Pop-up restaurants: a brief history

are the chef equivalent of a summer romance - a short-term thing where neither party judges or forms an emotional bond, but it's good fun while it lasts. As Erik Idos, chef of upcoming modern Filipino pop-up Pirate Kitchen, says: "You do it for a day and then you're done." Back to reality.

The chefs and organisers behind Hong Kong's latest pop-ups are young - often Generation Y or Generation Me - a tech-savvy, creative crowd born in the 1980s, who seek work that rewards the soul, as well as their bank accounts. As a result, they can be criticised for seeming non-committal and lazy.

So are pop-ups - temporary restaurants set up within existing restaurants, cafes or other spaces for a limited period - a mere trend that Gen Y will grow out of, or a genuine testing ground for restaurateurs?

To Lindsay Jang, co-founder of Yardbird, and a relatively seasoned organiser of pop-ups in Hong Kong, these temporary eateries make business sense.

"To run a good business, you're always looking at the market and seeing where the gaps are." These one-off events provide the perfect place to prove a concept. In March last year, Yardbird put on Hecho, a pop-up serving Mexican street food - tacos, ceviche, quesadillas and so on. "We had a business plan for a Mexican restaurant," Jang says. "It's really good market research, I mean, do I want to put all this money into a restaurant? [Pop-ups let you] see what the feedback is and what the costs are like." Although it was popular - people queued for up to three hours - the restaurant never came to fruition ("trends come and go," Jang explains), but it allowed them to learn and help them plan for future pop-ups. On June 16, Jang, along with business partner Cindy Ko and Idos, will be staging Pirate Kitchen at friend Joyce Wang's art gallery, WANG Space.

One of the things pop-up organisers have to learn is to resist the temptation of pleasing everybody. "When we started we always over-prepped [the amount of food]," says May Chow, who was also behind Hecho, but has since started her own business, Little Bao, which specialises in Asian "burgers", or bao. She's done numerous pop-ups and is opening her own brick-and-mortar restaurant this August.