We had a popup going at Journeyman this weekend, run by my friend Mike Betts. He's a personal chef, and his crew consisted of zero other restaurant professionals, one equities analyst, one engineer, and a young man who runs an urban farm. Mike makes part of a living off pop ups, but mostly from cooking for families that choose not to.
This led D to wonder aloud, between bites of Mike's sliders, if the future of restaurants looked like that. Forget the initial investment and overhead, forget trying to pay cooks a living wage, forget the fuckwittage of tipped service. Instead, get a bunch of passionate, interested hobbyists together and make some food. Sell tickets. Do it once a month. Multiply by everyone who's ever thought about chucking their day job and going to culinary school.
It's easy to see this as exploitative, but considering the existing alternative, it's difficult to argue that it's conclusively worse.
I'm trying to think of industries with a similar structure.
You'd have to consider fast food places and delis of convenience a whole other industry (to which gas stations might be the closest comparison), which is fine.
Some obvious parallels with music and theatre and sport - garage bands, community theatre, the Sunday league. What's missing there is the way small acts get big, that crowd of interested observers / talent spotters. And all of the other three rely also on a critical mass of people and acts that do it full time, with an inexhaustible source of new labor and talent for the industry.
And maybe the point here is that there is a gap in the world of food, that middle ground of hobbyists who are willing to get up on a stage, figuratively, and play in public. You can rattle off all the reasons this is the case, of course, but I still think there's a there there.
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