post-modern food pop-ups
ghost kitchens, heating. it's cold af.
Our time is about the ephemeral. The quick and the flash-in-the-pan. Gig work, AirBnBs. It’s hard to imagine someone living decades in their place-of-birth again. Even we become ephemeral online. A person is like a bit of heat that travels and shows up in different places, posting differently on different networks. The best at this are really great actors on any internet network they’re on. But even those who aren’t aware of their own online ephemerality are participating in it, like, say, a mother using LinkedIn to search for jobs, Instagram to browse Bollywood celeb posts, Facebook to chat with old high school friends, a sort of fragmenting of the self in a way that is fluid and not unified the way it is in real life, where we are very much carrying our sacks of blood and muscle with us from the nervous job interview to the hunched-over lunch to eating the covert chocolate bar to the subway home alone.
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been meeting a lot people who work in industrial kitchens around me. Many of these kitchens host pop-ups, which are food business that show up somewhere for a discrete amount of time. These businesses might rent out a food cart or operate from a ghost kitchen where they temporarily make what they want. Sometimes, like in the case of Bong, a pretty good Cambodian restaurant in Crown Heights, a pop-up will become a full-on restaurant in a dedicated space. But, lots of other times, a food business will never put down full roots. They remain ephemeral, and you’ll just have to follow them online as they pop up in various markets and have events in different places, maybe with an influencer cook who has a cupcake residency in some bakery that’s not getting much foot traffic.
Like much of what is ephemeral, the pop-up isn’t exactly a bad deal for restaurants. It’s a change from what came before, even much better in some ways. Just like it’s compelling that someone can get good at the internet today and make money selling their nail art themselves without having to work for a larger company, a pop-up lets people avoid having to deal with the full cost of real estate until they’re sure about it. And in New York, where Manhattan average rental space is among the highest in the country with no solution in sight, this is a reasonable thing to want.
I’ve learned that it’s so expensive and unprofitable to run a restaurant that anyone who does so must really love what they’re doing. Between February 2020 and December 2025, wholesale food prices in New York became 34% more expensive. Minimum wages have increased to somewhat match the cost-of-living in New York, $17/hr before tips. A commonly used number in the restaurant industry is that a restaurant working well makes around 3-5% in gross margins, which refers to the money you have leftover after you spend on everything else. Restaurants, unlike a lot of other businesses, tend to include rent in this margins calculation, so this percent is a little lower than what you might hear elsewhere. Still, think about this: Silicon Valley is built on the premise of great margins—once you make a piece of software, you can distribute it forever for very little cost. Of course, the basic premise of cheap distribution might change after LLMs. It’s now even easier to make software, and it’s even harder to get people to pay attention. But software is a different and much easier game than the restaurant business. Which also has to deal with marketing.
And ephemeral stuff does really well online. Pop-ups get attention. Everyone wants to help the new kid. Show up to eat before it’s over or you might miss the trend. A pop-up is an insider event, something surprising. In the summer, a lot of pop-ups set up in parks, where they’ll rent out a stove, propane burners, a few chairs to sit on when they’re tired, a tent overhead to hide from the elements. They usually opt to be in markets (like the almost-too-popular Queens Night Market, whose founder I talked to eons ago) because it’s time-consuming and expensive to get all the other permits on your own.
But then winter comes, especially those terrible ones like what we’re currently living through, where the wind chaps at your face and huge clumps of snow create a refrigerator effect on the streets. Some pop-ups rent out industrial kitchens to avoid having to hop around during the seasons. I know a lot of people at these spaces, because they’re near where I work. One is divided into seven simultaneous businesses on a Saturday afternoon. Three use the space as a ghost kitchen, where they make food in the kitchen, then take orders for it online, one acting as a full restaurant on Uber Eats and another creating some sort of an exclusive email list to sell pies.
Someone I know there has an entire job where he sits by a window and passes paper bags along to various delivery people who arrive to take this food that people have ordered from ghost kitchens. And the others are mostly pop-ups, who show up at that industrial kitchen at the same time every week, where they can operate out of without having to worry about equipment or hygiene.
This is what the industrial kitchen is supposed to offer: regularity without needing to go the whole way of renting a space. Which is what surprised me last week, when I went to visit this specific kitchen and saw all of the customers were wearing coats. Eating very quickly with hats and earmuffs on, their cheeks pink, little puffs of white breath in the air. Babies swaddled in scarves and blankets. Somehow colder than outside because I had let down my guard, expecting indoors to be warm. The thermostat said the heat was down to 51° F, which is illegal. According to NYC Housing Maintenance Code, all commercial, occupied spaces must maintain at least 68°F between 6AM and 10PM when it’s colder than 55°F outside. And it was extremely cold outside. I’d forgotten my gloves at a friend’s, and still, my hands hold that memory of becoming unmoving and stiff and painful.
The person whose job it is to sit by the window had on a full winter puffer, two scarves, and a Mets wool cap. I have never seen someone indoors look so cold. He told me that the heating would be fixed eventually, but not as soon as it needed to be, because he wasn’t sure if they could call 311.
The law for minimum temperatures applied to full-time rentals, but the ghost kitchen businesses only rented the space for a few hours at a time. And the rental went through a management company that sat between landlord and tenant, and was tardy and unresponsive. The ephemeral nature of the business had him questioning whether the place was even real, real as in whether this business was even governable.
really enjoyed reading this one Meghna! I didn't realize these pockets of nyc existed
Really sharp observation about the 51°F thing. The ephemerality creates a legal gray zone where nobody's responsbile. I worked at a similar shared workspace once and noticed how the landlord would always delay fixing stuff because we were "temporary" tenants. The pop-up model is great for flexibility but seems to create these weird accountability gaps.