Tampa Bay’s food pop-up scene removes barriers between chefs and consumers

Maybe you’re standing up at a family barbecue balancing a paper plate on your knees. Perhaps you’re at the Asian night market pulling out a pork skewer that’s been sitting in your bag for an hour (but still hits just right at room temperature). The best food memories are often formed outside of the confines of white tablecloths and amuse bouches.

Somewhere between the world of full-service restaurants, personal chef gigs and the casual nature of food trucks lies the persevering pop-up—a low cost, DIY approach to dining that involves the chef/owner building and breaking down their portable kitchen, which usually looks like a canopy, a few plastic tables, coolers, and cooking equipment like grills and induction burners.

Whether it operates out of a brewery, takes over an existing restaurant space or frequents events or markets, pop-ups fill a unique space in Tampa Bay’s culinary scene. Patrons can directly connect with the chef and experience their food—most of which can definitely be considered restaurant quality—in a no-frills, unadulterated way. After all, a majority of the local food pop-ups in Tampa Bay are owned and operated by full-time chefs that are finding their culinary niche outside of a restaurant’s four walls.
John Harrell operates his two-year-old, St. Petersburg-based pop-up Offset Sandwich Exchange with his wife Amy, and has found a unique satisfaction in owning his own business after 20 years in the hospitality industry. The 35-year-old has worked every position from dishwasher and line cook to sous chef and general manager, and is currently the liquor manager for Tropicana Field. But he hopes to start working full-time for himself in the near future.

"Sometimes it doesn't feel like work when you're trying new things or putting out food that people are really loving,” he tells Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “Pop-ups are like the most extreme version of food service because you're literally bringing a kitchen into someone's house, a brewery, the sidewalk— wherever really.”

Offset specializes in handheld items of all styles and cuisines and has been steadily growing since its launch in late 2022. Harrell adds that stepping into this new role has helped build his confidence as both a chef and small business owner.

While John and Amy take their mobile kitchen to various locations like St. Pete Brewing Company, The Bends, Grand Central Brew House and Hawthorne Bottle Shop, other local pop-ups—like the Wesley Chapel-based Heritage Dim Sum—utilize one location as a homebase for their business.

Stationed at Tampa’s Felicitous Coffee for its weekly markets, 30 year-old Meishan Lu incorporates her family’s 100 year-old Chinese recipes into her pop-up’s streamlined menu. Her mother, her grandparents and great-grandfather were all professional dim sum chefs in her family’s hometown of Guangzhou, China.

“Ever since I was little, the only thing I wanted to do was to be in the culinary field, so I studied baking and pastry arts at Johnson and Wales University. Even after my first food truck in Miami didn’t work out, I just wanted to try again when I moved to Tampa,” Lu tells CL. “Making pastries and cooking is my passion, it’s what my family is known for. There's less and less people going into that specific culinary field, so it's a dying skill, I think. It’s just a tradition that I want to continue.”

Heritage Dim Sum currently sells its homemade bao and dumplings at Felicitous’ various markets (Lu’s favorite is the “golden lava” bao with a luscious, cured egg yolk filling), but will soon open a brick and mortar where its Chinese delicacies will have a permanent home.

While pop-ups are certainly not a new trend in Tampa Bay and beyond, there seems to be a burgeoning scene especially in St. Petersburg. “It might sound crazy to say, but I think COVID really instilled this fight or flight mindset in a lot of people—in cooks and other hospitality folks especially. I think it’s making people think outside of the box in order to ‘make it’ or feel financially stable,” Harrell, who lives and works in the ‘Burg, says.

With significantly less financial barriers than opening a restaurant or even a food truck, pop-ups are often an easier way for chefs to start making more money and striving towards professional autonomy. A lot of these owners and operators work 40-plus hour weeks in kitchens while somehow finding the time to recipe test and prepare even more food for their own business ventures.

Taco Wizard’s Michael Roberts only has the wee hours of the morning to get ready for his “nomadic radical taqueria” pop-ups, after working all day-long at his popular restaurant.

