If you want to find the heart of the local food movement, look not in traditional restaurants but in bookstores, art galleries, optometry offices and even on beaches — or, more commonly, at a Russian nesting doll of restaurant within a restaurant.
While there is a growing movement by Canadians to support local food businesses, many entrepreneurs face the challenge of astronomical rents and start-up costs. Enter the pop-up: from Japanese micro coffee roasters and Mexican brunch to natural winemakers, bars and hyperlocal chefs. If you want to find the heart of the local food movement, look not in traditional restaurants but in bookstores, art galleries, optometry offices and on beaches — or, more commonly, at a Russian nesting doll of restaurant within a restaurant.
It is here where the pop-up-preneur combines creativity and community to test concepts, activate spaces and celebrate cultures. The ephemeral nature of the pop-up can draw out the urban adventurer keen to explore new cuisines, experience their neighbourhood in new ways and connect directly with passionate purveyors.
A hunger to showcase one’s own food and concept drives many chefs like Alvaro Montes de Oca, who first started finding his identity while at the community-focused Ubuntu Canteen (which has since closed). With encouragement from the canteen’s chef and owner, Dave Gunawan, he “started putting out a Mexican-inspired farm-to-table, very ingredient-forward dinner service. Very modern, but at the same time, very traditional,” Montes de Oca says. “And it went very well. I had a lot of success.”
From there, it was necessity that drove Montes de Oca to pop up with Chilitos, his own Mexican brunch series out of Carp, a sushi and poke joint across from Kingsgate Mall, with inventive tamales, succulent barbacoa and textural chilaquiles.
“I broke my ankle with a triple fracture going down the slide with my baby daughter,” Montes de Oca says. “Suddenly, everything was over, like completely stopped. I couldn’t walk for eight months. I was forced to figure out what I could do. I could not stand for 12 hours anymore.”
Through challenge, we often find courage, and from the compost pile can come new life. “I would look at my daughter like, I can’t die, this thing cannot get infected. I have responsibility,” Montes de Oca says. “You find out whether you have internal strength in you or not.”
Chilitos draws from Montes de Oca’s own childhood in Monterrey, Mexico. “All of the dishes I do are something that I ate with my mom or with my grandmother, more like memories than anything else,” Montes de Oca says. “I want to cook Mexican food the way I perceive it and the way I see it and the way I experience it in my life.”
Left: Chef Saman Ahmadivafa shares the flavours of his Iranian childhood through Khaaterat, a pop-up that transforms personal food memories into beautiful, plated storytelling. Shown here grilling sea bass on a konro grill with Robert Ross, right. Photo by Ramón Nyitrai.
Right: At Chilitos, the chicken pozole verde, top right, is served with shredded chicken, hominy corn and chicharron topped with shaved lettuce and radishes. Photo by Lindsay Otto.
Pop-ups open much-needed space for global cuisines to find a home. Take Khaaterat, which means “memories” in Farsi. Like Montes de Oca, chef Saman Ahmadivafa centres his menu on dishes he holds dear from childhood, which in his case was in Iran. Or Sohn-Maht by Korean-Polish wife and husband duo Chef Remi Jo and Aleksandra Rahman, who pop-up with dishes that combine their heritages, including kimchi cabbage rolls and kimchi and cheese pierogi. Or Chef Tushar Tondvalkar’s pop-ups, which feature contemporary Indian food with a West Coast influence, often including foraged ingredients such as wild herbs and botanicals, much like his recent secret supper with Swallow Tail Culinary Adventures.
For Shinya Furue, founder of small-batch roastery Hiyori Coffee, his coffee identity is tied to his culture. “Growing up in Japan, I developed a strong appreciation for living with care and intention. That naturally influences the way I approach Hiyori Coffee. I also have a bit of a craftsman’s spirit; I care more about flavour than appearance, and I don’t compromise when it comes to quality. That mindset shapes everything we do.”
Furue’s open monthly pop-ups at the sunlit ENISHI SPACE captures this essence. “Japanese culture influences not only the flavours we create but also the way we design our spaces and gestures. At Hiyori Coffee, we care deeply about seasonality and “ma” — the sense of space and pause. We want each cup to offer a quiet moment in someone’s day. Even the way we brew or structure our pop-up events is guided by an appreciation for calmness and graceful movement,” Furue says.
While pop-ups can showcase global flavours, at the same time they are often hyperlocal. What is or is not available from the farmer or the fisherman or the forager can inform the ingredient-forward chef’s menu that day. The beauty of the pop-up’s fluid nature allows for the type of creativity that, like a bottle of bubbly, derives energy through constraint followed by an openness.
Hyperlocal chefs who embody seasonality, Devon Latte and Lucas Johnston have used pop-ups as a path to permanence with their newly opened restaurant, Nero Tondo. Popping up last fall at Miki Ellis and Stephen Whiteside’s Subject to Change, a rotating guest chef concept that briefly took the place of their Michelin Guide–recommended restaurant Elephant when it closed, provided Latte and Johnston the opportunity to use the space for their longer-term project.
