Old San Francisco speakeasy gets new life as a pop-up restaurant

Remember when restaurants used to boast about how long they’d been in business? Now, it’s all about, well, now. Bricks and mortar permanence has given way to the shock of the culinary new. Food lovers chase food trucks, whose chefs in turn chase the next new trend, unshackled by high rents and overhead. Adventurous home cooks and would-be chefs run secret supper clubs—occasional, nomadic “restaurants” whose locations and menus are announced last minute via emails or text messages to diners. And now, chefs are taking a page from retailers, opening temporary pop-up restaurants.

Major retailers from Target to Gap, Gucci, Adidas and even Pop-Tarts are permanently changing the shopping landscape with these temporary stores. Like their retail brethren, pop-up restaurants allow chefs to explore new ideas and cuisines without the major commitment of time and money a standard restaurant requires. And their very temporariness creates demand—diners want to be among the lucky few to be able to say they ate there.

One pop-up restaurant in San Francisco is trading on its history as one of the city’s Prohibition era speakeasies. Open just one night a week, 18th Amendment Speakeasy serves menus based on vintage cookbooks, and you need a secret password to get in the door. To find out more about the purposely shady restaurant and the former high school friends who run it, check out my latest post at USA Network’s USA Character Approved Blog.