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By Ed Avis and Natalia Otero
Jesus Gutierrez serves customers in Choza, the pop-up restaurant he opened behind his restaurant 3 Margaritas in Broomfield, Colorado.
Pop-up restaurants are a common way for food enthusiasts to get started in the business and for established restaurant owners to experiment with new options. Below are two case studies of pop-ups in the Mexican restaurant space.
Choza on the Patio
Visitors to any location of 3 Margaritas Family Mexican Restaurant in suburban Denver enjoy quality traditional dishes such as Caldo do Pollo, Camarones Mexicanos and Pollo con Crema. As with most multi-unit restaurants, the menu at all 13 locations of 3 Margaritas is essentially the same.
But Jesus Gutierrez, who owns the location in Broomfield, wanted to introduce customers to a different kind of cuisine — the kind he remembers from his childhood.
Gutierrez is among the second generation of the company’s founders and has happy memories of the food he and his family enjoyed during frequent visits to the beach near Vallarta, Mexico when he was a kid.
“We would go to the beach about six times a year, like for my brother’s birthday or my cousin’s birthday, and our family would go to a little shack where they would cook in front of you,” Gutierrez says. “We would be right there on the beach eating fresh seafood.”
That was the vibe he wanted to share with customers, but it didn’t quite fit with the established menu of 3 Margaritas. So, he did what many Mexican restaurant owners do when they want to experiment: He opened a pop-up restaurant.
“We already were doing special dinners to be creative and educate our customers about different types of cuisines in Mexico and different types of agave spirits in Mexico, and I wanted to make something permanent — or at least for the whole summer — so we can show our customers something different," explains Gutierrez, who found the perfect location right behind his current restaurant.
“We had a little alley in the back where all of our orders come in, and we liked the space and thought it was a cool place to try something different,” he says.
He painted the walls surrounding the space and created a look that emulated the beach-side shacks he remembered from his childhood. He installed a small kitchen with enough room to mix ceviches and open oysters and set up several picnic tables.
A door leads from the patio into the main restaurant, so when customers order drinks, they’re made at the regular bar and brought out to the patio. The pop-up also uses the restaurant’s existing POS system.
He named his pop-up Choza, the Spanish word for “hut.”
“It was very low risk, because it’s right behind my restaurant,” he says. “I even use my same staff.”
The one exception is that Gutierrez hired a new chef for the project, Sharif Villa Cruz, who previously worked at Lola Mexican Restaurant in Denver, among other places. Gutierrez had partnered with Villa Cruz before on special tequila dinners at 3 Margaritas.
Choza features cuisine inspired by the beach in Mexico
Villa Cruz developed a menu that reminds Gutierrez of those happy days on the beach in Mexico. Most guests start with oysters, Gutierrez says, and one of the most popular dishes is Aguachile Negro, made with shrimp in a sauce of lime juice, burnt tortilla, garlic and habañeros.
The cocktails also differ from the menu at 3 Margaritas. The best seller so far is Coctel de Tamarindo, which features La Luna mezcal from Michoacan, house-made tamarind pulp, orange liqueur, lime juice and chile de árbol bitters.
Choza opened in early May and will last throughout the summer. Denver gets cold in the winter, and the space is mostly open, so the pop-up is limited to the warmer months. But it’s an experiment, and if things go well, a permanent Choza may emerge.
“Every customer who walks in has fallen in love with the food that we’re doing in the little pop-up,” Gutierrez says. “So you never know. By the end of the summer, if we love what we’re doing and we still want to keep doing it, we might have to find a small location somewhere.”
Calaveritas
Maya Peralta in her pop-up, Calaveritas
The idea for Calaveritas, Maya Peralta’s pop-up in Atlanta, Georgia, started in 2017 when she began sharing her vegan Mexican food with family and friends. By 2019, encouraged by their reaction, she decided to open a vegan Mexican restaurant, but ran into the roadblock so many would-be restaurateurs face: the lack of funds needed to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant.
Happily for Peralta and Atlanta diners, that financial challenge proved a serious but only brief set-back.
“Then I saw the festivals and markets in Atlanta, and realized that was an opportunity for me,” she says. “I researched the requirements to have a pop-up and how much it cost and what kind of equipment I needed. When I had some extra money, I bought a tent, a grill and tables and that's how I started.”
And Calaveritas was born.
Peralta sold vegan tamales through her new pop-up at three Atlanta-area events in 2019. Inspired by the encouragement she received from customers, she kept at it and moved her pop-up to various events over the next three years.
Peralta says she carefully chose which festivals or markets to set up in. Regarding cost, she says $250 is good. Some large, popular events charge as much as $1,000, but she says it’s very difficult to turn a profit with that large of a fee.
The quality of the organization running the event is another important consideration.
“For example, the Beer Fest is good because it's very well organized, it's not so expensive, and they help you with the schedules,” Peralta explains. “They organize the set-up, they give you water, and they have a lot of staff that help you so that everything is in order.”
Calaveritas is now located at Prep, a food business incubator in Atlanta
In 2022 Peralta found stall space at a vegan open-air market, where she stayed two years. Earlier this year, she settled Caleveritas into a permanent indoor space operated by Prep, a culinary business accelerator. Prep provides Peralta with cooking facilities and a to-go window from which to conduct business.
“During the last few years, we’ve been in more than 20 locations,” Peralta says. “Wherever we went, a lot of people followed us.”
Peralta enjoyed some aspects of running pop-ups, such as the ability to set her schedule and meeting a lot of people. But other things she did not like, such as the amount of work required for certain events — counting set-up and clean-up, 15-hour days were common.
“Now it feels more like a normal job,” she says. “We don’t have to take things down and move them around. We were very popular at festivals and we were making more money, but we ended up dead at end of the day!”
Ed Avis is the publisher of el Restaurante, and Natalia Otero is a regular contributor to the magazine.
Sidebar: What Equipment Do You Need?
Maya Peralta, the owner of Calaveritas in Atlanta, Georgia, has operated her pop-up for five years. She says that besides the obvious cooking equipment the pop-up needs, some key items that people may not remember include:
- Weights to hold the tent legs in place when the wind blows
- A weather tarp to cover anything that’s not inside the tent in case of rain
- Another tarp for the floor so that dirt doesn’t drift upwards
- A fire extinguisher
- Several small fans to keep cool
- Small plastic boxes to place on the tables for napkins and utensils
- Several large bins to organize all the equipment and carry it around.
“If it’s more of a night event, you need lights, too. And if they don’t provide electricity, you need a small generator,” she says. “Each year we have learned more and more.”