Bennett Lai had it made: a cushy job at Google. Work-life balance. Six-figure salary. So what compelled him to start his own food business where he’d spend almost every spare hour and pour thousands of dollars into? Passion, that’s the only answer.
Originally from Hong Kong, when Lai immigrated to the U.S. he was surprised by the lack of Asian food options. Sure, there were Asian restaurants that ticked the boxes of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, but there weren’t many places that showcased the diversity of regional cuisine in one culture. China alone has eight regional cuisines, with the spicy, chili-oil laden dishes of Szechuan being the polar opposite of light and sweet Cantonese cuisine.
“I asked myself: If I died, what would be on my tombstone? What do I want to be remembered for?” said Lai.
Now, Lai is on a mission to raise awareness for the diversity in Asian cuisine with his pop-up, Marupo Eats. The name is a mash-up of Marco Polo, a call to exploration. Marupo Eats specializes in Hong Kong snacks like egg tarts and pineapple buns, although it also serves foods from other Asian cultures. Lai’s dream is to have his own restaurant one day. But two years in and more than $40,000 personally invested, Lai still doesn’t have a storefront.
Lai’s story shows the long road it takes to go from pop-up business to a restaurant. He’s not alone.
Years ago if you wanted to open your own restaurant, you might be able to with the support of friends and family. Now, with rising rents and barriers to access capital, most restaurants are opened by restaurant groups or celebrity chefs. Pop-up events are ways for up-and-coming food entrepreneurs to test the market while raising money for a brick-and-mortar.
The pop-up scene in Metro Detroit has been strong for many years and has had some success stories, both from chefs who went on to open restaurants and those content to stay nomadic. Last year, Pakistani street food concept Khana was the runner-up on the Food Network show “The Great Food Truck Race” (although it’s not a food truck) and the Fried Chicken and Caviar pop-up got name dropped by the New York Times. A popular pop-up called Street Beet regularly has long lines for its vegan junk food appearances and even published a cookbook called “Nostalgic Vegan” that has sold out.
Some of the city’s most successful chefs started with pop-ups, including Takoi’s Brad Greenhill, Godwin Ihentuge of Yum Village, and George Azar of Flowers of Vietnam.
At every stage of opening a restaurant, challenges abound, from building up an initial customer base to navigating complicated regulations when getting your own place to managing staff and overhead once you have a brick-and-mortar.
Ameneh Marhaba — Little Liberia
Like Lai’s motivation for bringing more diversity in Chinese cuisine to Michigan, pop-up chef and caterer Ameneh Marhaba wants to fill a gap in African food and open Detroit’s first Liberian restaurant.
She started as a pop-up in 2016, asking bars in the Detroit area if she could take over a corner of their space to sell food. Recently she’s been serving soups and stews, spring rolls, and roasted vegetables at places like the Schvitz Health Club, Brewery Faison, and Brooklyn Street Local. While most pop-up events are a la carte service, Little Liberia has a seated, ticketed dinner at Brooklyn Street Local on Aug. 20.
Marhaba got a big boost toward her goal to open Little Liberia the restaurant two summers ago when she won the Detroit Hatch competition, which earned her a $100,000 grant and thousands of dollars in pro bono professional support. A year later, in September 2023, she said she signed a lease for her brick-and-mortar on Woodward in the city’s New Center area, putting her near other restaurants that specialize in African cuisine like Baobab Fare and Yum Village.
But nearly a year later, Little Liberia is still not open. Marhaba is accepting of where she is in the journey, however.
“The process takes time and I understand that these things need to be done with the right procedure,” she said, adding that she firmly believes she should have a solid opening date soon.
“Right now we’ve got our architectural design completed and submitted to the city. We’re working with construction companies to finalize a code for the construction and build-out of the space,” she said. “So that’s the stage I’m in right now, and I’m working on everything else to get us open: design, wall graphics, menus, merch, everything else that’s involved.”
In the meantime, the immigrant entrepreneur is keeping a steady calendar of pop-up events to stay in touch with her clients and followers of her business. Marhaba regularly keeps in touch with her followers on social media to clue them in on the day-to-day business of being a pop-up chef, from running to get supplies to creating the menu. She does all this while doing catering and working a 9-5 job.
She says other budding business owners who are following a similar path have reached out to her for advice, especially for young women. It can be harder for women to break into the business and get access to capital.
“I’m living proof of it,” she said.
“I’m struggling with people in our industry just looking at me and not taking me seriously because I’m a young woman, and that’s a battle that I’m going through as I’m going through this restaurant-opening process,” she said. “There’s always this assumption that women don’t know as much or do as much, so we have to keep breaking those barriers by showing and expressing what we feel and what we know.”
Bennett Lai — Marupo Eats
Lai’s best advice to pop-up owners is to have a second stream of income.
“It takes a lot of money to run a pop-up. The way I’ve seen it work is you either have a second job or a supportive family member or spouse,” said Lai.
For Lai, that means balancing his full-time job at Google while running Marupo and its small staff of five part-time employees. When running a pop-up, there’s a long list of expenses you have to account for: from investing in equipment like a heated display case or tent for farmers markets to food licensing to paying staff.