Latte explains: “Doing a pop-up is proof for you individually that you can do it. The number of people that come into Nero Tondo and say that they came to our pop-ups, it’s gotta be 40 to 50 per cent. You have people that want to come and eat your food and see what you’re up to. You’re not hiding behind someone else’s concept and someone else’s umbrella.”
While courage is central to pop-ups, it also goes hand in hand with wine production, and so wine bar or winemaker pop-ups make natural partners. You can often find winemakers popping up within restaurants or natural wine bars like Dachi or Bar Tartare to pour their new releases for a night and connect directly with diners, but pop-ups outside of traditional food spaces also bring unexpected connections.
Left: Grape Pop’s Brittany Hoorne, shown bottom right at Batch Kitsilano, reimagines the wine experience with pop-up pours in bookstores, bars and patios — breaking down barriers between producers and people, one glass at a time.
Middle: Dishes from Sohn-Maht’s pop-up, bottom left, blend Korean and Polish traditions — kimchi cabbage rolls and kimchi and cheese pierogi — reflecting the culinary heritage of chef duo Remi Jo and Aleksandra Rahman.
Right: Shinya Furue making a pourover with Hiyori Coffee at their pop-up at Enishi Space.
Brittany Hoorne of Grape Pop, a mobile wine bar, explains: “There’s a level of vulnerability in wine production that I think wine producers have to embody, because if they’re not willing to be vulnerable, I don’t really think they’re willing to produce. You put your all into it. Your vintage is your one shot to make it happen. There’s a braveness in wine producers that I think is very badass. It’s very punk, but it’s also just wildly romantic.”
“You spend all year making this one thing,” says James Langford-Smith, co-owner (with winemaker Jordan Kubek and viticulturist Tyler Knight) of Pamplemousse Jus Natural Winery. “You’re sharing a part of yourself or a part of time.”
This isn’t just about eating a nice meal or enjoying a beautiful glass of wine. Pop-ups are about bringing people into a community that cares deeply about our collective future. Langford- Smith says, “It’s not cheap to eat out anymore and it’s not cheap to go to a farmers’ market and buy your produce. But people would much rather buy something from a local farmer and hear a story or come to the Pamplemousse farm or our pop-ups and spend $10 more on a bottle of wine, because they feel a part of something that’s bigger than just a winery or just a farm. They’re part of this community.”
Hoorne describes it this way: “It is so often one conversation you have. It’s one taste of something they really love, it’s one meeting with a winemaker that will allow someone to align themselves with this community and to realize that it really just comes down to regenerative farming and soil health.”
Pop-ups bring these conversations into neighbourhoods and non-traditional spaces, like Grape Pop has with Nooroongji Books and more regular sunny pop-ups at the outdoor patio bar Batch Kitsilano. Hoorne shares, “I think wine itself can very easily be taken to a pretentious level. And natural wine can be very cool or trendy or gatekeepy, and I think the reality is, if we continue to operate like that, we will get nowhere. Where I’m trying to find myself is in spaces where people aren’t already talking about wine.”
Langford-Smith once popped up at a dry-eye event at an optometry clinic. “I went there with very little expectations. Obviously, Summerland is a sleepy little place and you can imagine a dry-eye event on a Thursday from 4:00 until 6:00. The average age was probably sixty-five. But I think we ended up going through three cases of wine, and I had such a good time. It’s such a good way to expand to a demographic that normally we wouldn’t be exposed to as a low-intervention winery and the new young kids on the block.”
Most pop-ups occur within restaurants, usually on off-nights. While a lot of planning may go into one, an air of spontaneity is central. For the customer, this cultivates a sense of discovery, of being in the know. One way to keep your finger on the pulse is by following venues that regularly play host to pop-ups, including Modus Coffee, Dachi, Carp, Batch, Pizza Coming Soon or through the rotating chef program at Bar Tartare.
Langford-Smith explains: “I think why people really connect with pop-ups is because it is a story of two different people coming together to share a common goal.”
It is through stories that community forms. “If you want connection with the folks growing the grapes, the people that are growing your food, that is the story we are telling,” Johnston says. “The other day, we’re explaining a cabbage dish to somebody and Devon’s fiancée is sitting next to them. I’m plating the cabbage and I tell them, ‘This person you’re sitting beside grew this cabbage.’ Connections feel important.”
For hyperlocal and cultural chefs, micro producers and low- intervention winemakers, pop-ups provide a path not just to forming their own food identity but, collectively, a Canadian culture where regional ingredients and multiculturalism are at the forefront and regenerative production is central.
“We have an opportunity to create our own identity that is very distinct, very unique, rather than fit ourselves into this other hole when we’re not the right shape,” says Hoorne. “I think with the right personalities in the right positions, we can be in a space where we are proud of what we have and who we are.”
