How Seattle’s newest, tastiest restaurants went from pop-up to permanent

March 2020 was a tumultuous time in the restaurant world. With COVID-19 spreading through Washington state, Gov. Jay Inslee instituted a number of emergency measures including closing bars and restaurants for anything but takeout. Canlis pivoted to selling burgers via drive-thru while other Seattle-area restaurateurs like Tom Douglas and Renee Erickson shuttered their restaurants entirely. Suddenly it seemed good food was going to be a lot harder to find. 

But as the weeks wore on, creativity and resilience won out. Pop-ups started multiplying like mushrooms and if you knew where to look (ahem, mostly Instagram), there were interesting things happening in those closed dining rooms. 

The pandemic did not create the pop-up scene in Seattle but it presented opportunity amid a perfect storm where many unemployed or underemployed people had time to think about what they really wanted to do, then easily find space (all those shuttered restaurants!) to do it. Customers had time to wait in lines and the desire for community, even if it was only for a quick conversation while picking up food.

These factors fostered a pop-up friendly environment that made it favorable for people with little capital and little food industry experience to give the masses a taste of their cooking in a low-risk setting. It also provided the time and space for many to take stock of their lives and decide if they liked the path they were on. As life resumes in the post-pandemic era, many of those originally experimental pop-ups have stuck around. Armed with the experience they picked up as fledgling food business owners, some of the best ones — including Vindicktive Wings, Coping Cookies, Ben’s Bread and Loxsmith Bagels — have parlayed their pandemic-era success into building Seattle’s newest brick-and-mortar restaurants.  

A quest to find a taste of home

Vinny Minichiello moved to Seattle from Washington, D.C., for a marketing job in February 2020. After COVID “flipped everything on its head,” Minichiello, like so many others, was working from home and trying to figure out what was important to him. His identical twin brother Dominick was living in Florida and nearing the end of a lease. At Vinny’s urging, Dominick moved to Seattle in August 2020 and the brothers began going to bars and reviewing drinks for their “Twin Sippin” Instagram account.

The Minichiellos are originally from Elmira, N.Y., a small town about two and a half hours east of Buffalo. While searching for chicken wings that reminded them of home, they started posting wing reviews to Instagram.

“We were snobs about it. We were looking for our favorite wing and we were just getting sad,” Vinny said.

In December 2020, unable to make it back to Elmira for the holidays, the brothers finally took the plunge into wing-making and bought two $70 portable deep fryers from Walmart. 

“We were like, ‘We can’t bash these places without trying it for ourselves,’ ” Vinny said.

They called some of their favorite hometown bars asking for tips on fry times, recommendations for fryer oil and recipes for blue cheese dressing and Buffalo sauce and spent every weekend for two months frying wings until their wings tasted exactly like home.

They started feeding friends — many of whom bartended at some of their favorite bars — and were invited to host a pop-up on St. Patrick’s Day 2021 at the now-closed Rabbit Hole in Belltown. They named the business Vindicktive Wings, sold out of 80 pounds of wings they’d brought and thought, “Maybe we’re onto something here.”

Monthly pop-ups morphed into a four-day-a-week residency at Rose Temple Bar. They were both maintaining full-time jobs — Vinny managed budgets for Truly and Mountain Dew; Dominick managed the bar program at Big Mario’s — while going through 400-500 pounds of wings a week, shopping at Costco for chicken on the day of each event.  

“Our ‘oh [expletive] moment’ was when the meat manager Jake said that Costco was buying more wings because of us,” Vinny said.

Meanwhile, the word was out on these pandemic superhit Buffalo-style wings served only with blue cheese dressing and never ranch. Their Instagram following steadily climbed from the low hundreds to the thousands, and they consistently sold out.

In January, Vinny quit his job to go all-in on wings and assembled a summer schedule of regular pop-ups, figuring that if Vindicktive failed, he would move back to Elmira. In February, the Minichiellos’ best friends, brothers Mike and Fletch Morgan, found a space for a restaurant and asked the Minichiellos to go into business with them.

The space was most recently the Towne Pub on Second Avenue in Belltown, a narrow, rectangular bar with exposed brick and high ceilings that reminded Vinny of some of his favorite dive bars in upstate New York.

“We always dreamed of having a space like this and all the sudden it was real, and we had a lease agreement,” Vinny said.

The Morgans helped with capital, the two sets of brothers signed the lease and by March 1 they all committed to working 12-hour days, seven days a week to open Vindicktive Bar & Wings in May. Vinny said it feels strange “to thank COVID” for the business, but without the pandemic, his brother never would’ve moved to Seattle. Vinny didn’t have a strong sense of community here and never would’ve gone out reviewing wings by himself.

“COVID really reprioritized my thinking. Where do I want to be in my 30s? Do I want to be a marketing executive that just sits behind a computer all day and doesn’t feel like he’s moving the needle in any direction?” Vinny said.

Slow, steady growth

In the world’s strangest twist, the pandemic — while awful on so many levels — provided a massive opportunity for people looking for change. Vinny said the four business partners were lucky “to open a bar with regulars” after using the pop-ups as a proving ground for their concept.

Samantha Padilla and Ashley Hernandez, owners of Coping Cookies, have a similar origin story. When the duo first started hosting pop-ups in 2020, Hernandez was working at Seattle Children’s hospital and Padilla was taking a break from personal training. The business started from a bake sale at Hernandez’s workplace — she brought boxes of cookies and asked co-workers to donate money to different nonprofits as payment. The cookies were so hot Padilla and Hernandez moved sales online, then started doing pop-ups, then moved their operation from their apartment to a commissary kitchen. 

