Cities are filled with so many interesting one-time food pop-ups—but only if you know where to discover them. These events, often only lasting a couple of hours, can be very hard to find, with only a couple Instagram posts informing people of them. I’m always interested in trying unique food, and set out to find a way to reliably discover such events without too much hassle. While everything could still be a lot easier to discover, I found it interesting to explore the platforms attempting to make people aware of all of the food events going on around them.

What interests me so much about food pop-ups is the uniqueness. Oftentimes, restaurants or other venues will host chefs who are coming from afar, and you most likely won’t be able to try the food item again in your city. Also, if the venue is hosting the chef, they must be pretty good, or else why would the venue bother? The randomness of many pop-ups delight me. Oftentimes, pop-ups are in the most unpredictable locations, which makes it all the more fun.

The first and most obvious way is Instagram’s built-in search. If you put in the date, the word “pop-up,” and the place you’re looking, you’ll probably find one or two good search results, and they’ll probably be towards the top. Unfortunately, Instagram’s search often surfaces events from years prior, or things in a completely different place (in other words, you might find things from 2016, or things that are happening in Australia when you’re looking for New York). It leaves a lot to be desired, and while it may give a couple of results that other platforms don’t, they’re usually either not good ones, or, if they are, they require sifting through lots of irrelevant results to find.

Another helpful method is newsletters. Many neighborhoods/cities have newsletters with events. If you look hard enough, you might be able to find some interesting food events that you wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere. A good place to start is to search Substack for newsletters that cover your area and that publish weekly digests of events. However, these newsletters aren’t necessarily designed for food events, and require filtering out unrelated things that aren’t exactly the target goal.

The most useful of my techniques, by far, has been Mato. Mato is a curated event platform, accessible on the web, and available in many large cities worldwide. It is curated by (presumably) a team, which looks at Instagram events and adds them, along with details, to the platform. Most events it surfaces are at least worth a look, and it has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. Mato has helped me find some really interesting food events—however, it finds events in all different categories as well, so I highly recommend you try it!

Today, I visited Vietnamese restaurant Ði Ǎn Ði for an onigiri (Japanese rice ball) pop-up collaboration with Amenohi in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The meal was delicious, and reminded me of how much fun it is to go to food pop-ups, but how they’re so hard to find. If they haven’t been widely publicized, they’re not going to get very many people to show up (that wasn’t the first onigiri pop-up I’d been to). That one I found on Mato.

After lunch, I stopped by vintage furniture store Renewfinds, which was hosting Uju Studios, an Korean-inspired pâtisserie, for a weekend-pop-up, and ate a tasty mango sticky rice-rice krispie treat. That one I happened upon by a chance Google search, which directed me to an NYC cafe-events site.

I’m thinking about starting a dedicated blog for food pop-ups, or making it a regular section on this blog. Would you be interested in that? Let me know!