Sidewalk Suppers

Three of New Orleans's hottest pop-up restaurants

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The pop-up culinary movement is thriving in New Orleans, and it is no wonder. Like the city itself, these moveable feasts are bold, a little nonconformist, and full of soul.

Typically, chefs set up folding tables with kitchen supplies, food warmers, deep fryers, griddles, and grills on city streets, take over a bar’s kitchen, or create masterpieces one plate at a time under tents in all kinds of spaces. These temporary hotspots have the informality, affordable pricing, and chef-driven originality of food trucks, without the “bricks-and-mortar on wheels,” as one pop-up maestro calls them. A newfound pop-up could well leave you wanting more, only to disappear—until you unexpectedly run into it again during a charmed encounter, perhaps at your favorite bar.

In a city renowned for celebrated restaurants, pop-ups offer a lower-stakes route for talented cooks to go out on their own and deliver their creations to the masses. The business requires little more than delicious recipes and the cost of food—no permanent location, few, if any, staff, and limited menus that get the food to fans with relatively little fuss. Before 2020, the city had some pop-ups, but when the pandemic shuttered restaurants, emerging cooks found the scrappy, open-air alternative a sustainable, and safer, avenue to not only earn a living, but to put themselves out there in a bolder fashion than traditional restaurants allowed. The trend has only exploded since.

In a city renowned for celebrated restaurants, pop-ups offer a lower-stakes route for talented cooks to go out on their own and deliver their creations to the masses.

On any given week, New Orleans hosts around fifty chef-driven pop-ups. A few samples: Matchstick Kitchen turns out delicious Asian-inflected meals, most frequently for patrons at Barrel Proof Bar in the Lower Garden District. Tropicalia Kitchen spices things up with Brazilian food at Anna’s in the Marigny. Oni Onigiri specializes in Japanese street food. Coops Table plates up boudin balls, seasonal salads, and BBQ.

In neighborhoods throughout New Orleans, these triumphs of open-air cooking feed people who stumble upon them unaware or avidly seek them out. The wise and addicted follow their favorites on Instagram or head to @lemonpop.nola on Instagram to see a daily listing of options, then race to get the goods while they can.

We dug into a few to get the uninitiated started.

Waska

Three black folding tables, plus a gas-fueled flat grill and deep fryer, occupied a parking spot on Freret Street. That was all the kitchen Chef Jose Chris Blanco needed to turn out Colombian-inspired wonders. He pivoted between work stations in a fluid choreography that resulted in delicious arepa sandwiches, fried plantains, and ropa vieja—a slow-braised flank steak in a rich sauce of tomatoes and pureed peppers that was flecked with olives and served over rice.

His arepas carry a rich golden hue, and you can taste in them the sweet density of the fresh corn he uses to make the dough. Rebuffing the convenience of pre-cooked cornmeal, each week he cooks the corn himself, dries and grinds it, rehydrates it, and then kneads it. The results are crisp vehicles for a range of fillings, from fried plantains to tender, zesty pollo asado. While Blanco can fill your order in ten minutes or so—long enough to grab a drink and a table at Breezy’s, the open-air patio just outside the music venue, Gasa Gasa—this is not exactly fast food. From start to finish, his dishes take around six hours to prepare.

A passion to share the foods of his childhood with his community fuels Blanco’s work. The chef was born in Colombia and moved to Miami as a child, where he tasted a host of other South American foods that influenced his palate. He named his pop-up restaurant Waska after the town in Colombia where he grew up until he was ten, Güicán (pronounced wah-ska).

Blanco studied fine arts in college (he paints the food trays his food at Waska is served on), but he has always been drawn to kitchens. He started flipping burgers when he was fourteen, and at age twenty-one started working in a restaurant kitchen in San Francisco. Eventually, he ventured to New Orleans, where he worked at Lilette and other venerable spots before moving to Vermont for a time. After losing work during the pandemic, he returned to New Orleans.

Struggling to find restaurant work, he helped a friend run a pop-up event—and got inspired to give it a try himself—just as a one-time thing, he thought. That was more than three years and hundreds of pop-up events ago. “I really never dreamed that pop-ups would become my full-time job and my source of income,” Blanco said.

“I like the freedom to be my own boss, getting to feed people my food. I get to talk to people because I am not tucked away in a kitchen,” Blanco said. “I do it from my heart, and I do it with love.”

On Freret Street, that love showed up as Blanco sizzled chicken on the grill and dropped dough into the deep fryer to hiss while it cooked. As he sliced open the hot arepas, he told me, “I try to get food to make sounds so people hear it, and come.” The noises were a byproduct of the food preparation and a clever marketing tool.

Just then, a trio of college students ambled down the sidewalk, stopped to inquire about Blanco’s food, and promised to return for dinner.

If they’re smart, they eventually did.

waskanola.com.

Two Bites/Latke Daddy

Outside the Tell Me Bar, Chef Adam Mayer stood beside a propane griddle sliding golden grilled halloumi onto pools of smoked beet hummus the color of pink Mardi Gras beads. He served it with house-made focaccia.

Next to the griddle, arancini sizzled in a deep fryer. Inspired by the Italian fried and breaded rice balls, Mayer’s arancini is formed with jambalaya. Tucked inside is a piece of pepper jack cheese for extra gooey goodness. Also on the menu that night were shrimp remoulade wontons and teriyaki bánh mì sliders, a combo that was a party for the palate. All this open-air artistry, in the shadow of a Crescent City Connection exit ramp, marked the winning debut of Two Bites, a rebrand of Mayer’s long-running pop-up Txow Txow.

As the new name implies, he sizes his plates so diners can order one of everything. Mayer made the name shift to reflect the evolution of his culinary practice.  At Two Bites, Mayer delivers a blend of Mediterranean and New Orleans flavors, what he calls Nolaterranean.

