Pop Off!
Everybody's popping up but no one is making money
You’re reading Mutual Interest, a business newsletter about when brands flirt with each other.
I’m back in LA and feeling ready to lean into summer (which some of you know I lovingly refer to as SUMMAH!) after experiencing Minneapolis in it’s peak summah glory. Went on two glorious runs to the glorious Olivia Rodrigo album, saw many of my favorite Midwesterners and spent lots of time at the park with my cute nieces. I need some new swimsuits, linen pants that don’t make me look like I’m in 98 Degrees and summer summah reading recommendations, drop any leads in the comments, please!
In today’s delicious post:
Pop up growth
Bagels in Japan
Chicken tender hive
KNICKS IN FIVE?
The Pop-Up Bubble Cannot Be Popped
I can’t go more than a few scrolls through Instagram without seeing a restaurant post about an upcoming pop-up with another restaurant. Maybe another sign that I really need to get back on Bricking my phone. This week alone I looked at the Max & Helen’s x Palace Diner pop up in LA, the Les Enfants du Marche x Jean’s pop-up in New York, and next week’s Dunsmoor x Vern’s dinner. It almost feels like a Stefan SNL sketch if he came of age during the peak Bon Appetit phase.
Some restaurants, like Paris’ Early June, LA’s recently closed Melody Wine Bar, Coach House in Chicago, and Marseille’s Trattoria Jogging even adopted the model further by always featuring a guest chef. But with so many restaurants doing pop-ups these days, it can feel less special. It’s like the long tail of dining. We can’t even be regulars anywhere when there’s always somewhere new to go to.
And I’ll be honest (while not naming names!): some of the pop-ups I’ve been to have been major misses. The food can feel out of place, staff may not be trained or familiar with the dishes, and oftentimes the cuisines don’t even pair well since both establishments are filling a menu with their big hits while collaborating on very few (if any) dishes, due to small kitchen sizes not equipped to double a menu and list of ingredients for a few nights. They’re also usually quite expensive too - these special, can’t miss dinners easily go upwards of $150.
Regardless of price or customer satisfaction, pop-ups are more pop-ular (had to…) than ever. The global pop-up value market is valued at $1.8B, and is expected to double within 10 years. 62% of millennial and Gen Z customers are looking for pop-up dining experiences at least once per quarter, due to “exclusivity, novelty, and social media shareability as primary motivators”.
But beyond the consumer, does it actually make sense for the restaurants? Jamie Feldmar did a great piece for the The Angel, Have We Reached Peak Pop-Up?, including interviews with some well known chefs and owners from some of my favorite restaurants: Brooks Headley of NY’s iconic-at-this-point Superiority Burger, Nancy Silverton, the queen of LA’s dining scene, and Andy Schwartz, the co-owner of one of my favorite new LA spots in recent years, Baby Bistro (which started as a pop-up!) among others. They dived into a slate of reasons:
Marketing Restaurants get to get in front of new customers and markets.
Testing Pop-ups can even serve as a way to tease and test geographic locations or even new concepts!
Education Chefs and teams can learn from one another and return home better than at their home establishments.
Employee retention/sense of community Chefs and their teams love getting to showcase their hard work and what they’ve built to the hospitality community, And when profit is low, retention is even more important to save on training- the restaurant industry has a 35-40% annual turnover rate.
Fun and camaraderie Of course, it’s fun to cook with like minded people and celebrate what both teams have built!
Financial Reservation apps like Resy and premium credit card services often will cover chef fees as part of their pitch to get these hot restaurants under their platform. American Express is buying another reservations platform, Europe’s TheFork, to join Resy, so we can only expect more of these this year.
Lower Risk A hot new food concept (like LA’s delicious new and super popular Dover Sole Market - their parking lot poke sells out within minutes via Instagram DMs… would recommend though) without a dedicated space can enter a restaurant for a few days much easier than the work of acquiring permits and licenses (and investment!) for their own space.
The marketing and financial pieces are what I find interesting. My parents have owned and operated restaurants since I was a child, and I grew up seeing the hard work it takes to stay afloat. I spent time during the pandemic working for a company supporting small restaurant businesses as they had to switch to delivery to survive. The restaurant industry is notoriously tough, and is only getting tougher with the rise of food costs, tariffs, commission rates on delivery, reservation system expenses, and more.
42% of restaurant operators reported that they lost money in 2025. Food costs are 38% higher than pre-pandemic (higher than the 30% total inflation rate, which is crazy in itself). Casual and fine dining restaurants are on the lower end of the total restaurant industry’s average profit margins - from 3 to 8%. Did you know restaurants have to pay per person, usually around $1.50, for every person reserved for? The technology that is helping restaurants boost business also compounds their margins. Restaurants are now expected to offer delivery services, POS systems, scheduling systems, and more. Seriously - next time you complain about the price of a menu item, consider how many local restaurants seem to still go out of business every month post-pandemic.
