How I Opened a Restaurant for One Night Only
Two months of planning, opened just one night and over as soon as the last guest walked out the door. What was just a restaurant with 45 guests sitting down for a 5 course prix fixe dinner just turned back into an organic, gluten-free bakery that sells cakes, macarons and pastries by day.
Where did this restaurant go? No more pork belly steam buns? No more chicken and waffles? Well, it's gone - for now...until we find another location and another date to create amazing food for amazing people.
Back in December I was looking into different opportunities to get into the restaurant industry. If any of you know anything about the restaurant business is that it's HARD. It's hard to open one and it's hard to run a successful one. Most people end up running it to the ground. I've heard of pop-up restaurants in the past, places like Mission Chinese Food and Rice, Paper, Scissors in San Francisco. But it wasn't until I bought LudoBites by Ludo Lefebvre and read his stories of adventure and challenge of cooking in random locations across LA That it really hit me, "Why don't I start my OWN pop-up restaurant?!"
All the positives started lining up: low cost to entry, very little overhead, opportunity to start cooking, incentive to create a brand and a website, huge opportunity to market myself and brand my concept.
So when the new year started, I enrolled myself into culinary school at the Art Institute in Orange County and I found a job at a new restaurant that opened up in the next town over, all while trying to scout out locations for my first pop-up. I was determined to get as much training and experience possible to make my business a success. I experimented all the time with specialty items, trying to find my niche. I held private tasting dinners in my own home for friends to figure out what was good and what was not. And the scouting continued.
I always had an eye on Eat Cake in Rowland Heights. Amongst the strew of Chinese restaurants and bakeries along Colima Road (notorious for Asian food of all sorts), Eat Cake stood out. It was trendier with its decor and gluten-free, organic offerings. It was comforting to always walk in. I knew in the back of my head that this would be a perfect place to hold a pop-up dinner for one night. But it was as if Eat Cake was the prettiest girl in school, I was afraid to approach them about it.
So a couple of months went by and I kept putting off the idea of pitching the idea to them. Honestly, I was afraid of possible rejection, which is weird because I was in sales for 9 years and have heard no more than most people in their lives. But Eat Cake was THE one that I wanted to do first in Rowland Heights.
Then one night, I gave myself a check up from the neck up. A reminder to myself of what I gave up in order to pursue what I really wanted. So with this new found confidence I sent a message to Eat Cake on Facebook about the possibility opportunity of holding a pop-up dinner at their establishment on a Saturday night. And to my surprise I got a message back in a matter of minutes - they were interested! I was more excited than a girl scout who sold her last box of cookies.
I was fortunate that the owners, Tricia and Mike were so kind and willing to help. So the planning started with the exchange of ideas between Tricia and I about the menu and the concept. I toured the kitchen to get a better idea of what I was going to be dealing with. More e-mails and more e-mails about all the fine details...should we use paper cups or glassware? Plastic forks or silverware? There were date changes and schedule conflicts. But in the end, it all worked out.
All along the way, I was open to the challenges that would occur at any occasion. Something I learned being a district sales manager was that business was sometimes about dealing with organized chaos. I think the 9 years working at Vector Marketing and selling Cutco Cutlery gave me the confidence to go into a new territory and not be scared.
But as the weeks leading up to the event started coming closer, I began to get more nervous. Reservations for the event weren't where I had hoped for them to be. It was difficult not having an online reservation option which probably affected our early sales numbers. But with constant promotion on Facebook, I saw our numbers steadily rise. The Monday leading up to our event was possibly one of the most exciting days in my life. I woke up finding out that we only had 6 seats left. There was a surge in reservations over the weekend. As soon as I heard, I posted on Facebook about the limited seats remaining, I texted people making sure they called in and THEN...WE WERE SOLD OUT! We were at the point where we were sold out and people were still calling in wanting to reserve! We even extended our seating at 8pm to accomodate just a few more. It was one of the most exciting things I have ever experienced. It was overwhelming knowing that a lot of these people were coming out just to support me.
The days leading up to the event, I was a nervous wreck. I was trying to balance work, school and Mama Yu's. I was a one man team managing the marketing, accounting, front of the house decor, back of the house shopping and timeline, and keeping a smile on my face. I don't think anyone understood the logistic challenges of creating an event like this.
The day before the event I finally got started on the shopping (thinking back now, I wish I had more time the day before to start) and prep. I prepped until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. I finally hit the hay at about 3am only to get up before 8am to continue it all again.
Luckily all the meat (pork shoulder, pork belly and chicken) was brined and marinated the night before. The pork shoulder for the second course, pork "tostada" was the first to go in the oven. I rinsed off the salt and sugar brine and rubbed it with more sugar and Chinese five spice. Want to know why it was so tender? It was roasting in the oven since 8am that morning and we didn't pull it out until right before service.
