Growing up, my family dinner table was incomplete without “the works”—an array of salads, spreads of peppers, grilled meats, and various oils. But “the works” means more than food. It was also a lattice of conversations and overreaching arms. During my childhood, we didn’t go on many trips nor did we find too much time outside of my parents’ work to be together. For us, sharing food was how we connected.
As I got older, the way I ate changed. I spent my lunches alone, eating corporate slop bowls while looking at my phone. The first time I ever ate at a pop-up, it occurred to me that we will always have meat, rice, burgers, and banh mi, but what changes is how we eat, who we share our meals with, and where we get them. Hunched over a feast of wings on the North Rampart neutral ground, my friends and I spoke with the sidewalk chef in front of a smoker—asking about the logistics of smoking meats at midnight, and how he picks his sauces. It was a familiar feeling I thought I had lost—taking a moment outside of our individual lives to come together over food. It reminded me that food and culture are inseparable, and that New Orleans can serve as an example of how life outside the margins sustains the market and community.
It’s not hard to come to this realization in New Orleans, where it feels like you are never more than 50 feet from someone cooking. Our culinary capital actively engages roughly 50,000 workers and millions of patrons every year. In the state of Louisiana, a fourth of all visitor spending goes to the service industry, and locally, food and hospitality is one of the largest employers (behind office work). But as vital as restaurants are to our economy, the business model is growing untenable.
From exorbitant costs to the intricacies of City permits, opening a restaurant is an arduous bureaucratic endeavor that precludes many entrepreneurs from ever even starting the process, and the prohibitive costs don’t stop once the doors are open. The National Restaurant Association reported an average of 35% increase in operating costs over the past five years due to inflation. In practice, this means owners face a dilemma: either they reduce their margins, welcoming significant losses in profit; or shift the burden of higher prices onto consumers, preventing many customers from walking through the door. Lose-lose.
While we have enjoyed some economic stimulation from one-offs like Taylor Swift concerts or Jazz Fest, many local businesses don’t reap the benefits long-term. With a proposed billion-dollar funding deal to renovate the Convention Center and erect a new development adjacent to the CBD, the city is advancing a tourist experience that begins and ends in the CBD—leaving neighborhood restaurants in the Bywater, Irish Channel, and the Treme with tables unattended.
The crisis in the industry is self-evident—everyone has a favorite restaurant that has recently closed down. Just this past year, El Cucuy, Avo, Ancora, Trilly Cheesesteaks, and dozens more have all permanently closed their doors, threatening the culinary community we take so much pride in, and raising questions about whether our dining habits are sustainable.
In an empty La Boca, an Argentinian steakhouse owned by Chef Adolfo Garcia, a friend and I sat within the stillness of a restaurant before it opened. Chairs up, floors swept and mopped, and silver rolled. But, quickly after we sat down, the son of the owner, Chef Adolfo Garcia Jr., presented us with khao soi—a buttery, spicy, northern Thai noodle dish. Even before he owned restaurants of his own, Garcia Jr. hosted dozens of pop-ups, presenting culinary experiences outside the brick-and-mortar model. “When I got back [from culinary school], I was talking to chefs looking for opportunities to cook and just trying different things out that we didn’t have… here you can have a pop-up table outside of a bar. Something like that would never fly in New York,” says Garcia Jr.
For Garcia Jr., popping up in his dad’s kitchen allowed him to test what works—and what doesn’t. “For a lot of restaurants, they start as pop-ups. Burger Nerds and Bub’s popped up for two years before becoming restaurants,” adds Garcia Jr. Chi Chi’s, Garcia Jr.’s first brick-and-mortar, opened after a successful pop-up only a few months prior. “For starters, finding investors is tough, and then even if you do have the money to open a space, you really want to ensure a local following,” says Garcia Jr.
While pop-ups can curb costs, they also sustain community. Garcia Jr. adds, “The only way to be successful in New Orleans is to create community. The local chef scene is just so tight-knit. When we decided on Chi Chi’s, we knew we wanted to get everyone we could involved. We had Dalgo [a.k.a. Mr. Balloon Hands] do the art, and Dom [Signs by Dom] do the logo. We just wanted the people to feel like this is their spot too.”
