John Perkins thought up a perfect motto for his pop-up restaurant — or, rather, pop-up restaurants, four different concepts he is rotating seasonally through his catering firm’s event space:
“Don’t call it a pop-up. We’ve been here for months.”
Perkins laughs at the silliness of the line. He admits, though, “I still don’t like the term ‘pop-up’ for what we’re doing.”
What would he call it?
Again, he laughs. “I don’t know. A restaurant with a limited engagement? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.”
Perkins is one of several St. Louis chefs redefining what the term “restaurant” can encompass. In some cases, these chefs are embracing the pop-up ethos, offering a one-time-only event inside of another restaurant’s space.
Others have experimented with forms that defy easy categorization, from a dinner series forcing chefs to cook without their usual tools to Perkins’ rotating concepts.
Call it the rise of the alternative restaurant.
In this, St. Louis follows a trend that in recent years has spread across the nation, and even the world, touching some of the highest circles of the culinary scene.
From the latter half of last decade into this one, Los Angeles chef Ludo Lefebvre won critical acclaim for LudoBites, a series of pop-up restaurants. Thomas Keller, perhaps America’s most renowned chef, in 2011 ran a 10-day pop-up version of his restaurant, the French Laundry, inside London’s famous Harrods department store.
After wowing gourmands with his avant-garde restaurant Alinea, Chicago chef Grant Achatz opened Next, a restaurant that offers an entirely different concept every three months. Next’s menus have ranged from early 20th-century Paris cuisine to Thai street food to its current incarnation serving gourmet vegan dishes.
Unsurprisingly, as an alternative restaurant by its very definition exists outside the mainstream, it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact moment when the trend began in St. Louis. One reasonable starting point might be the Dorm Room dinner series at 33 Wine Bar Tasting Room in Lafayette Square.
Since the summer of 2009, the monthly (approximately) Dorm Room dinners have challenged local chefs to prepare a multicourse meal for 80 to 100 diners using the kinds of equipment found in a college dorm: microwaves, toaster ovens and hot plates.
Jeff Stettner, who sold 33 earlier this year, says the dinners arose from a conversation at the bar with Kirk Warner, the former King Louie’s chef who now runs a private-events culinary venture called Kirk’s Traveling Kitchen.
“He was talking about these (private) dinners he was doing across the country,” Stettner recalls. “I said it would be awesome if (33) had food like that. We didn’t have a kitchen.”
Warner’s response?
“I don’t need a kitchen.”
The Dorm Room dinners attracted many of the highest profile St. Louis chefs, among them Gerard Craft of Niche, Kevin Nashan of Sidney Street Cafe, Kevin Willmann of Farmhaus and Josh Galliano of Monarch.
As the dinner series progressed into its second year and beyond, it became less about the college-dorm limitations and more about the spirit of experimentation and friendly oneupsmanship.
“It really became a fun night at 33,” Stettner says. “A bunch of cooks would get together, break bread and drink great wine.
“I knew we’d hit on something when chefs who’d completed a dinner peer-pressured other chefs into doing it.”
SECRET CHEFS
Around the same time that the Dorm Room was gaining steam, Perkins was making a name for himself with another culinary trend: underground dinners.
Or, rather, he wasn’t making a name for himself.
He operated anonymously as the Clandestine Chef. His press appearances didn’t include photographs of his face and referred to him, at most, as Chef John.
Perkins abandoned the anonymity as his catering business, Entre, gained a higher profile. In 2011, Entre opened an event space on North Boyle Avenue, near Gaslight Square in the Central West End. Perkins didn’t intend to turn this space into a pop-up restaurant, let alone a series of pop-ups.
“The whole thing has been a little bit of an accident,” he says.
In January, he launched the first pop-up, called Le Coq because most of the dishes featured chicken (often as an accent rather than the main ingredient), because his catering business had entered a slow period.
Its popularity with diners inspired him.
“Well, I’m stupid if I don’t do more of this,” he told himself.
After Le Coq, he opened A Good Man Is Hard to Find, named for the classic short story by Flannery O’Connor and featuring Southern comfort food. Out went the chicken-themed décor; in came a striking wall painting inspired by O’Connor’s narrative.
In June, A Good Man Is Hard to Find gave way to what Perkins describes as its “polar opposite”: a vegetable-focused concept called the Agrarian.
A fourth concept will open after the Agrarian ends its run in early fall. Perkins plans to repeat the same four concepts next year.
Since he already offers year-round dining, why not just open a restaurant?
“I don’t have the finances to run a full restaurant,” he says. “I don’t have a real bar. We still use paper tickets. We just got soup spoons.”
