When Josh Lewin decided to leave his post as executive chef at Beacon Hill Bistro, taking part in an experimental pop-up program wasn’t exactly part of the plan. But after he was approached about a six-month kitchen residency at cocktail bar Wink & Nod’s new culinary incubator, his interest was more than piqued.

“We got the opportunity to operate our program with basically 100 percent creative and operational responsibilities, without having to invest in a South End lease,” says Lewin, who had parted ways with the bistro after three years to found Bread & Salt Hospitality with partner Katrina Jazayeri, aiming to open a restaurant of their own. “We were able to test what, we think, is a great idea.”

A longer-term take on the typical pop-up format—where a chef takes over a restaurant’s kitchen, or a less-traditional venue, for an often one-night-only dining experience—Wink & Nod’s program offers up-and-coming chefs the chance to run their own restaurant within an established brick-and-mortar. “The point is to try to develop our own little network of chefs, to give people the avenue to have a restaurant, when not everyone has that financial capability,” explains Euz Azevedo, president of Boston Nightlife Ventures (BNV), Wink & Nod’s parent company.

If a typical pop-up is like a crash course in opening a restaurant, Wink & Nod’s incubator, which launched last spring with Whisk (the popular pop-up from Jeremy Kean and Philip Kruta) and welcomed Bread & Salt in September, aims to be more of a master’s program. The format is a first for Boston—and would be a first in most cities (though Chicago is slated to see a similar concept, Intro, open in February).

While Wink & Nod might be reinventing the wheel in a big way, it’s a wheel that’s been rolling here—and gaining speed—for some time. For many chefs, pop-ups have served as invaluable vehicles for honing their own culinary voices.

That’s true of early local pioneers like Will Gilson and Louis DiBiccari, who both pursued pop-ups while working in established kitchens. Gilson founded Eat Boston in 2010, launching a series of innovative dining experiences throughout town before opening his own restaurant, Inman’s Puritan & Company, in late 2012. Similarly, DiBiccari started underground dining experience Chef Louie Night, an “Iron Chef-like” pop-up series, out of his apartment in 2003. He ran the popular pop-ups for years before eventually opening his own brick-and-mortar, Fort Point’s Tavern Road, in early 2013 with his brother Michael.

Those success stories haven’t gone unnoticed by young chefs dreaming of having their own restaurants. In the past, an ambitious young gun’s best (and often only) bet was to work through the traditional culinary ranks—from prep cook to sous-chef and so on—often under the tutelage of an established chef. And while many chefs emphasize the considerable merits of that route, other paths have proliferated. Food trucks have spawned brick-and-mortar restaurants (and vice versa). And pop-ups have been used not only by newcomers hoping for a foothold, but also by established chefs looking to flex their creative muscle. Years in, pop-ups have proven to be anything but a fly-by-night fad.

Just ask Mark O’Leary. “I think it’d be silly just to write them off as a trend,” says the O Ya and jm Curley alum. Before settling into his current role as executive chef at Chinatown hotspot Shojo, O’Leary played around with a couple of pop-ups: high-concept snack food project the Future of Junk Food and wildly popular late-night pop-up Guchi’s Midnight Ramen. “It’s a great platform for demonstrating whatever your passions are. I think any young cook who wants to do something like that should just get out there and do it. It’ll only better you. It’ll make you a better cook. It’ll make you more organized. And, more important, it’ll teach you what not to do. You can very much learn from your failures while doing pop-ups because they’re so concentrated into one short span of time,” O’Leary says. “Essentially it’s the opening night of a restaurant every single time you do a pop-up. And that makes it really challenging. But to me, that’s half the fun. It’s sort of like rogue cooking.”

Making Room for Error

With their joint pastry pop-up, Party of Two, Top Chef alum Stephanie Cmar (Stacked Donuts) and partner Justin Burke-Samson (Trademark Tarts) found that chance to learn on their feet—without the risk of running a brand-new business into the ground. “There are always menu disasters, or multiple disasters, in a restaurant. You’re always putting out a fire,” says Burke-Samson, who, with no formal training as a pastry chef, was a relative newcomer to the industry when he linked up with Cmar for their much-buzzed-about project, currently in the early stages of transitioning into a brick-and-mortar shop.

“Pop-ups are going to give you that brief version of that if you’ve never been in a restaurant. You need that. You need to know how to troubleshoot.”

