In the past three weeks, I’ve waited two hours for potato tacos. I’ve twice ducked out of the office early for pizza, first for a thin-crusted, pastrami-topped pie, then for a fennel-laced creation dusted in pollen. Once, I stayed out past my early-for-a-food-writer bedtime for a plate of duck prosciutto served with housemade za’atar crackers. 

And I have no regrets. 

The truth is, the food I’ve consumed in San Francisco over the past few weeks has been some of the most exciting of the last year. The secret? I’ve been eating only at pop-ups. 

The first pop-up restaurants were born of the recession, bursting onto the scene around 2010, as a way for scrappy, upstart chefs to launch restaurant concepts with minimal capital. Sometimes operating outside of legal parameters, these short-lived guerilla restaurants represented an anti-establishment way for chefs to cook without having to answer to investors about the price of ingredients and labor.

A decade and a half later, they’ve finally settled into becoming a permanent part of the San Francisco food scene  — though they are by nature temporary themselves — and, in the wake of the pandemic and with the country’s economic outlook uncertain, are once again thriving. 

But before you, too, dive into this dining sport, consider yourself warned. Pop-ups require the digging of a detective and the zen of a Buddhist monk: following chefs on Instagram; patiently waiting for them to announce their next dinner; enduring long lines and bumpy service and — sometimes — rowdy diners who have been guzzling martinis on empty stomachs for two hours while they wait for the food to show up. (OK, fine, that was me.) 

Once you’ve accepted this fact, you will be rewarded with dining experiences, both one-off collaborations and long-term residencies, that are often utterly remarkable — in part because they are ephemeral. You may fall deeply in love with the chicken Parmesan sandwich at Bette’s, in awe of how the golden cutlet retains its crunchy exterior despite being set between slices of pillowy milkbread and buried under a blanket of melted provolone and a ladle of zippy tomato sauce. But you have to leave knowing you may never taste it again: Bette’s hasn’t announced any future dates.

For chefs, pop-ups offer both benefits and drawbacks. While a restaurant requires a significant financial investment, all a chef needs to start a pop-up is unbridled passion and a hell of a lot of sweat equity. That’s why you’ll often find pop-up menus laser-focused on a single item, usually the result of an obsessive dedication to perfection.

Profit is rarely the main motivation. Chefs aren’t likely to reach financial stability exclusively selling Swedish hot dogs or smashburgers or a highly specific style of regional pizza. The only hope is that they might attract investors or accolades that can help them get there, a financial gamble I’ll be exploring in another story.  

For the diner, however, the hunt is part of the thrill. Knowing my favorite pop-up could suddenly appear with little warning at some dive bar in a corner of the city I rarely frequent adds to the allure. There’s pleasure in the anticipation and delight of discovering something you can’t book on OpenTable or Resy.

We diners have everything to gain from these passion projects. All we have to do is hunt them down and reap the rewards.

Hunting down pop-ups takes effort, but you’ll have a head start if you keep an eye on these. The best bet for catching events, which are usually announced a few weeks in advance, is to follow each business on Instagram. 

Hadeem
Spencer Horovitz’s Hadeem is easily the hottest pop-up in town, thanks in part to a nod from the James Beard Foundation, which named him among the country’s top emerging chefs. Horovitz’s nostalgia-fueled cuisine blends dishes from across the Jewish diaspora with California ingredients, resulting in food capable of connecting with diners whether they grew up eating potato knishes or scallion pancakes. 

Bette’s
You’ve never had chicken Parmesan like Bette’s. Since 2019, Danielle Grivet has been perfecting her recipe, which starts with brined chicken breast that gets breaded and fried to order. Cherry tomato sauce, melted provolone, and fresh basil are the only adornments on a sandwich that’s somehow much greater than the sum of its parts. 

Ilna 
Maz Naba brings decades of hospitality experience to his sophisticated California-Lebanese pop-up Ilna, where diners can find Eastern Mediterranean classics refreshed with global influences and local produce. Dry-aged beef dumplings swimming in yogurt sauce get a kick from za’atar pepper crunch, while kousa mahshi, a traditional stuffed zucchini dish, features a filling of Dungeness fried rice and a crisp pepita-date topping. 

Hej Hej
San Francisco has strong hot dog culture, but Amelia Eudailey brings a new dimension to the scene with Hej Hej, the Swedish pop-up she launched last year. The Classic Swede stars a pork-shoulder frankfurter that gets buried under cheesy mashed potatoes, bay shrimp salad, dill pickles, ketchup, mustard, and fried shallots. Two hands are definitely required. 

Bar Pie Guys
Detroit-style pan pies have been trending hard for four years but may be on the cusp of being dethroned. Square Pie Guys owner Marc Schechter last month quietly launched a spin-off pop-up called Bar Pie Guys, specializing in pizzas with cracker-thin crusts. They’re inspired by the pizzas you find at Chicagoland bars: light, crispy, and cut into squares.