Initially, Hernandez and Padilla had to haul ingredients from their Northgate apartment to their White Center commissary kitchen before every bake. Hernandez kept her hospital job until March 2022, and the couple juggled cookies with work. But as the pandemic wore on and the world started opening up, the pop-up ecosphere started to cool. 

“We saw less pop-ups being born and less people showing up to certain pop-ups,” Padilla said.

Burned out by working two jobs and hauling ingredients all over town, Hernandez and Padilla felt like they were at a crossroads. They could stay in their chosen fields of health care and fitness, potentially going back to school to gain more accreditation, or go all in with this “cookie thing.”

They decided it was time for a change. After expensive searching and eventual remodeling, their Capitol Hill cookie shop opened at the end of March. Now, a few months in, things are starting to feel easy and cohesive.

“We have set open hours and bake days. A little more consistency has helped with our own mental health but it’s still fun, it’s still easy and it’s still enjoyable,” Padilla said.

The “popping up” part of pop-ups is one of the major drawbacks for people interested in supporting these microbusinesses: It’s not always convenient to time your life around a pop-up schedule. 

With their brick-and-mortar store up and running, “we’re more accessible to people now,” Hernandez said. “We have people who have followed us [online] and [have] never been able to find us before, so that’s really cool.”

Additionally, spending that time doing pop-ups provided the Minichiello brothers and the women of Coping Cookies with a long runway to see not only if their idea resonated with people, but if they liked doing it enough to do it full-time. 

The pandemic gut check

Ben Campbell, co-owner of Ben’s Bread — opening in Phinney Ridge in late June — jokes that he’s a “pop-up grandpa” because he has run his pop-up for eight years. In 2015 when he first started, he was the head baker at Capitol Hill restaurant Lark, running bread pop-ups in his spare time. 

In 2018 he had resigned at Lark and was ready to set out on his own when Renee Erickson approached him with a job offer. Campbell put his own project on the back burner to run the bread program at Willmott’s Ghost for three years while continuing to make things like corn cookies and English muffins for his pop-ups.

Campbell ran Ben’s Bread solo for six of the last eight years, sometimes speeding between multiple kitchens across the city to get everything proofed, baked and packaged. 

Pop-ups are grueling. There’s the presales, prep, set up, tear down, social media management and connecting with customers. 

And, “even though you’re a pop-up — especially once people read about you once — they start to treat you like you’re a full business,” Campbell said. “But you’re borrowing three people’s kitchens and hoping it all works.”

The pandemic made things crystal clear for Campbell. Things at Erickson’s Sea Creatures restaurant group were going well, but after running himself ragged doing his day job and the pop-ups he realized he wanted more control over it all. 

With his bakery opening in Phinney Ridge, Campbell and his wife Megan finally “get to make the choices and have the responsibility, have the ownership over a space and welcome a community in,” Campbell said.

Campbell says people often request certain items that he can’t make all the time in his current setup because of kitchen, space or time constraints. He’s looking forward to being able to say “yes” more as Ben’s Bread opens its doors later this month. 

Like Campbell, Matthew Segal is also a “pop-up grandpa.” The pandemic pop-up craze also helped him shoot to fame and establish a loyal following, and after eight years as a pop-up, Loxsmith Bagels opened on Beacon Hill in April. 

Segal started popping up as Loxsmith Bagels in 2015, curing his own fish and using his handmade bagels as a vehicle to highlight the fish. After dining rooms closed in 2020, he set up a residence at Capitol Hill’s Nacho Borracho from March-December 2021 and was waffling on whether to continue the pop-ups when cookbook author and food influencer J. Kenji López-Alt stopped by one day, bought Segal’s last bagel and posted it on Instagram. The post got over 6,000 likes. 

“I basically exploded,” Segal said. “So with all that notoriety, I was like, I have to keep this going.”

Segal signed up for space at a commissary kitchen and found a permanent place in Beacon Hill — but he needed to crowdfund to renovate the space. Then López-Alt struck again, posting that he was going to take a baking class Segal was offering. After the post, Segal made $10,000 from bagel baking classes, offering them in person and via Zoom, which helped get Loxsmith off the ground.

The Beacon Hill shop opened in April with a focus on cured fish and ingredients people want to eat on bagels. Segal no longer has time (or capacity) to smoke his own fish.

“We can’t even possibly keep up. … I’ve always been more passionate about the fish but the people in Seattle — they’re obsessed with the bread,” Segal said. 

Looking back, Segal says a brick-and-mortar for him was “always in the cards,” but the pandemic provided opportunity. One of his customers had the building where the Beacon Hill shop is located, and López-Alt’s Instagram posts (one subsequent post garnered over 9,000 likes) didn’t hurt, either. But he’s done looking back.

“Pop-ups are a pain in the ass. I never want to do one again,” Segal said.

The pain around pop-ups centers on how you essentially open and close a full restaurant every time you do the pop-up.

“And people expect a real restaurant,” Segal said. “They try to Yelp you. They’re mad you sold out. It’s like, we’re trying to sell out. That’s the point!” 

Growing pains

Making that transition from pop-up to real restaurant isn’t without growing pains, however. 

Running a restaurant kitchen was a whole new learning curve for Vinny from Vindicktive Wings. He was used to shopping every day and having his friends help run fryers on pop-up days. Opening day at the bar was a real wake-up call. The bar was overrun with fans looking for a wing fix, orders ratcheted up to 200 pounds of wings in an hour.  

“We thought we were going to open up a bar with wings, not a restaurant. We were treating the bar like a pop-up,” Vinny said.  

They introduced a Wednesday 99-cent wing special and went through 330 pounds of wings in one night. Vinny called in reinforcements and now has hired a kitchen staff (with real line cook experience) of five. 

“We’re becoming a full-fledged kitchen,” Vinny said with a smile.