“You can glamorize the whole situation way too much,” Cmar adds. “You can think that a restaurant is just going to be an immediate success and there won’t be any hard work and you’ll never have to worry about your budgeting or food costs.”

Mary Ting Hyatt agrees. Before opening Bagelsaurus in Porter Square, she sold her handmade bagels as part of a weekly pop-up out of Brookline’s Cutty’s, her then-employer, working out many of her own growing pains through the “microbakery.”

“The pop-up was sort of like training wheels,” Hyatt says. “I didn’t own the shop. I didn’t have to deal with the complications of, say, a snowstorm and digging out the trash, and all of the physical things you have to do with an actual store—and a lot of the stresses. With a pop-up, you can kind of do what you want and test the waters, and it’s accepted as a test.”

JJ Gonson, personal chef and owner of locavore catering and event company Cuisine en Locale, ran her One Night Culinary Events series (complete with Viking- and Day of the Dead-themed feasts) before opening a permanent location for her company in Somerville. A self-trained chef without any real connections to the restaurant industry, Gonson was able to play around with her craft in a way she maintains just isn’t possible when running a brick-and-mortar. “A pop-up is absolute freedom,” she says.

“Traditional kitchens are not places for experimentation. Food is expensive; so is labor time. If you are paying for overhead and meeting margins, you are not messing about.”

As a veteran of the industry, both on the creative and business sides of operations, newly appointed BNV chief culinary officer Bill Brodsky is all too familiar with those margins. “I think back to when I was coming up: I would look at food as ‘These are the colors on my palette, these are all the tools I have.’ And when I owned my own business, it wasn’t an avocado any more; it was a dollar and twenty cents,” says Brodsky, whose first venture as chef/owner, City Landing, shuttered in January. “You have young chefs that are full of passion and talent but—forget the finances—sometimes don’t even know the steps to take, because there’s not one book that everyone reads and then all of a sudden you go open a restaurant. But if you find that book, send me a copy—we’ll take 12 of ’em!”

In lieu of the discovery of a definitive manual for Successful Restaurant Ownership, Wink & Nod’s program aims to offer its chefs a real taste of what it takes. “This is a great opportunity to say, ‘OK, you’ve got the talent; now let’s see if we can develop it into a business.’ I think that’s missing, gone the way of the dodos, so to speak, for up-and-coming chefs these days,” Brodsky says. “Unless you’re on a reality TV show, you don’t get discovered!”

Lewin, for his part, says it’s already helped him get a far better understanding of what his customers want. “We always really believed that we should be careful about developing concepts before understanding a neighborhood and a location and an economic market. These things change so quickly and they’re so specific, especially in Boston,” Lewin says. “We came in here and saw a cocktail lounge functioning with this really cool company. So we thought OK, this is going to be a place where late 20- to 30-somethings come to try the latest thing, and we can work in that model. So we put out a similar menu [to Whisk], but we put a couple entrees on that menu, because we’re a company that’s focused on a seated dinner service and a high level of table service. We thought, we’ll throw these on and see which sells, and we’ll keep one on the menu—and we sold out of all the entrees in like 20 minutes. That just solidified our belief that you can’t make assumptions about a place.”

That kind of immediate market feedback has also been key for Cmar and Burke-Samson, who both say they’ve met customers who have turned into real friends. (Like “Donut Ben” and “Pop-Tart Charlie!” Cmar jokes.) “I think [starting with a pop-up] is almost mandatory prior to opening up anything,” she says. “Because you don’t know what people are going to like. You might have an awesome concept, but there’s no demand for it. It’s all driven by demand.”

“We’ve sent out surveys to all of our guests and customers and people who follow us on social media,” Burke-Samson adds. “We just took that risk and said, ‘Instead of us telling you what you want, tell us what you want.’ ”

Community Servings

Support from Boston’s culinary community, chefs say, is just as important to a fledging pop-up’s success. Upstarts like Hyatt and Burke-Samson, and even more seasoned chefs like Cmar and O’Leary, maintain that they couldn’t have gotten their respective experiments off the ground were it not for the kindness of industry heavyweights willing to open their kitchens—some of them relative strangers who were simply interested in seeing what a fellow chef had up their sleeve.

“That was the crazy part,” Cmar recalls. “These are people who know way more than us about everything. These are people that have the brick and mortar. And they’re letting us come, and they’re interested in what we’re doing.” Adds Burke-Samson with a laugh, “I worked with some really awesome chefs, and internally I was fucking freaking out. And they were like, ‘It’s just a normal day for me.’”

