Food Farmer Earth: Anatomy of a Pop-up Restaurant

In this interview for Food Farmer Earth, I talk with Kathryn LaSusa-Yeomans of The Farmer's Feast, who dissects the elements that go into making her incredibly successful pop-up restaurant experiences.

“What’s a pop-up?”

It’s the question that Kathryn LaSusa Yeomans gets asked the most about her recent venture. A seasoned chef who early in her career trained with the likes of Lidia Bastianich and Diana Kennedy, Yeomans worked in restaurants in her home state of New York and in her adopted home in Portland, Oregon.

At a certain point, though, she needed to break free of the constraints of restaurant kitchens to pursue her dream of teaching people to cook using market-fresh, seasonal ingredients. With the birth of her own company, The Farmer’s Feast, she started doing cooking classes at area farmers’ markets, as well as for Roger Konka’s Springwater Farm, demonstrating how to cook with his foraged greens and mushrooms.

It was Konka who first suggested selling food as well as doing demonstrations, and it wasn’t long before there was talk of holding dinners for their growing throng of fans. They’d been renting space in a local restaurant for their commissary kitchen, and the owner was enthusiastic about having them use the place for dinners on nights when the restaurant was closed.

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Watch part two of the interview with Kathryn, Teaching From the Source. In this week's kitchen segment, Kathryn shows how incredibly simple it is to make a basic risotto. To get regular updates on local producers featured on Food Farmer Earth, consider a free subscription.