The Bird: A New Business Model for Pop-ups?

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The Bird

Photo by Caitlin Abrams

Are pop-ups a fad or a thing? 

That’s one of the open questions that’s been floating around restaurants these last few years, as pop-ups went from being fleeting and unusual occurrences to being regular gigs for folks like the Curry Diva, or regularly scheduled events, such as the famous Korean Friday nights at Cook St. Paul.

Careful readers will have noticed that both the Curry Diva and Cook St. Paul have their pop-ups at restaurants that are breakfast- and lunch-only. So would it be a viable business model to open a breakfast- and lunch-only spot that worked pop-up predictions into its bottom line? That’s the living experiment that will be taking place before our eyes in Minneapolis this year, as Kim Bartmann takes steps to make her newly re-launched The Bird a sort of turn-key pop-up space.

It all started because they launched a party room and comprehensive party program at one of Bartmann’s other restaurants, Red Stag, with options for everything from business breakfasts to late rock-and-roll nights.

“We constantly were getting inquiries for more people than we could fit,” at Red Stag, said Bartmann. “And I don’t have an interest in starting a catering arm.” That’s when it occurred to her: What if The Bird had out-of-the box pop-up capabilities? If you wanted valet parking, you could turn that on at so many dollars an hour. Servers would cost X, bartenders Y, cooks Z—you get the idea. They’d be able to draw staff from the many Bartmann properties, and they already have the things in place that make pop-ups at other spaces more difficult—things like the right liquor licenses, wholesale food and beverage contacts, bathrooms, dishwashers, and enough wine glasses. There’s a space in Detroit called Revolver that does something similar, Bartmann told me, but The Bird might have more revenue possibilities—it might work for, say, chefs traveling to promote a cookbook. It might work for corporate events for our many local food companies who fly chefs or other food thinkers in for seminars or speeches. It might work for an annual beer dinner for a local brewery. It might work for a local chef who wants to do a charity thing or some other thing, but doesn’t want to close his or her own restaurant for the night. Heck, you yourself might be an amateur chef with a mean pizza recipe who has always dreamed of charging 100 of your closest friends to come to your restaurant to, say, raise money for cancer research. There are a lot of possibilities.

The first ones are booked. Yia Vang, who runs the popular Hmong-food focused Union Kitchen pop-up has dates booked at The Bird this summer.

“It’s funny,” said Bartmann. “When I worked at the old Ruby’s Café,” where The Bird is now, “in the 80’s, I would always say: 'Mary. We should find some way to let someone do dinners here.'” It took a while, but it looks like she has.

Will The Bird be something like a downtown theater, like the Orpheum or First Avenue, in a different key? No one blinks an eye when Wicked or Barbara Streisand come to town and use out-of-town principals and local scenery makers and infrastructure. Remember that Bartmann is probably more familiar and comfortable with such a role after all her years of running the theater at the Bryant Lake Bowl. I find it to be an incredibly intriguing idea. If you do too, watch this space as it continues to develop and evolve. As I told Bartmann, it always is lonely to be the pioneer—to do the tests, and take the risks to find out what works. I hope this does!