“Years and years ago, you would never even think of going to some chef’s restaurant and opening up shop for one night,” O’Leary says. “But I think the Boston community, specifically, is really open to that. I think most chefs in town are really friendly and nurturing and want to help other chefs along. It only betters a city. It betters the food scene. I’ve talked to chefs, and they’re like, this thing wouldn’t fly in New York. I think we’re a competitive city, but also I think we all embrace the competition. We patronize each other’s restaurants. I think that’s how it should be. That’s how you create a really involved dining community.”

Azevedo and Brodsky say that a sense of community is a driving force behind Wink & Nod’s pop-up residencies. “We want to make sure that when people come out of here, they are successful,” says Azevedo. “I want to be able to look back and see a young chef become the next superstar. Really, we want to be part of the dining community here in Boston and develop talent. We want them to leave here after six months and open their own restaurant.”

Certainly, the road to success is paved with potholes, and the Wink & Nod team has seen their share, not the least of which is figuring out how to smoothly pass a fully functional restaurant over to a brand-new chef with a brand-new concept, seemingly overnight. “It was a lot of hard work!” says Lewin of his own transition into the kitchen. “[But] Wink & Nod, as a restaurant, is fairly young too. So three years from now this conversation will probably be very different. There’s nothing to go on, no past experience in this sort of thing. None of us has ever worked in a restaurant like this, because there isn’t one. So it’s very much building a program from nothing, and it’s fun to be a part of that.”

Early this spring, Lewin will pass the torch to former City Landing chef de cuisine Patrick Enage for the next six-month stint. Enage is a relatively unknown entity in Boston, but he’s excited to take advantage of the residency’s unique format to cultivate a fan base and, hopefully, bring a fresh perspective to the scene. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to attract some investors to open my own restaurant,” Enage says. “But as we look ahead to the next few months, I’m embracing the pop-up format as an opportunity to tie together the flavors, decor, ambiance and hospitality of my childhood in the context of a full-fledged dining concept.”

He’s also looking forward to continuing to grow under the mentorship of Brodsky, who met him in 2002 at Cape Cod’s Wequassett Resort and Golf Club. “Bill showed me that being a chef wasn’t just about putting the best food out or being the biggest badass in the kitchen—or at the resort for that matter. It wasn’t just about being a successful financial manager or a great leader. It was all that plus uncompromising integrity: your respect for yourself and, ultimately, your respect for food.”

Enage’s menu is still a work in progress. But then, the Wink & Nod team admits that, like many a pop-up, their whole operation is very much in the “figuring it out stage”—though they figure more out with each changing of the culinary guard. “Innovation is not clean and tidy. Innovation is dirty,” Brodsky says. “There are hiccups and challenges until the very end result, when you get something wonderful. I think as we continue to improve this model, we’re going to begin spitting out some truly innovative talent.”

Whet Your Appetite

“I’m very excited about bringing the food of the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and [beyond] to Boston’s dinner table,” says chef Patrick Enage, who spent January eating his way through Asia. His menu is still in development, but here’s a sneak peek of what to expect when he pops up at Wink & Nod this spring.

Kabayaki glazed swordfish belly with grilled Taiwan lettuce and salted duck egg vinaigrette

“I love anything belly—pork, swordfish, tuna—because it’s where the intense flavors reside.”

Bakkwa with daikon, carrot, Thai chili peppers, cilantro and sweet vinegar glaze

“I really want to showcase Southeast Asia’s wider multicultural culinary heritage. The ingredients here, starting with bakkwa, a Chinese salty-sweet dried meat that is similar to jerky, represent the region’s culinary diversity.”

18-hour braised pork belly in kabocha-pho broth

“This dish balances rich texture and complex subtlety—a signature of a lot of authentic Southeast Asian cuisine.”

Prawns with squid ink lo mein in red curry broth

“This is a modern twist on the ever-popular ramen with a distinctively multicultural combination of flavors. Be on the lookout for fresh noodles made in house!”


Related Articles

  • 28 Days Later

    The evil genius behind jm Curley’s foie gras-glazed jelly donut may not seem the likeliest candidate to co-found a wellness app...

  • Ports to Call

    Whoever loves chocolate (and who doesn’t?) needs to know about port...

  • Architect of a Meal

    Scelfo's Designs for Alden & Harlow...

  • Spice Route

    With bold Turkish fare, Sarma makes an impressive debut...

Comments are closed.