This is part two of the Standard’s three-part series exploring the San Francisco pop-up scene, including why it offers some of the city’s most exciting dining.
In the last two and a half years, Danielle Grivet has sold hundreds of cheesy, tomato-sauce-slathered chicken parmesan sandwiches at bars across the city through her pop-up Bette’s. It’s mostly a solo operation, with Grivet doing prep at an off-site kitchen before loading ingredients and equipment into a Waymo or Uber (she doesn’t own a car) and hustling it all over to Lark Bar, Ginger’s, or House of Shields.
For the culinary school grad, having a buzzy, semi-Instagram-famous pop-up starring her childhood-favorite comfort food had been one of those dreams that felt slightly out of reach. But when she got laid off from her fashion job in 2023, she thought, why the hell not?
Today, Bette is one of the most exciting pop-ups in the city.
But despite her success — or perhaps because of it — Grivet is thinking about winding down Bette’s. She’s getting weary of schlepping sandwich ingredients all over town and is waiting to hear back about an event planning job. “It’s a difficult time for me, being at this crossroads right now,” she says. “But I need to get back to a more stable life.”
For talented but underresourced chefs and restaurateurs, pop-ups are an established path to getting a nascent business off the ground. The benefits are obvious: minimal overhead, ready-made exclusivity, and a low-risk way to experiment. But Grivet — and others operating some of San Francisco’s best, most hyped pop-ups — have a love-hate relationship with the model. The itinerant businesses — which can draw long lines and legions of fans seeking food driven by passion over profit — require herculean efforts on the part of operators.
In some cases, the investment pays off; after launching as pop-ups, Four Kings and Oakland’s Burdell became two of the country’s hottest restaurants. But for the majority of pop-up operators, the path to sustainability is long, arduous, and nearly impossible. Often, they struggle with the question of what exactly to do with a project about which they are obsessively passionate but seems perpetually stuck in the in-between.
Since launching in 2020, East Bay-based pop-up Smish Smash has attracted a following for serving some of the region’s best burgers. My first memory of eating one was at the Outside Lands festival in 2022, where, sitting on a patch of brown grass, I admired the thin edges of the patty, as delicate and spindly as a snowflake. It was love at first bite, but in the last three years, I managed to catch the itinerant business only a handful of times.
Smish Smash owners Victor Donado and Amy Han have been looking for a permanent home for the business for years, but, like Grivet, are uncertain. In January, they opened an outpost in the Saluhall food court on Market Street. But even this isn’t forever; it’s a year-long residency.
Han says they’re viewing the time at Saluhall as an opportunity to test whether committing to a permanent space is the logical next step. They’ve learned to appreciate the upsides of pop-up life, including the ability to retain direct control over the quality of food and experience, preparing every burger and serving every customer. “For us, consistency matters,” she says. “That’s my biggest fear of scaling.”
Operating seven days a week at the counter-service Saluhall spot means they’ve had to hire staff and embrace the challenge of training and managing a team. If the staff can’t maintain the current levels of quality and consistency, Han and Donado may decide to remain a pop-up once the residency ends. “This is our livelihood,” Han says. “This feeds our children. So we pour our heart and soul into it.”
But even when a chef seems to have broken out of pop-up purgatory, escape isn’t always clean. Max Blachman-Gentile worked as culinary director of Tartine Bakery before launching his wildly popular pizza pop-up Jules in 2023. The pop-up was always a stepping stone toward opening a proper restaurant — a marketing tool. “I saw it as a means to an end,” he says, which is why he could afford to invest in sometimes impractical culinary choices, like prepping three sauces — tomato, fennel cream, and mushroom cream — for a menu of just four pizzas. “The point is to get people to say, ‘This is serious pizza,’” he says.
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Powered by his pop-up’s success, Blachman-Gentile secured financial backing to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant at 237 Fillmore St. in the Lower Haight. It debuts in a few weeks. He won’t go so far as to say he couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t launched Jules first as a pop-up but notes that many of his early investors were pop-up customers, and he landed his lease in part because his landlord had attended one of his events.
Since locking down his permanent space, however, he finds himself in uncharted territory. Pop-ups benefit from the illusion of scarcity. So what happens when your product becomes available every day? Blachman-Gentile announced the upcoming restaurant in late September, then stopped doing events for several months. He began to worry he was losing momentum as he inched closer to opening day. The steady stream of new Instagram followers on the Jules account slowed noticeably.
So he planned one more pop-up at Woods Beer & Wine Co. that drew a large crowd to the typically quiet Cole Valley neighborhood on a Wednesday night.
“I have a very love-hate relationship with it at this point,” Blachman-Gentile says of pop-ups. “But you have to keep the ball in the air.”