Pop-up dinners that share a culture, course by course

Pop-up dinners that share a culture, course by course

01/30/2020

NEW YORK • At pop-up restaurants, where chefs temporarily set up shop in a dining room, a barn or even a dorm room, dinner is an improvisation, more jazz than symphony.

For a limited time and a limited audience, a cook can riff with premeditated spontaneity.

For years, pop-ups have been many newcomers’ first step towards opening a restaurant, a way to show off their talent and try out new ideas.

But now, some chefs and home cooks are treating the pop-up as an end in itself, using the dinners to explore and share their culinary traditions.

Often, these meals feel like both academic seminars and family scrapbooks, an intimate anthropology told in beloved recipes and reclaimed ingredients.

Pop-ups are not entirely new in the United States. They have roots in mid-20th-century supper clubs, the food trucks where labourers bought lunch and the home restaurants that fed leaders of the civil rights movement.

When the Great Recession led to restaurant closings, many chefs turned to pop-ups to stay current, visible and solvent.

This new breed of chefs charge for their dinners, but none are getting rich from them.

Most advertise on Instagram and sell tickets online. Whatever the logistics, their pop-ups allow them to innovate and experiment for just a few guests, creating a community that lasts only as long as the meal.

As personal testimonies carry more weight in art and public discourse, pop-ups offer cooks a way to say, through food: “This is my history. This is who I am.”

LEIGH-ANN MARTIN

In 2017, Leigh-Ann Martin booked a ticket to St Lucia in the Caribbean.

A native of Trinidad, she was tired of New York winters and yearned to understand more about her ancestral foods. In a series of trips to the Caribbean ranging from a week to more than a month, she set out to explore different islands.

In Trinidad, she spoke with relatives, carefully watching them cook. In Grenada, she felt connected to the land, preparing barracuda once a week. In Barbados, she sought out dishes not meant for tourists.

When she returned to her apartment in Union City, New Jersey, in June 2018, she started hosting intimate pop-up dinners, called a Table for Four, at her small, square table.

Martin, 34, plans each course months in advance, infusing rum with fruit for dessert and meeting with the staff at Good Wine, a store in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to plan each pairing.

“I’m a crazy Virgo,” she said. “I’m Miss Bossypants. With everything, it’s preparation.”

OMAR TATE

At a dinner chef Omar Tate served last summer in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, he set an antique medicine bottle, a wood carving and a calcified shovel on a small table at the side of the room.

He had found them in South Carolina, on the former plantation where his ancestors had once worked as slaves.

Tate, 33, presents these artefacts at every Honeysuckle dinner, to humanise and recognise the work and lives of his enslaved forebears.

A poet and chef, he worked at the restaurants Fork and Russet in Philadelphia, and as sous-chef under chef JJ Johnson at Henry at the Life Hotel until it closed in July 2019.

Tate’s menus for the dinners, which he has hosted from Philadelphia to New York City to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, quilt cultural history and his own memories into a celebration of the black American past.

STEPHANIE BONNIN

On Sundays, Colombian-born chef Stephanie Bonnin transforms her railroad apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, into a pop-up restaurant.

The 20 or so guests who gather here to eat are mostly friends, drawn by word of mouth, though she is hoping some day to open a restaurant.

Bonnin, 32, a trained chef, gathers her recipes on regular trips to Colombia and Latin America, where she seeks out older chefs to learn about pre-and post-colonial food ways.

She also has a weekly stand at open-air food market Smorgasburg.

With her no-holds-barred jokes, Bonnin is a natural hostess and a listening ear.

“I have a restaurant,” she said. “It’s just in my living room.”

NYTIMES

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