Perkins points to the tables and chairs arranged around Entre. “This is not mine; this is my landlord’s. I’m just using them.”
Perkins continues, “The convenience of something like a pop-up for me is it allows me to do what I can do and — this sounds terrible — hide under that banner a little bit.”
SELLING AN EXPERIENCE
Thanks to his critically acclaimed stints as executive chef at An American Place downtown and Monarch in Maplewood, chef Galliano was guaranteed an audience for the three pop-up restaurants he ran last year.
He says he undertook his first pop-up, All-Star Fried Chicken Fish, last summer in part because he was “aching” to get back into a restaurant after Monarch closed. It also served as a dry run of sorts for a Southern-themed restaurant concept.
All-Star ran for a single Monday evening at Michael Randolph’s Clayton restaurant, Half Half. The crowd was large, the waits for both a table and takeout long. And though Galliano doesn’t lack for restaurant experience, the realities of a pop-up operation surprised him.
“I was coming at it as a restaurant chef, instead of as an event coordinator,” he says. “The one thing I took away from it: We served good food, but we were selling a dining experience.”
Galliano followed All-Star Fried Chicken Fish with two more focused pop-ups (that is, with tighter, less ambitious menus) based out of Pint Size Bakery Cafe in Lindenwood Park and 4 Hands Brewing Co. in Soulard.
With pop-ups in general, “it’s kind of enticing to be able to say, ‘I have these different thoughts and ideas, but I don’t have a vehicle to put it together,’” Galliano says.
Though he has returned to the kitchen full-time as executive chef of the Libertine in Clayton, he says pop-ups are the sort of thing he’d do again.
MATCHING PASSIONS
Currently, the most active pop-up restaurant is Kitchen Kulture, a partnership between Dressel’s executive chef Michael Miller and Chris Meyer, a server at Blood Sand.
The two had previously worked together at Monarch as well as on landscaping projects. They originally envisioned Kitchen Kulture as a business that would sell kitchen-themed T-shirts for cooks to wear under their chef’s whites and aprons.
Eventually, they decided it would be appropriate to pair a food product with the clothes. They focused on prepared dishes made from locally sourced ingredients, which they introduced last year at the Tower Grove Farmers Market.
When it came time for the market to end, Meyer says, “We didn’t want to go dormant.”
Thus the Kitchen Kulture pop-up restaurant was born. Though to call it a restaurant might not be exactly accurate. Meyer and Miller stuck to the idea of prepared or, as Meyer calls it, containerized food.
“We got used to being creative with containterizing,” Meyer says. “How do you take that skill set and make the food mobile? We are bringing everything (to the site of the pop-up) three-fourths of the way finished and then finishing it (there).”
Kitchen Kulture teamed up with Sump Coffee for a series of brunches. Sump lacks a traditional kitchen and was a perfect match for Miller and Meyer’s approach.
“Everything was run off one extension cord,” Meyer says.
Diners didn’t seem to mind or even notice.
“I feel like more people are focused on the food itself,” Meyer says. “What we take as a really good sign is when people think the food looks great” in spite of its atypical preparation.
Now Kitchen Kulture is also partnering with the Fortune Teller Bar on Cherokee Street for the Preservation Dinner Series. The first dinner, titled Humo (smoke) and featuring smoked foods, took place on July 1.
Meyer says the spirit of collaboration — of matching business with a similar passion for food and drink — is an important part of the Kitchen Kulture experience.
As an example, she says, Sump owner Scott Carey “treats coffee as an agricultural (product), (just as) we’re trying to source the best ingredients we can.”
For the Preservation Dinner Series, Kitchen Kulture is drawing on the Fortune Teller Bar’s unique Cherokee ambiance. Also, a small local firm, Sprouted Designs, is supplying custom napkins.
Galliano agrees that collaboration is key for pop-up restaurants in St. Louis.
“In so many aspects, in this industry you need to make a name for you, and it’s your name that goes on the award,” he says. “We work so much we don’t get to see our friends.”
He says pop-ups, on the other hand, “become a chance to cook with your heroes and have fun.”
Will pop-ups and other alternative restaurants go the way of the underground dinner fad, from which even Perkins himself has retired?
Maybe. But if Perkins is any indication, the alternative restaurant — whether a one-time event or an ambitious plan of rotating concepts or something as yet unknown — speaks to a deeper need among chefs: “I’m trying to cook and make a living and find out how to do that.”
What The Agrarian • Where Entre, 360 North Boyle Avenue • More info entrestl.com/presents; 314-632-6754 • Hours 5:30-10 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday
What Kitchen Kulture • More info kitchenkulture.co