But Two Bites is only one half of Mayer’s culinary personality. The other—potato-based and unapologetically irreverent—is Latke Daddy, a pop-up devoted to creative takes on the Jewish potato pancake served at Hanukkah.

Growing up in San Francisco, Mayer first learned the joys of communal cooking at age six, when he assisted a friend and her mother in making latkes for a Hanukkah party. The party grew larger every year, and by the time he was a high school senior, they were turning out latkes for eight hours straight.

“With Latke Daddy, the whole idea is to see how much treif I can put on a latke,” Mayer said, using the Yiddish term for non-kosher foods. “When I put pulled pork on a latke, I can hear my grandpa rolling over in his grave,” he joked.

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Each November and December, Latke Daddy fans feast on creations like the Aloha Daddy, topped with pulled pork and grilled pineapple, and the Monsieur Daddy, layered with ham and Gruyère Mornay sauce. Latke Daddy often appears at the Sunday and Thursday Crescent City Farmers Markets, generally between Thanksgiving and the New Year.

If Latke Daddy channels Mayer’s youth, Two Bites reflects his years of training and global travel. Raised by a single dad who worked long hours, Mayer grew up dining out, living the California mantra of eating fresh and local. After college, he headed East, cooking in Philadelphia and New York restaurants, before moving abroad to sharpen his craft.

In Bilbao, Spain, he landed at Mina, a Michelin-star restaurant, and fell hard for Basque food culture. He also did stints at restaurants in Israel and Denmark, plus in New Orleans at Shaya and Bywater American Bistro. His Two Bites menu—which will soon include items like dirty-rice dolmas wrapped in collard greens and crab fritters over green papaya salad—brings together all of his influences.

“With Latke Daddy, the whole idea is to see how much treif  (the Yiddish term for non-kosher foods) I can put on a latke. When I put pulled pork on a latke, I can hear my grandpa rolling over in his grave" — Chef Adam Mayer

Mayer likes the freedom of pop-ups, the small menus that allow for experimentation, and the community they create. “It is nice to be out in public and watching how people interact with your menu,” he said. “It is a fun, different way to approach cooking.”

Whether he’s dropping arancini in a fryer or piling pork on a Jewish classic, Mayer’s two pop-ups speak to the same impulse: to feed people with creativity and heart—one latke, or two bites, at a time. @latkedaddy on Instagram.

Xanh Nola

On a humid Tuesday night, Chef Anh Luu greeted customers beneath a canopy tent at the entrance to Miel Brewery in the Irish Channel. Steam rose behind her from a kettle filled with chicken and andouille gumbo. A grill hissed to life as she laid down skewers of tangy beef. A bright green pile of cilantro sat on a cutting board nearby, ready to top bowls of vermicelli noodles. Menus at the ordering table spelled out the offerings of Xahn Nola, Luu’s pop-up that is a delicious expression of her New Orleans childhood.

“My mom was stay-at-home,” Luu said. “She loved New Orleans food and she was constantly working on cooking projects.” As one of thirteen children in Vietnam, her mother stopped school in middle grade to cook for her family. In New Orleans, she turned produce from her own backyard garden and local ingredients—crab, shrimp, andouille sausage—into dishes at once Cajun or Creole and Vietnamese. “That inspires my food today,” Luu added.

Holy trinity, roux, lime juice, lemongrass: in Luu’s cooking practice, these are natural pairings. She finds that Vietnamese ingredients don’t change the soul of a dish, they just enhance and deepen the flavors.

At Xanh Nola, that idea is expressed in a richly flavored gumbo, its base enhanced by pho broth. Instead of a dollop of rice, the dish comes with fried sticky rice cakes, dense floating balls. The menu is brief and enticing, including wontons filled with lemongrass boudin, crisp sesame rice crackers sprinkled with a bright orange spicy shrimp seasoning, and oyster sauce-glazed beef skewers that could be added to a tofu vermicelli bowl made bright with pickled peaches and other garden-fresh goodies.

When Luu was a student at Ben Franklin High School, she got her first job at sixteen at the now-defunct Vaqueros. That began a long culinary exploration in kitchens across the Crescent City, from pizza shops to po’boy counters and sushi bars.

“When I think about how to reconnect to my culture, it always starts in the kitchen.” — Chef Anh Luu

Then Hurricane Katrina displaced her family; they moved to Portland, Oregon, and she followed. There, she honed her kitchen skills at the Western Culinary Institute and at Tapalaya, a Cajun/Creole restaurant that was happy to hire a cook from New Orleans. Over a decade, she rose from line cook to chef, then owner. Her bold mash-ups—think crawfish étouffée with rice noodles and phorritas, pho-inspired burritos—earned her national attention, two appearances on the Food Network, and a reputation for fearless fusion.

Just three days before buying Tapalaya, Luu’s mother passed away. She remained in Portland for three years, but New Orleans tugged at her heart. “My mom’s death sparked a longing for me to return home,” Luu said. “She was my link to my culture. When she died, I lost that connection.” She eventually closed the restaurant, returned to the city, and began to rebuild her sense of home through food. “When I think about how to reconnect to my culture, it always starts in the kitchen.”

Her pop-up not only connects her to her culture, but allows her to share it with the broader community. “I’m trying to do this for the culture, to strengthen our culture,” she said. The name of her business, Xanh—which means “green” in Vietnamese—nods to fresh herbs used in Vietnamese cuisine.

Luu calls her work renegade cooking.“You can be anybody and do anything here,” she said of her hometown. “You don’t have to be stuck in a box . . . You can tear it down.” @xanhnola on Instagram.