Hi friends,

Considering the inevitable onset of alternative spaces as our social media overlords continue to obfuscate. So much is changing, it’s challenging and unrealistic to keep up with the devastating rhetoric surrounding us. So we look for constancy in off-kilter media, our neighborhoods, analogue tech. There’s a rise in ham radio that I for one will be tuning in for.

I’m seeing thriving farmer’s markets and backyard produce swaps become the norm. More scrap-focused chefs on the rise and homemade versions of grocery store favorites. The swing towards post-consumerism is happening, has to happen for us to make significant change. Economic influence is the most vital power we have, and this is your sign to make the most of it. Your dollars are a determining factor.

Amazon Prime–canceled. Finding local / DEI supported alternatives or going without. As someone with a dedicated upcycled jar cabinet you can bet I will find a way to make do with as many pickle jars as makes sense.

In the vein of divergent community making, very excited to share an interview with Portland local app, Pop-ups Please! A vibrant, indie focused platform making independent chefs and artistic experiences accessible to the public. As a pop-up chef and PDX plant-based foodie myself, this app has been a game changer in the local scene. Scroll on for the full read!

Stay hungry,
Hawnuh Lee | Founder, Closed Loop Cooking

The hummust try this bagel sandwich.

The dish >>

• No eggs? No problem. On my vegan breakfast kick whipping up sourdough discard bagels with tasty veg sausage. Here are a few other breakfast bagel sandwich ideas for your liking!

• Great read on the hope of a meatless mainstream.

• Better ways to tell someone you’re vegan.

• Reducing stress this week with these tips.

• Just discovered FoodFix - highlighting food policy news in Washington.

• Love seeing this array of zero waste misos.

• Omg this gherkin fountain. Would fit in perfectly at this lucky girl matcha dinner party.

We need more Pop-ups Please! With app co-founders Alex Peter and Francisco Morales

interview by Maia Welbel

Opening up a brick-and-mortar restaurant has got to be one of the most challenging (and risky) business endeavours one could embark upon in 2025. If you’re not sitting on an exceedingly cushy volume of cash, the prospect looks practically insurmountable. Experimental concepts, boundary-pushing menus, and local-first frameworks get stymied by upfront costs before they ever see the light of day. It’s a real blow to those of us who would love to see up-and-comer chefs’ creative ideas come to fruition so we can try them out ourselves. The harder it is for independent projects to get a foothold in the food and beverage industry, the more diversity and innovation gets quashed, and we miss out on mind-expanding, delicious dining experiences.

Lucky for us, would-be restauranteurs aren’t letting that stop them from putting food onto diners’ plates. It just might not be served inside four permanent walls. Between 2022 and 2023 the number of restaurant pop-ups in the U.S. grew by 155%. And that’s just based on data reporters could get their hands on. Many more have undoubtedly popped-up below the radar, so to speak. Pop-up establishments allow chefs and entrepreneurs to bypass at least a portion of leasing, permitting, renovation, and equipment costs, so they can test out ideas and share their food with customers without incurring so much liability. That might be why, from coast to coast, we’re seeing some of today’s most creative cooking being done in an itinerate fashion. 

But here’s the rub: between SEO manipulation, consolidated advertising networks, and social media pushing suggested content over personal connections, you’re more likely to find out about the gourmet breakfast sandwich or herbal tonic pop-up in your neighborhood from a friend a week after they’ve closed than you are from the creator’s digital marketing bids. Pop-Ups Please is here to solve that problem. It’s an app whose sole purpose is to get the word out about cool pop-ups and the creative people behind them. You can download it right now to see what might be popping up near you, or even post your own. But first, you’re going to want to read this conversation with its founders Alex Peter and Francisco Morales — two designers and food lovers helping you choose spontaneous community gathering over scrolling. 

Tell me a little bit about who you both are, and how Pop-Ups Please got started.

Alex Peter: I'm Alex, I’m the CEO and lead of our small team here in Portland. Francisco who is with me here is our chief of design, and also my co-founder and partner. Xóchitl Jaime-Aguirre leads communications and PR, and Zach Babb is our CTO (I’m doing air quotes around all our titles). 