Chef Adolfo Garcia Jr. works in Dolfy’s kitchen on a “crowd favorite,” charred leeks with romesco (a classic Spanish sauce of tomato, piquillo peppers, and almond).
While Chi Chi’s has seen success in its first year, many other Freret locations can’t say the same. Ice Cream 504, Ancora, and The Kolache Kitchen have all recently closed, with corporate eateries like CAVA and Chipotle taking their place. “Twelve years ago, no one wanted to touch Freret, but then local businesses started to pop up, and now look at this, it’s like a mini-Magazine,” says Garcia Jr. With corporations expanding into the area, restaurateurs have to make a more concerted effort to promote laterally. “We are about to open our second restaurant here,” says Garcia Jr., talking about Dolfy’s, a woodfire Spanish eatery in Ancora’s old space. “When I see corporations come here, I’m like, wow, everyone collectively did something, because now these fuckers want a piece of the pot.”
Kevin Leblanc, the Head Chef of Chi-Chi’s, notes, “We have had probably, ballpark, 15 pop-ups and collabs since we’ve opened.” Each of those is a primer in how community is sustained—not with competition or another conference downtown, but through ground-level communalism. Reflecting on a recent collaboration with Lucy Boone Ice Cream, LeBlanc shares, “[Lucy Boone] is local, it is right up the street from us. Aaron Schnell [co-owner of Lucy Boone] is back there grinding all the time. I just love their ice cream, and it’s awesome to have their product at our restaurant. Everyone deserves to have their flowers.”
Just five minutes away on Maple Street in Carrollton, the new restaurant Hot Stuff reminds us that pop-ups can be about more than just survival. Part of the Mason Hereford group [an ANTIGRAVITY advertiser], Hereford and partner Chef Nate Barfield present a “yes-and” model that leverages the novelty of pop-ups for strategic marketing.
Featuring a long line of stewed meats, boiled vegetables, and fried pork chops, Hereford and Barfield take the Southern-style meat-and-three and add their signature twist—Hot Wheels, cowboy aesthetics, and creative flavor fusions. From the minute you walk in, you know you’re eating at a Hereford concept in the vein of Turkey and the Wolf, Molly’s Rise and Shine, and others. This distinct brand identity, the same one brought to Late Night With Seth Meyers and The Today Show, makes Hereford and Co. a name common to the conversation of New Orleans food.
Before ever waiting in the cafeteria-style queue at Hot Stuff, the food-inclined tourist already knows Mason Hereford. With a base of curious customers from around the country traveling to New Orleans, the hard part of getting guests in the door is often already accomplished. On any given Wednesday, there’s a line out the door, selling New Orleans, one guest at a time.
After a recent pop-up with George Motz, the internet “burger scholar,” it became clear that pop-ups can be a mutually beneficial marketing tool for New Orleans and for celebrities. As Barfield stuffed “Hamburger Po-boy” buns, he was simultaneously gaining access to Motz’s 250,000 Instagram followers. For his part, Motz was earning a stake in the New Orleans culinary market, a sought-after prize for foodies.
Barfield says it best: “New Orleans is a unique city to cook in. It has its own cuisine. When you see other cities that do great food, they are generally cooking food from other countries or classic American food, but New Orleans is its own thing, and you don’t really find that outside of Louisiana.” Hot Stuff knows that people want a piece of the New Orleans pie, and uses it to benefit the overall brand.
Chef Nate Barfield scoops mac and cheese while Durel Randall works behind him at Hot Stuff
When Rosalita’s Backyard Tacos operated out of its Bywater brick-and-mortar, you had little choice but to enjoy your meal with strangers in the ambiance of someone’s backyard. A year after the storefront shut down, I once again found their San Diego-style tacos, but this time on a rainy Tuesday night outside of Bud Rip’s. Laurie Casebonne chatted with each customer in detail, while Chef Ian Schnoebelen took brief breaks from his haphazard fry station to side-eye upcoming tickets.