The reason pop-ups are growing and will continue to grow is that they are an offshoot symptom for restaurants looking for less expensive ways to drive awareness and traffic. While I wish it was fully a function of creativity and fun, it feels tough for a restaurant to truly have fun when they’re operating on such slim margins. The unfortunate part is that what used to feel fun and exciting now feels bloated, meaning restaurants will continue to have to figure out ways to grab our increasingly limited attention.
The rest of this post focuses on restaurant pop-ups and related news that have managed to get my attention over the last few weeks.
Apollo Bagels x Dean & DeLuca
How the mighty have fallen. Dean & DeLuca, the blueprint for brands like Eataly and other upscale American food markets, launched in SoHo (when it was “edgy”) in 1977, importing international delicacies like balsamic vinegar and specialty cheeses for their high-end customers. They expanded with their sophisticated palates to new markets, eventually expanding internationally - but at that point, the imitators and competition had caught up, and their specialty products felt less special. They were acquired in 2014 by Thailand based Pace Development, who expanded it quickly into Asia, but when the US business continued to suffer, the company ended up filing for bankruptcy in 2020 with over $500 million in liabilities and just $50 million in assets.
I always like when a brand doesn’t shut down their Instagram. I’m listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s cigarette smoke and getting a little emotional paging through extremely 2019 looking product images of fruitcakes and gluten free snack bites.
All of the American stores shuttered with the bankruptcy filing, but globally, the brand continued to expand with over 50 locations in Japan alone and a total of 78 stores operating under international licensing and franchise agreements. They seem to be doing really well under a slightly different model than their American older brother - a focus on quality remains, but with real estate focused in luxury malls and over-the-top airports instead of local neighborhoods. We walked past a packed Dean & Deluca store in Ebisu towards the end of November merchandised with Christmas goodies (despite Christianity not being common, Japan celebrates Christmas in a secular, consumer driven way - and by eating KFC for dinner).
Apollo Bagels is a bagel brand started by the owners of Leo, a pizzeria in Brooklyn. It actually started as a pop-up in the pandemic to help recover losses from the lack of in-person dining. As popularity continued to grow with lines down the block, the team took the brand into an international pop-up model before opening their own brick & mortar location in 2024, scaling to 5 locations within two years. A bit of a pop-up wunderkind.
Now they have partnered with Dean & Deluca to expand once again to Japan. One of the owners of Apollo Bagels, Joey Scalabrino, calls himself a huge fan of the brand (even collecting merchandise since childhood), so getting the opportunity to expand to Tokyo for Dean & Deluca’s first collaboration in two decades feels special. The pop-up was only for a few days, but I’ll be really interested to see where things go from here. There’s massive potential for Apollo to use Dean & Deluca’s existing infrastructure to expand to a key market like Japan with a demographic that also has a massive focus on quality. All of this is happening while there feels to be a burgeoning movement of interest in bagels (and investors: Pop-Up Bagels just got valued at $300M despite only having 30 open locations).
![夢みたい！」【ディーンアンドデルーカ】“ニューヨーク最高のベーグル店”が初上陸。5/22〜24の限定開催 | 朝日新聞デジタルマガジン＆[and]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ohKo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dc6d01c-ee92-4569-aa98-716408946dbf_1200x800.jpeg "夢みたい！」【ディーンアンドデルーカ】“ニューヨーク最高のベーグル店”が初上陸。5/22〜24の限定開催 | 朝日新聞デジタルマガジン＆[and]")
On a larger scale, Dean & Deluca should look at expanding this model to other viral food trends. Think NYC’s french dip sandwich from Salt Hank or the sprinkled cakes of Dot Cakes, matcha and breakfast sliders from LA’s Community Goods or the pancake from Cafe Telegrama. If I had millions of dollars in investment, I’d figure this model out myself. While we eat so much more globally than we did 20 years ago (I still remember the first time I ate hummus and it felt exotic!), it’s still very hard to experience restaurants from around the world. While the food halls of the mid 2010s got a bit tired and led to the growth of ghost kitchens in the pandemic, imagine what a quality-forward pop-up IRL marketplace could actually look like. Why not bring all of the long lines together? Your friend can wait in the Dubai chocolate bar line while you wait in the Gelateria Vivoli affogato line. Efficiency!
Popeyes x Surf Lodge
I love a high low moment, even if the amount we are seeing in recent years (McDonald’s x Paramount Caviar over Valentine’s Day or Taco Bell’s Choco Taco for Salt & Straw come to mind) is probably a recession indicator.