The Chef de Cuisine of St. Pete’s worldly restaurant Wild Child, Roberts launched his unique ode to Mexican cuisine a few years ago. You may want to approach a Taco Wizard event with patience, because patrons will wait literal hours in line to get a taste of his creative eats—like the prized “pho birria” tacos with slow-braised beef, herbs, chihuahua cheese, chilies and hoisin or a crispy tostada piled high with lump crab, fermented hot sauce, mango pico and guacamole. While its offerings are constantly changing, these two dishes have been mainstays on the Taco Wizard menu.

He cranks out 300-400 tortillas by hand for each pop-up—all which are made from heirloom corn sourced from regional parts of Mexico, nixtamalized, ground and formed into masa. While there’s an enormous amount of prep for each Taco Wizard pop-up, he usually knows he’s going to sell out before service even starts.
Robert tells CL that he’s hoping to make the pivot towards full-time Taco Wizard gigs in the future, and that catering jobs and private events may bolster the pop-up’s growing popularity.

“I always promised myself that I would be my own boss when I turned 40 and I'm turning 39 next week—so I’ll hopefully be making a few leaps this year,” Roberts says. “I'm excited to eventually have the time to be able to take it seriously. Not like I don't take it seriously, but I have to get so much accomplished in the time between the restaurant closing and the event, so I'm always chasing my tail and my head's always spinning.”

“So to be able to take my time, have some fun and figure things out structurally just sounds like a fucking dream come true to be honest,” he continues.

Like Lu and Harrell (and a majority of other pop-up owners), Roberts hopes to one day own an entity of his own, although he doesn’t think Taco Wizard’s future lies in a brick and mortar or even a food truck—at least for now.

Despite all acknowledging business ownership as time consuming, incredibly hard work and sometimes having small profit margins, all three of these local pop-up owners posses the unwavering passion and dedication needed to make this kind of unique approach to dining work—and have no problem letting up-and-coming cooks know the trials of the pop-up grind.

“I would tell someone who wants to do this: Don't start it if you don't really, really love it. It’s a lot of hard work and if you want to start a business to make a lot of money. I honestly wouldn't recommend this industry,” Lu says with an earnest laugh. “My passion for cooking and serving people is one of the only things that keeps me grounded in this line of work.”

Harrell advises up-and-coming cooks who may want to branch out into their own ventures “to try not to get too far ahead of themselves,” and to regard both compliments and criticism as equally important types of feedback.

And since a customer can have such an organic transaction with a pop-up owner due to the casual nature of the exchange, both commendation and criticism can come easily.

At traditional, sit-down restaurants, there’s usually a few walls and a dining room between the customer and the person that prepped, prepared and plated their meal. But when it comes to the pop-up experience, folks are interacting with the small business owners themselves and watching them prepare the food they’re about to eat—both the literal and abstract barriers between the consumer and the chef are torn down. Without an eatery’s atmosphere, ambiance and service, the dishes are truly able to speak for themselves, and you may find yourself scarfing down a restaurant-quality meal while balancing a to-go container on top of your car.

With hospitality groups and out-of-towners with large financial backing steadily opening up new concepts in Tampa Bay and it becoming harder and harder for locals to open and sustain restaurants, the freedom of small-scale pop-ups allows both up-and-coming cooks and veteran chefs to create their own spaces in our ever-changing culinary scene.

But not everyone who operates food pop-up wants to turn their small business into a full-blown enterprise. Matt Galloway, who slings St. Pete’s beloved Slimey’s Burgers, takes a more playful, yet practical approach. He started selling no-frills burgers at his popular house shows in an effort to, well, feed people.

“I feel like the food truck craze of the 2010s was fun and all, but the barrier of entry is still fairly high,” Galloway explains. “I think pop-ups are just stripping it back even further, with everyone collectively asking ‘what is the absolute bare minimum that we need to serve food to people?”

Whether a pop-up is just a casual side gig or a full-time venture with a goal to open a restaurant one day, these chefs literally just want the space to be creative (which many restaurant gigs can stifle), to make money for themselves and have professional autonomy.

“You gotta be freaking crazy to do it,” Roberts says. “But you have to truly love it and be ready to give it your all. And I guess that's where I'm at….fuck.”

Here's a list of Tampa Bay food pop-ups dishing out everything from specialized banh mí, barbecue and sandwiches to artisanal pizzas, doughnuts and dumplings.

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