My background is in startups — I’ve pretty much jumped from startup to startup for most of my career — so I’m really passionate about technology and small business. Francisco and I actually opened up a gallery together, towards the end of the pandemic, which we ended up running sort of pop-up style. We'd have events once or twice a month, rather than doing a full brick and mortar open hours type thing. So that's where we were introduced to the idea of a pop-up. We also had good friends in the hospitality and restaurant industry who were influential in the growth of pop-ups here in Portland, so it just became a very big part of our social lives. We were actually at a pop-up one day that one of our friends put on and we only made it on the last day that it was running. We were sitting at a table with a bunch of people having a great time, and we were like, “How did we all almost miss this? How have we not been here every night?” And we were talking about how much Instagram sucks because you don't see a post for an event until like two weeks after it happened. So I pulled a piece of paper out of my bag and started writing down ideas for an app that would be a place you go just to find pop-ups. Like apart from your cousin's baby photos and random bits of news. So that's kind of how it started. Zach, who I’d worked on at a few different startups in the past, was there too, so I tapped him on the shoulder and was like, “I have a new idea. How long would it take, and are you down to do it?” And he was like, “Give me two weeks.” So in two weeks, we had a demo, and we spent the summer working on it and launched it that fall. 

Francisco Morales: I am a graphic designer, and both me and Alex have been really passionate about figuring out ways to support creatives here in Portland right now. Rent prices are really high, and I think a lot of people have responded to the scarcity of spaces through this pop-up model. We've seen it not just in the culinary space, but in visual arts, and music, and markets for makers… There are a lot of entrepreneurs and creatives who are struggling to find space and connect with their community and consumers. So that was kind of the catalyst for us to open up our gallery, which we were also using as a design studio where we did branding for some small businesses here in town. And designing logos for República & Co. is actually how we entered the sphere of Portland’s food and beverage industry. Building these new relationships and friendships, we started to see what happens behind the scenes and realize that there are a lot of similarities to what was happening in the visual arts. So Alex and I were both like, “Okay, this is really affecting creatives and small business owners across the board, which in turn has such a big impact on our community and culture.”

We managed to find this property that had a little retail space in the front and a living space in the back. So we literally moved in and built out our gallery there. We used it as an experimental creative space. We did a few openings that were more traditional, like visual art on walls. And we also did retail pop-ups, where we would host people who were coming into town, or were on the market circuit and wanted to try a pop-up. They would stay for two to three weeks, or however long they wanted to be there. We did a couple of makers markets, which led us to come up with a concept we called Mesa, where we collaborated with our late friend Lauro Romero to find different ways of bringing together art and food. The app is also dedicated to his memory. Through that program we paired up different artists and a chefs to collaborate on a menu and gallery exhibition. 

The rest aligns with what Alex said — we had to close the gallery because rent was so high, so we spent a year trying to figure out how to pivot so we could continue our programming and continue supporting all the amazing creatives in this town. 

I love the idea of finding creative ways to bring together food and art. Can you tell me more about what came of those collaborations?

FM: The first one we ever did was with me as the artist and Lauro as the chef. We felt like that would make it easiest for us to figure out how to create a process and an example of what a collaboration could look like, so that when we pitched it to other folks, we had a foundation to build upon, and examples of what’s possible. We decided we were going to do two seatings in two nights, so four seatings all together. The space, like I mentioned earlier, was super small, and it was attached to our living space. Lauro and his sous chef were going to prepare everything in our tiny apartment kitchen, and guests would sit in the gallery at a big communal table. It was all hands on deck. Me, Alex, Xóchitl, and some of our other friends ran plates and served drinks.

The way that the art came in was a series of paintings and illustrations I had already made as part of my practice. A lot of my work deals with identity, as far as being Mexican American, Chicano, originally from Southern California, and what that experience has been like now that I live in Portland. Lauro was from Mexico, so he'd had his own experience coming up in the food industry and ending up here in Portland. So we sat down and went through some of the pieces, and he picked out a few that resonated with him. Then he created a menu based upon that work — inspired by the colors, or topics, or his own interpretation of the piece — and then it all came to life on the plate. 

Everybody who came had a super positive reaction. A lot of people had never been to anything like that, and didn’t know what to expect. It’s intimate, it's communal. You experience art in a new way. You experience food in a new way. You experience people being vulnerable and telling stories in a new way. It is such a unique experience, and just sharing that with other people, you leave with a different perspective.