This summer, Popeyes is launching a partnership with Montauk’s The Surf Lodge to be the supplier of their “Chicken Tender Tower.” The Chicken Tender Tower is a long-running yet off-menu viral dish at the East Hampton club known for hosting celebrities and influencers. It’s $150 for around 35 tenders and fries. One influencer claimed it’s “worth every penny!” The kids are not all right, this is a cafeteria meal. As of Memorial Day, the platter now has Popeyes tenders, still priced at $150. It’s about a 65% markup from purchasing tenders at the closest local Popeyes an hour and a half away, which is a steal if you consider the price of a rideshare.
However stupid this is, I love it. For Popeyes, it speaks to the quality of the tenders and for The Surf Lodge, the frivolity of being rich enough to even be there.
Noma Breaks Their Model (Again)
Noma was the blueprint. The Copenhagen restaurant’s hyper seasonal ingredient focus, gastronomical techniques, and commitment to their craft garnered them three Michelin stars and the number one spot on 50 Best’s list five times. Rene Redzepi, their head chef, was treated like an idol.
A few years ago, Redzepi announced that the future of Noma was fully in residencies. They were closing down their gorgeous restaurant and kitchen located on the banks of Refshalevej, instead opting to travel for extended pop-ups, citing the impossible margins of running a fine dining establishment. They had tested this before through the pandemic in places like Tulum and Kyoto, finding inspiration in local ingredients.
The first official stop was Los Angeles this year - the $1500 per person (10 Chicken Tender Towers) tickets sold out instantly.
Then the New York Times put out a piece with dozens of allegations against Redzepi. A weird, expensive looking video response from Noma followed, and a bunch of partnerships backed out, but the LA residency team kept trucking. I expected to know everything about the meal via my algorithm but it felt like no one who had gotten tickets was really posting (here’s one lackluster review that includes the words “reindeer penis”). The Noma name and status, it seems, are tarnished.
Last week, Noma announced that they are changing their model again - back to Copenhagen to open a restaurant that is somehow going to be more complex and seasonal, with a unique menu each month. Redzipi will step away from day to day operations but stay on as creative director, clearly inspired by LA’s Silver Lake coffeeshop vampire fuckboy population’s favorite job title. Olivia Rodrigo said it best on the new album: I won’t settle for a guy with a fake job!
You must question how this is better financially than the original restaurant they closed down. To be blunt, this pisses me off. Noma’s big transition into a traveling gastronomic circus was announced, with a lot of fanfare, as a way to alleviate some of the financial pressures of running a fine dining restaurant. Redzepi let himself become a stalwart and beacon for independent restaurateurs; acknowledging the massive struggles for one of the greatest restaurants in the world made it seem like he was their mockingjay. By walking back from the residency pop-up solution, it feels like Noma is demonstrating that they are, and always have been, above it all.
It’s a golden parachute in a sky dazzled with Michelin stars, when the many restaurants and chefs that once looked up to Redzepi don’t have that same privilege.
Noma did some cool collaborations ahead of the Los Angeles launch with local restaurants like Courage Bagels and Holbox. This is the kind of thing they should be continuing instead - making their food more accessible and sharing the knowledge and work they built their brand upon.
Missed Partnership Opportunity of the Week
Jellycat is huge. The London based brand, operating for 25+ years, is now available in 77 countries. They were on TIME100’s Most Influential Companies this year. They’ve grown exponentially the last few years, with an estimated $500M+ in revenue and over 20 million Tiktok haul posts. Qualitatively, I think every baby and toddler I saw over my two weeks in Minnesota had a Jellycat. It’s also not only for young kids: Tyler’s high-school aged niece was itching to go to a store in town that she knew had Jellycats at Christmas. The Guinness Book of World Records awarded a teenager an award for having more than 1000 Jellycat plush toys.
Jellycat does these really unique pop-up shop experiences related around their food-related plush toys. In London, they had a fish & chips shop. There was a patisserie in Paris. In New York, they opened a diner with FAO Schwarz. I feel like they employ from the same pool as Disney workers (compliment). Adults and kids alike lined up for hours to be entertained before the purchase of exclusive SKUs like Steepy Tea Bag and May Macaron. One of the past shop workers, Miriam Marwood, has turned into a TikTok persona with over 200K followers now.
Jellycat is missing out on fully partnering with the food and restaurant world that it already has mimicked. It feels like an easy win to partner with trending, hyped up restaurants. Think about how beautiful it would be for foodie parents and their kids to finally enjoy standing in lines together. Maybe they could keep it local to London with a Dishoom pop-up at first - think about how cute a little smiley biryani plush toy would look. I’d travel in for a River Cafe or St. John Jellycat pop-up… INNIT?
Next week: sex sells!
Thank you for reading. I love meeting new people who share my (mutual) interests. I’m always open to interesting conversations with people and also consult on retail strategy and partnerships across categories. You can always get in touch at matt.miller520@gmail.com.
Will be adopting the tendie tower as a signature item at the lake!