People's Noodle Bar Pop-Up Levels Up

Chef Peter He just came back from vacation. Two whole weeks off for the holiday season—a relative luxury usually reserved for executive chefs with self-sustaining kitchens or those whose restaurants temporarily go dark. But those days, as of tonight, are long gone as he expands service for his Columbia Heights pop-up ramen shop, People’s Noodle Bar, and enters an undefined purgatory between food realms.

Starting tonight, the ramen bar, surreptitiously intermixed within the walls and operations of Señor Chicken, will expand its service from one night to Monday through Saturday from 5 to 9:30 p.m., as well as offer a few more ramen options for omnivorous diners.

Sunday was Señor Chicken’s last day of operation in D.C. indefinitely. He sees the expansion as a transitional time as he considers converting the current pollo shop into a matured noodle bar. “We started planning for a noodle bar conversion a few months ago,” He said.

For some food watchdogs, the pop-up restaurant comes off as an over-saturated and self-indulgent trend, but for others, it's a path toward opening a permanent restaurant. For a fledgling operation, the risk is minimal and overhead is low; for the chef, it offers a venue to experiment and create; for the community, it helps fills an otherwise fallow restaurant front.

Although comparisons inevitably will be made to other noodle entrepreneurs—likely Erik Bruner-Yang's Toki Underground, who opened his own pop-up taco spot just prior to switching over to ramen—He found starting off small to be his best route. "There are other business development opportunities to eventually open a restaurant, the pop-up method seems to work out better so far," He said. “Opening a restaurant is just expensive. If we don't get the right terms from the landlord, we would need to exercise the discipline to walk away.”

Discipline—to make the hard decisions, to stay true to the product, to walk away. But maybe that’s the allure of opening a small pop-up, the flexibility to cut ties or surge forward in an ever-changing environment.

Interestingly, that environment in Columbia Heights includes another noodle shop, the popular Pho 14, which is situated just a few storefronts down Park Road. “I believe we've come up with a unique concept,” He said, which for the most part is true. One is a full-service Vietnamese restaurant, the other is a self-serve Japanese ramen shop.

But will people care to delineate between one noodle from another? “There is a lot of room for creativity in a good bowl of ramen.”