How did those experiences lead you into the creation of Pop-Ups Please?

AP: We started by talking to people in our community about their experiences with pop-ups — How do you find out about them? How do you list them? What's that experience like? And then starting to talk to more pop-up organizers specifically, to find out what solutions they had found that worked for them, what the hardest parts are, how they advertise, etc. Just putting all those questions out there and starting to ideate with people we know and people we were meeting for the first time. I have a background in product design, so I started making mock ups and prototypes — taking sketches and doodles and turning them into design specs. And then worked with Zach to get our minimum viable product up and running really quickly. We've taken a super iterative approach to it from there, listening to what feedback comes in, and making improvements big and small. We wanted to make it as simple and agile as possible, because pop-ups are a very agile business model. Like if there’s a weather issue, or you have to move the hours, or you sell out early, or you couldn’t source an ingredient… you have to be able to adapt. So we wanted to create something that could be updated on the fly. We were really focused on how we could design to enable spontaneity.

I'd love to hear about what that looks like in practice. It's still so new, but it seems like you have already had a lot of folks using the product. What's worked well so far? What stands out to you?

AP: Yeah that’s something we were all kind of surprised about. We had over 300 beta testers almost immediately. So we’ve had kind of overwhelming support. I still remember Zach initially saying that if we got 10 beta testers he would be stoked. So seeing numbers go up and up, we were like “Okay, people are into this — we're doing something that people see a need for.”

Xochitl has a lot of connections in the industry, especially around pop-ups, so she's always been like, “Our number one thing is talk to people and let pop-up organizers know that we’re a part of this.” Like, we've been in their shoes. We are in their shoes. It’s a “made by you, for you” type of  thing. Which I think is kind of the magic of why it works. 

FM: When we had the gallery, we ran it with zero commissions because we wanted the artwork to be accessible for people who identified with that artist or that artist community. So we tried to come up with a different model where rather than inflating the prices, we just let the artists get 100% of the sale. We wanted to make the experience the product that we were offering so the art itself could be proprietary to the artist. Because, you know, they spend a lot of time making that stuff! And that has translated into the ethos of the app. It doesn't cost you anything to post your pop-up, and immediately after we verify it it shows up on the feed. 

Another thing is that we decided to build the app based on the user's location. So when you open it up it organizes the feed based on what’s nearest to you. And maybe you realize that there are pop-ups within walking distance that you didn't even know were there because you don't follow them on Instagram, or it didn’t show up on your feed or whatever. The cascading failures of social media are so long. So we were like, “How about we get rid of that by making it just time and location based?” 

I think there’s power in creating something that is literally geared for one thing and one thing only. It’s gotten to a point with some of these platforms where they’ve packed so much stuff into them that they’re useless. Like, when I open up social media, 99.9% of the time I don't accomplish the thing that I went into the app for, and instead I end up spiraling into something else and now 30 minutes have gone by. We want to help small businesses simplify by not having to interface with like four different social media channels because they already have so much on their plates. 

So if I go on the app right now can I post a pop-up anywhere, right? It doesn’t have to be in Portland?

AP: Yes! We've already seen people posting from New York, and LA and Washington… Just truly through word of mouth. We only just launched in November, but we’re realizing that maybe we’ll be in more cities sooner than we imagined. Why not?

Thank you Alex and Francisco! We are so happy this app exists and can’t wait to see its impact continue spread. If you’re reading this from somewhere Pop-Ups Please hasn’t reached yet, consider sharing it with your local community or using it to host a pop-up yourself! 

Wellness is also this.

CLC might make a commission from links or ads in this newsletter,
so we can keep crafting rad content for free!

Have an idea we should feature in the newsletter? Want to work with us? Drop a line at [email protected]. We can’t wait to see what y’all cook up next! #closedloopcooking

*****

Stop Being the Best-Kept Secret in Your Industry

Turn trending ideas into social media attention (we detect them for you).
This attention into followers.
And followers into customers.

Turn ONE conversation into WEEKS of authority-building content, that actually sounds like you. From idea to monetization.

Start your risk-free 7-day trial.

Publish and Sell Books Your Way

Lulu makes it easy for creators like you to publish their work. With affordable, high-quality print-on-demand books, you can grow your brand, reach a global audience, and keep 100% of your profit.

Create Your Free Account Today