Creative food in creative spaces
Chef-driven venues exploring new flavours in more creative spaces
Calgarians have had about a decade to get familiar with the concept of a restaurant pop-up: It's been nearly 10 years since the team from Charcut ran their wildly successful Charpop events, and popular, now-permanent restaurants like Native Tongues and Pizza Face started as pop-ups. The concept has lingered over the years, but pandemic times have caused a clear uptick in new pop-up businesses.
At its most basic, a restaurant pop-up is any temporary food business. Traditionally, they've “popped up” in oddball spaces like warehouses or private homes for anywhere from a single night to a couple of weeks, but the concept has grown to include businesses that run regularly out of a sublet space, usually another restaurant with limited hours of operation. In the era of COVID-19, pop-up culture has grown to include takeout and to-go products.
Respect the Technique is a pop-up owned by Kaede Hirooka and Jonathan Chung, two wellversed chefs who have worked at several prestigious restaurants.
Since it launched in 2019, RTT has presented in-person pop-up dinners at a variety of venues, hosted cooking classes, created take-home products, ran a takeout service called Chibi Cheese, and taken on whatever else has struck the chefs' fancy.
Both chefs have a deep love for Japanese food, but the vague nature of the name “Respect the Technique” allows them to experiment with different cuisines and avoid boxing themselves into any one format.
“This allows chefs to showcase their skills and present the food as it was intended. It's just the chef and the food, with no managers overseeing everything,” Hirooka says. “That's the main reason I wanted to do it, to prove that an actual chef-run company can be profitable and so that I can cook exactly what I want to cook.”
Hirooka is busy working toward opening a new Japanese restaurant in Banff with the
Banff Hospitality Collective, so RTT is putting a pause on weekly takeout and will be focusing on selling pantry items like red miso bacon and rayu chili sauce, as well as less frequent takeout and corporate events.
Hirooka and Chung also have their eye on starting a small bricks and mortar restaurant once the timing is right.
There are countless other chefs testing the pop-up waters.
Instagram seems to be the place to discover new ones: that's where chef Kayle Burns (executive chef at Una) first launched his Donut Club pop-up last year, and it's also chef Alessandro Chinea's choice avenue of communication for his outrageously delicious Chooks & Charcoal takeout chicken pop-up and currently on-hold Chilli Vanilli dine-in collaboration with chef Jaden Kanomata.
Both projects operate out of Von Der Fels on Sundays, which is convenient given that Chinea's main gig is as Von Der Fels' sous chef.
“I wanted to work for myself, and doing the chicken is really simple and rewarding, while still being approachable to people,” Chinea says. “The Chilli Vanilli events are more about that freedom to be creative, while the chicken is more of a good business opportunity.”
Of course, this is just the tip of the pop-up iceberg.
On a given week in Calgary you might find upstarts like Jellyfish Coffee serving up baked goods and Japanese-style coffee at A1 Bodega and Cafe or Tokyo Chopsticks doing ramen and Japanese tapas takeout from Ikemen in Kensington, in addition to regular pop-ups like Con Mi Taco (which operates on off-hours out of Meat and Bread) and Pigot's Breakfast Club (out of Diner Deluxe).
There's no doubt that the pandemic has been a net negative for the restaurant industry, but we're living in a time when young chefs can bring their creativity directly to customers through social media. It all feels a bit Wild West, but for food lovers it's a definite silver lining.
For more information about Respect the Technique's products and news on future pop-ups, visit the company's website at respectthetechnique.com.
To keep up with Chooks & Charcoal, follow Chinea on Instagram at
@chooks.charcoal.
In other restaurant news, Connie Desousa and John Jackson's Chix Eggshop has only been open sporadically since the beginning of the pandemic, but this week the pair (who also own Charcut and Charbar, plus Connie and John's Pizza and Alley Burger) are opening it back up for the first time in months, with a different focus.
The restaurant was originally conceived as a fried chicken joint but morphed into a breakfast place to serve the East Village's Alt Hotel.
Desousa and Jackson are taking it back to their original idea, with a new menu with a stronger emphasis on Southern-style fried chicken.
The messy, two-handed Nashville hot chicken and fried egg sandwiches are thankfully still on the menu, along with family crispy fried chicken meals and Inspired Greens salads.
Chix Eggshop is currently only doing takeout, including contactless curbside pickup and delivery via Skip the Dishes and Doordash. The restaurant is located at 624 Sixth Ave. S.E., and orders can be placed at chixeggshop. com.