolved into hosting monthlong chef residencies in the front and dinners, workshops and events in the back. It hosted many up-and-coming chefs and chefs from around the country before shutting down in the spring.
While it has been challenging for host businesses, venues continue to open their doors to pop-up chefs seeking to share their food and test their concepts, such as Host in Utica. Opened in 2022, it houses rotating chef residencies, brunch and dinner service, a barista, a bar, a pizzeria and a co-working space.
Chi Fan Le will take up residency at Host for a month and a half this fall as Chi continues to explore a more sustainable concept. She’s considering the possibility of a brick-and-mortar, a food stall at a specialty market or even producing frozen nutritious Chinese homestyle meals that people can purchase from a vending machine. The goal, she says, is to nurture people with her food; the medium is undetermined.
Though she has some experience working in a traditional restaurant setting as a prep and line cook, Chi says the residency at Host will give her a fuller understanding of what it would look like to take her business to a brick-and-mortar level. Chi Fan Le will be open for dinner at Host five days a week. The restaurant does a split with chef residents; Chi expects her team to take 70 percent of the profits. Chef Andrew Stevick, head chef at Host, oversees the restaurant’s dining programs and works to recruit and onboard resident chefs, offering small contributions of welcome and care in the kitchen.
“In the space, we provide oil, flour, salt, sugar and basic spices, which for these pop-ups can add up every week if you’re making your own bread or dumpling dough. These are some of the amenities we offer our resident chefs to provide an experience to allow them to be more profitable,” he says.
Though the split-profit model is new to Chi—who has done most, though not all, of her pop-ups in bars and places that have not charged a venue fee—she sees the value of this next-level exposure, learning experience, potential for streamlined efficiency in a single kitchen and financial opportunity as a worthwhile tradeoff.
“It’s definitely going to be a big jump from doing pop-ups once or twice a week; it’s also a different clientele, so we’re modifying the menu accordingly,” she says. Chi Fan Le presents as fast casual, while Host’s restaurant concept is more upscale sit-down. “It’s a really great next step for us,” she says.
It’s a fine balance if you can keep it
Folk is a neighborhood café and wine shop in Corktown, but it is also another way for pop-up chefs to test their concepts in Detroit. Rohani Foulkes, owner of Folk, has shaped her business to allow others to flourish. She’s loud and proud to share a historic building alongside several other women-owned businesses at the corner of Bagley and Trumbull. The Aussie-style café, a 2024 James Beard Award semifinalist, has hosted pop-ups since opening in 2018.
Before Covid, the café offered residencies, where chefs took over on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights for a month. This model was quite a heavy lift, Foulkes says, for both her team and the incoming chef. Now, the café hosts one-day pop-up dinners instead and recurring series such as “Food Folks,” which fostered storytelling through various international cuisines featured in kitchens throughout Detroit.
“We work with folks who aren’t yet in the position to open their own brick-and-mortar, or maybe they just don’t want to,” says Foulkes. “That is a totally reasonable thing to not want these days because of the cost of running any business.”
In addition to hosting chefs in their space, Foulkes and her team curate a beverage program to offer alongside their food. The café is known for its sustainable and biodynamic wines, and offering nonalcoholic beverages is essential to its beverage programming. Event nights include two sittings with tickets sold in advance. While many have been successful, this year the collaborations have occasionally had to cancel events if they haven’t sold enough tickets to cover both parties’ costs.
“It’s no secret that costs are getting higher, and margins are getting slimmer,” Foulkes says. “So it is more difficult, in that sense, to invite folks into an already high-cost establishment to run. And that’s not just specific to Folk, right? It’s any small business these days [asked] to split revenues in any way, shape or form.”
Folk’s model involves partnering with each pop-up toward a clear goal: offer the community a fun, vibey event, highlight a chef ’s cultural menu and raise money toward a cause, such as supporting the people of Gaza. February’s “Food Folks: Tawleh by Shaebi,” a Palestinian dinner prepared by Saffron de Twah chef Omar Anani and Foulkes, raised proceeds to benefit Anera, which provides humanitarian assistance to refugees in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. In-house, Folk creates eye-catching marketing photos with their photographer at no charge to the pop-up. Foulkes aims for the incoming team and hers to collectively shape experiences that benefit both businesses and are as accessible to the community as possible.
“What can we reasonably charge for tickets to ensure that both the pop-up chef and the brick-and-mortar cover what’s needed to make these pop-ups work?” Foulkes asks.
“It’s a fine balance,” she continues. “As we get more bars and restaurants and food and beverage and hospitality activations in the city, the consumers’ bandwidth to constantly go out and support different establishments and pop-ups gets thinner. You only have so much time and money to spend.”
Recently, someone told her they, as a consumer, had been feeling pop-up fatigue for several years now, as there were so many in Detroit they just didn’t know where to start. As expenses increase, Folk has pulled back a little, hosting pop-ups on average once a month that complement their restaurant and retail space.
It’s a heavy lift on both sides. Customers may be burning out.
So why continue?
“We do it because we want to collaborate with folks,” Foulkes says. “We have people coming to us asking if they can pop up in our space, and the thing that makes me consider this is exactly what makes it difficult to host pop-ups. Also, to run a business, it’s expensive to run a brick-and-mortar.”
She also enjoys offering her community something different in the café space, whether it’s an intimate, creative, fun dinner or a wreath- or candle-making workshop through business-to-business collaboration.
“It’s not just us supporting incoming chefs or other businesses. It’s them supporting us here,” she adds. “We’re not the ones that are purely offering space. They’re bringing their talents and their friends and family to us as well. It goes both ways. I’d hate to see them disappear. I’m also well aware of the constraints that we all have and why perhaps we’re seeing less and less of them.”
As a party promoter, Reaume says it’s important to know when to go out on a high note. Having thrown after-hours parties for 30 years, he understands that trends, whether in music, art, fashion or food, come and go. He doesn’t think pop-ups will disappear but rather evolve.
“Detroit’s an incubator for a lot of different kinds of talent,” he says. “I think Detroit is very special in the sense that we’re a city that really wants to help other people create and grow. I always say the soil in Detroit is rich with creativity.”
Sarah Williams is a freelance journalist based in Metro Detroit. Her work focuses on individuals and nonprofit organizations investing in their communities through social justice advocacy, arts and culture, holistic healthcare, education and neighborhood revitalization. Sarah and her husband Jay are the co-owners of Next Chapter Books, a community bookstore serving Detroit’s east side. Follow her on Instagram @ sarahwilliamstoryteller.
