“Pop-up dining” doesn’t mean picnic tables.
“Pop-up” dining is so 2014. In 2016, we Townies are just catching up. (For suburbia, though, being only 2 years behind NYC and Philly is not too bad. H-town is cutting edge!).
Eventbrite.com saw such a serious uptick in pop-up listings in 2014 (47% increase from 2013), they had to take a closer look. They analyzed 40,000 events listed and saw it was the most explosive trend on the site, with 82% growth. In industry standards, that’s just plain bonkers.
The long and short of it: Pop-up dining is a great way for restaurants to maximize use of their space, for chefs to break out of normal roles and for diners to try something different. Since the dawn of the Web, “sampling” experiences are the new normal, and we Townies are doing it.
It’s a good thing, too. Events like this will attract more of the highly-desired Millennial buyers to the real estate market in H-Town. H-Town has an aging population with a lot of empty houses. We’ll be competing for those buyers with neighboring towns. We need a great mix of urban-style attractions along with affordable houses and great schools.
We’ve posted before about the pop-ups coming to Kettle. Here’s an update. There’s a company called fEATures (notice the “EAT” in the middle) that acts as an event co-ordinator of the pop-ups. Here is there upcoming schedule for dinners at H-Town’s Kettle restaurant at the corner of Brookline & Darby:
LINKS:
We like that the fEATures pop-up people are using Philly area start-up Ticketleap for their ticketing. Get more info at their website or their Facebook page.
Look through the restaurant/dining industry talk in the Eventbrite article. There’s lots of info from their survey of 2,ooo pop-up attendees.
A more casual read about the study and trend can be found in a March, 2014 article at Huffpo.
Better Homes and Gardens talks about the Millennial buyer’s wants and needs.
Photo Credit: INHABIT on Flickr