The pork belly "al pastor" was next. It was braised in its own marinade with other spices and flavorful liquids since 9am that morning. It was probably braising for a good 6 hours before we took it off the stove.
The rest of the morning was spent prepping more and more and it almost seemed endless. Luckily I had my amazing friends, Nick and Shen helping me. They would later be helping me serve the guests waiting hungrily for their food. And might I add, they were awesome. Besides Shen, they had no experience being servers. They kind of just went with it and just made it happen. They made more strawberry basil lemonade when we ran out. They even helped us plate when we got backed up. They're jacks of all trade. That's them below.
Here's my other amazing server, my brother from another mother, Martin Yan (yep, like the chef but not...)
So our prep continued for much of the afternoon at an off location kitchen. We didn't have access to Eat Cake because they were still doing their normal business routine. Originally I had thought (and planned) to be in their kitchen at 3pm to continue our prep and set up and get ready. My volunteers from my culinary school were also arriving at that time as well.
But of course, challenges would arise because nothing had really derailed us yet. Unfortunately when I got there at about 3:15pm, their lovely store manager, Liz informed me that their kitchen wouldn't be ready for another hour. In my head I was thinking, "ANOTHER HOUR!? THAT'S GOING TO BE 4PM! WE'LL ONLY HAVE 2 MORE HOURS TO PREP STUFF WHICH WOULD NORMALLY TAKE 3!" But I calmly smiled and laughed because I knew something like this would happen. But Liz was awesome as she has been throughout this process. At the very least we were able to get our food out of the car and transport it into their kitchen to keep everything sanitary. We started unloading things where we could. So if you're reading this Liz, thank you for all your help!
Finally around 4pm, the coast was clear! My culinary classmate volunteers and I rushed in and started attacking our to do list. They were such amazing help, things definitely would've fallen apart if it wasn't for them.
They were such good sports. I barely had a hand in the prep work while we were at Eat Cake because I was so busy running around trying to make sure we had everything we needed.
Before we knew it, 6pm was approaching and our first guests were arriving. The one less hour we had really started to set us back. Our plates that we got from a party rental place was still being washed and the prep for our Trio of Tastes was just barely finishing up. The fryers to fry our tofu skins weren't hot enough yet and the tofu skins were falling apart in the oil. It seemed like my worst nightmare happening. It was about 6:30pm before we got our first course out.
The challenges continued as we started preparing for the second course. The first few scallion-corn fritters coming off the stove were getting burnt and weren't good at all. We needed to catch our rhythm and it just seemed like time was just against us. It took us another 30 minutes before we could get our second course out. By this time I knew guests were getting a bit annoyed.
Then my worst nightmare occurred. It was all my fault. I had put someone else in charge of making the ube (purple yam) waffle batter who had no experience before making it. I should've taken the reigns on one of the most important elements of my main dish. But at this point, there was no going back and no more ingredients. Luckily we had enough ingredients to throw together a succotash. A succotash is a southern dish made with corn, hominy, lima beans and bacon and finished with some butter and heavy cream. We didn't have any lima beans but there were frozen edamame that I substituted instead. So in the end, we still had an extra side to now go with the fried chicken. Sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches.
After that, we had time to take a breath. Dessert was already prepared and ready to go, courtesy of Eat Cake. But our first service had already run into our second service. It was 8:30 (maybe even 8:45) before our last guest left from the first seating.
But this was my kitchen tonight. As like any great leader, your team's attitude is a reflection of your attitude. We had to regroup and refocus. I gathered my entire staff, sent one to get enough supplies for our lemonade and sweet potatoes to replace our purple yams, and worked fast to make the next seating amazing.
We started gaining momentum as we already had full plates set up with our Trio of Tastes ready to go before the second group was seated. There seemed to be no break in momentum as we continually sent out plates of food. As soon as the last plate of Trios went out, we started the first plate for our second course. We were moving smoothly. There seemed to be no hiccups at all as we started finding our groove. Food still took some time, but heck, what do you expect with limited space to plate, a 4 burner stovetop (2 of which were occupied all night to keep things hot, so we only worked off 2 other ones to saute certain items to order), two household countertop fryers (One I borrowed and one that I bought for $20 off someone from craigslist that wouldn't even go pass 350 degrees F...don't judge me, I'm working on a budget) and a waffle iron I bought off amazon.
This time I knew food was going out perfect. Did we run out of food? Yes. Unfortunately, that's what happens in a pop-up restaurant. Am I apologetic about it? Of course. In an actual restaurant kitchen every element would have been 10x better. But that's the challenge. And challenges like these are only going to make Mama Yu's better.
At the end of the day, there is no greater feeling knowing that you pushed out 190 plates of gourmet food to 45 guests out of a bakery kitchen with limited resources to which you received amazing rave reviews in the end. I felt like a rockstar minus the groupies.
So when is the next event? Probably somewhere in your neighborhood. Stay tuned and follow us!
P.S. All Photos are Courtesy of Chris Ace Photography