By far, the largest expense is finding a place to actually make the food. As a food business, Marupo has to operate out of commercial, food-safe licensed kitchens. Most pop-ups use shared or commissary kitchens.
While Lai is now a subtenant of another restaurant, for a long time he was working out of a shared commissary kitchen, which comes with its own challenges. In a commissary kitchen, chefs pay by the hour to use it, but the schedule isn’t always consistent.
“Most shared kitchens have a seniority system. If you’ve been there the longest you get first pick of the schedule. If you’re a new person you might get night owl hours or evening,” said Lai. This also makes staffing and scaling harder. “When I work alone, I don’t care, I can go from 8 a.m.-2 a.m. … but a lot of employees don’t want to work those hours. That contributes to turnover,” said Lai.
With all these expenses, Lai has had to make sacrifices. As an eldest son of his family, he needs to send money to support his parents back home but has cut back on things such as trips or buying a computer.
Indeed, beyond being capital intensive, running a pop-up is also incredibly time intensive.
Currently, Marupo Eats sells food at two farmer’s markets a week with the occasional pop-up at a local business or catering order. While customers only see a pop-up for hours, it requires weeks of prep. On the day of a pop-up, it’s all hands on deck. Transporting goods from the kitchen to the farmers market takes multiple trips by car.
Setting up the table is also an ordeal. “You have to turn nothing into a store,” said Lai.
Still, what motivates Lai is seeing people try his food and learn about a new culture. At his farmers market stand, customers can browse a booklet that shows the different foods Marupo offers and the history behind them.
Lai has been scoping out potential storefronts, but he knows it’ll still be a while away, especially in Ann Arbor, where rent is expensive.
“One landlord on South University told me he was charging $10,000 a month for a 200-square-foot space. Simply because the previous tenant was an ATM that paid that rate,” said Lai.
For now, Lai said knows he’s in it for the long haul. With so much money and time sunk in, Marupo Eats isn’t yet net cash positive but hopes to be at the three-year mark.
That’s not uncommon. “Food businesses require a lot of money upfront but you make your money back slowly,” said Christie Baer, managing director for the University of Michigan’s Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project, a nonprofit that consults small businesses including many pop-ups.
“Food businesses look like they have a low barrier to entry but they actually require some of the highest level of business acumen to run one successfully,” she said. “There’s tight margins, perishable goods, and licensing to figure out — there’s just a lot of detail you don’t think about until you run one.”
Rachel Liu Martindale — Q Bakehouse & Market
Rachel Liu Martindale is proof that the pop-up to brick-and-mortar dream is achievable. After quitting her corporate engineering job, she started a bakery pop-up in 2017 under the brand Milk + Honey before finally opening a physical storefront this February: Q Bakehouse and Market, an Asian-American bakery in Ann Arbor. Q Bakehouse serves a dazzling array of Asian-fusion goods, from sweets like black sesame chocolate chip cookies to chili crisp scones.
In many ways, Martindale is a success story. Not only did she stick it out for years as a pop-up chef, but she’s also one of the few Asian American pastry chefs out there, a pioneering breed. When she opened Q Bakehouse, she was able to do so without taking out a loan, a feat made possible through a crowdfunding campaign that raised $22,000 in four days.
But since Q Bakehouse’s opening, she’s faced hurdle after hurdle. Three months after opening, the bakery was well-received by the community and consistently selling out, yet it had to abruptly shut down its storefront.
When the bakery had a subletter move in, the city looked over the bakery’s permits and found that Q didn’t have the correct certificate of occupancy. Q has a small retail space where they sell Asian groceries and snacks, but Q only had approval to operate as a kitchen, not for retail.
Martindale said she incorrectly assumed that because the space had previously been used for retail, she’d be able to use it for retail as well. Because of this, they had to shut down immediately and resubmit plans for the storefront and get new permits. In the interim, they pivoted to online orders and pickup only, which hurt sales.
Martindale’s confusion of navigating city permitting and zoning is something other small business owners face. “It’s extraordinarily difficult for business owners to figure out what all of the legal requirements are when opening your own storefront,” said Baer of Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project
Martindale has shared openly the stress the store closing has brought on her. “I was on the verge of giving up multiple times,” she wrote in the bakery’s newsletter. In response, she received an outpouring of support from customers who posted on social media and contacted the city on her behalf.
Finally, after seven and a half weeks of being closed, she was able to reopen.
Even with all these struggles, Martindale remains positive and believes the storefront is worth it.
“It’s a lot of fun being able to have your own space and I have an awesome team of people that make it a lot easier,” she said.
“My husband basically built everything in the storefront so it feels very personal. All the little details in the store and the selection of things we’ve curated feels like an expression of me on display and what I love eating.”
In conclusion, the journey from pop-up business to brick-and-mortar restaurant is a challenging one filled with obstacles and setbacks. However, the passion and dedication of entrepreneurs like Bennett Lai, Ameneh Marhaba, and Rachel Liu Martindale drive them to overcome these challenges and pursue their dreams of sharing their unique culinary creations with the world. Their stories serve as inspiration for aspiring food entrepreneurs and highlight the resilience and determination required to succeed in the competitive restaurant industry.
