By Raul Dias
Known for its ephemeral, fry…err, fly-by-night novelty,
the pop-up restaurant concept has been well and truly woven into the Indian
dining scene’s ever-dynamic culinary tapestry over the last couple of years.
With everything from Mumbai’s über-popular regional food championing pop-up,
The Bohri Kitchen ‘shape-shifting’ everywhere, to Delhi’s tapas-serving outfit aptly
named The Pop Up flitting from the Asiad Village to its recent perch at PCO,
the pop-up restaurant is, rather oxymoronically, here to stay!
But ever since its humble origin as supper clubs in the London and New York of
the 1960s, there have been all sorts of pop-up restaurant spinoffs; from food
trucks to the newest
being the trend of the permanent pop-up. Brick and mortar places that have
cropped up from the germ sowed by their erstwhile pop-up avatars and that are
imbued with the same ethos of dishing out—pardon the alliteration—fast, ‘frou
frou-free’ fare intrinsic to the pop-up concept.
Thalassa
This Greek taverna run by Mariketty Grana has had a rather mercurial trajectory
over the last decade or so. Starting off as a Goa-based souvlaki delivery service, plied on a single motorbike to a small moussaka-selling stall at the Anjuna
Flea Market to a permanent cliff-side restaurant in Vagator, Thalassa sure has
come a long way. And after its six-month stint as a pop-up in Mumbai a few
years ago, at the now-shuttered Olive Bar & Kitchen Mahalaxmi, Thalassa is
back dishing out its iconic oregano-rubbed roast chicken and prawns saganaki at a newly opened standalone
restaurant in the city’s Khar (w) neighbourhood.
Yakiniku
Introduced for the first time ever in Chennai in December 2015 for 10 days as a
pop-up, Yakiniku has now found a permanent home at the Hyatt Regency Chennai as
a dinner-only yakitori restaurant. At
the helm of things is Chef Shohei Nakajima sending out everything from takoyaki octopus dumplings to the fried
eggplant, miso sauce, sesame seed-redolent nasu
dengaku.
Sweetish
House Mafia (SHM)
Every weekend, a few years ago, suburban Mumbaikars would be seen waiting
patiently at different spots around Bandra and Juhu for a powder blue Tata Nano
to pull up and bestow onto them its bounty of cookies, the most anticipated of all
being the signature SHM s’mores cookie with its marshmallow fluff core. Today,
SHM, still run and owned by Neha Arya Sethi (who, earlier preferred to go
incognito, employing the moniker ‘Miss Sweetish’) not only has three intimate
and homely, permanent outlets in Lower Parel, Oshiwara and Pali Hill—serving
coffees, milkshakes and yes, cookies—but also counters at PVR Cinemas’ snack
bars.
Queimada
at The Bagel Shop
Initially planned as a short-term pop-up food festival to celebrate the
woefully underrepresented cuisine of the local East Indian community of Mumbai,
Queimada is fixed firmly at Pali Hill’s The Bagel Shop. With a menu designed by
East Indian chef Lester Pereira and Neale Murray—a Bandra food hero, Queimada
named after khimad, the East Indian
iteration of a spiced hot toddy, serves up an array of ignored classics like
mutton kuddi curry and duck moile, best mopped up with the fried
dough balls called fugias!
Desi
Deli
Taking her love for the classic American street food—the hot dog—and fusing it
with decidedly local Indian flavours, home chef Lolita Sarkar knew she had a
winner on hand way back when she used to sell her desi dogs at her pop-up stand at some of the Mumbai’s most
happening weekend flea markets. Soon enough, her fiendishly good mutton boti kebab-studded jungli dog and chicken
65 burger found a place on the menu at her Bandra outlet, which was soon
followed by an Andheri outpost.
Waiting
in the wings…
Guppy
by Ai
Like
Thalassa, this Delhi-based Casual dining Japanese restaurant too had a
six-month short turn as a pop-up at the erstwhile Olive Bar & Kitchen
Mahalaxmi, Mumbai. It’s now a few months away from properly debuting in Mumbai
at BKC, as it readies itself to dish out its signature Guppy pork belly with a
mustard-miso sauce.
(A shorter, edited version of this piece was first published in the 13th March, 2017 issue of India Today magazine)