Before their return to pop-ups, Casebonne and Schnoebelen operated several successful fine dining concepts. The longtime team behind Iris and the highly regarded Mariza, Casebonne and Schnoebelen remind us that our lives are independent of supply and demand. After several years in fine dining, the grueling reality of running a restaurant took hold of the partners. “We just got so tired of dealing with all the drama, coordinating the employees, and the paperwork with the City, the taxes, the overhead,” says Schnoebelen. Aside from costs, brick-and-mortars also restrict mobility. “We could never just close down the restaurant. We couldn’t go on trips or have off days, we would never close the place down on a whim,” says Casebonne. Ultimately, for Casebonne and Schnoebelen, leaving behind fine dining was leaving a weight in the water. “Above all, the benefit of running a pop-up is just being free,” says Schnoebelen.
Filtering through concepts and locations, the team eventually landed on a model that stuck—Rosalita’s Backyard Tacos. After popping up in Rosalie Alley (just off North Rampart, between Piety and Desire streets), the taco joint eventually led the team back into a brick-and-mortar in 2021. “We didn’t have to stop doing the pop-up, our business was good, but [the opportunity] was just too good to be true. The place was near our house, we could utilize the space next door, and the neighbors were just really awesome,” says Casebonne. However, opening their North Rampart brick-and-mortar only reaffirmed the couple’s decision to leave restaurants behind. “The business was going down, but [for me], the main problem was the amount of work and an unreliable workforce, and I just wanted to have days off. I have been cooking for 35 years and running a restaurant for 20. It gets old after a while. Having the freedom of a pop-up is a big load off,” says Schnoebelen.
Since closing Rosalita’s Backyard Tacos in 2025, the team has continued to do pop-ups under the same name. However, as Schnoebelen points out, this freedom doesn’t come without risks: “The more popular you get, the more you have to worry about authorities coming down on you. They did that for Chance in Hell SnoBalls. They had been selling snowballs off their porch for a long time before the City shut them down.” Despite this, Chef Schnoebelen and Casebonne still show up every Tuesday outside Bud Rip’s, opting in for community. “Quit barking up the wrong tree and putting a clamp on cultural experiences, and just take care of the basic infrastructure of the city,” adds Casebonne.
Herein lies the pop-up paradox. Our rules, laws, health codes, zoning, and public welfare demand formal institutions, government agencies, dollar systems, and money. But pop-ups raise the question of whether we even need institutionalized regulation for our culinary culture. Garcia Jr., Barfield, Casebonne, and Schnoebelen have been able to dream beyond it. In each case, pop-ups present a model that pushes the boundaries of traditional culinary enterprise, returning agency to the eaters. Whether capturing large audiences in the case of Barfield, or returning to street cooking roots in the case of Rosalita’s, pop-ups are all about breaking the mold.
At its core, preparing food is a fundamental human endeavor. Even without walls, tables, and a “now open” sign, chefs are going to cook. Creole and Cajun cooking wasn’t honed in industrial kitchens; it was made by enslaved people, farmers, and foragers. It was made in community kitchens, and sitting down with family. Over time, markets changed, our city developed, and the intangible forces have changed the way we live, but one thing that never seems to fade is our city’s food. Pop-ups are more than the dishes they serve. The smoked street meats and bar tacos are resistance and willful fluidity, and they are a reminder that passion can supersede market value.
When my brother visited recently, I couldn’t help but take him to one of my favorite pop-ups. The lights were low and dark, but he still laughed at the “Lord of the Wings” logo on the menu. We took our food outside, sat, and shared some drinks, watching people come and go with food, friends, and family. I could tell that for a brief moment, sitting under a dank awning in chairs too small, that my brother’s guard was down, simply enjoying the night, like we had done for so many years living together. That was the point, whether the Lord of the Wings knew it or not. What makes pop-ups special is their honesty; tapping into the pure essence of what eating has always been about—connection. In a world calculated on return on investment, supply and demand, and quarter-one profit optimization, eating is often the first thing to be compromised. But in New Orleans, family, friends, and food come first.
Top: Chef Ian Schnoebelen serves a crawfish platter during a Jazz Fest Saturday pop-up outside of Bud Rip’s.
Photos by Katie Sikora
