No restaurant, no kitchen, no problem: The growing band of nomadic chefs who ‘pop up’ across Ireland

These days, a great dinner can happen anywhere. Beyond the usual list of restaurants we’re keen to try, there are pop-ups, one-offs and special dinners on every foodie’s radar, plus a growing cohort of chefs and kitchens hosting them. If you want to cook and create experiences, sticking to one stove is not the only option any more.

One such nomadic chef is Caitlin Ruth. Originally from New Hampshire in the US, she was cooking in Ireland for decades before making the jump from a pub kitchen to a mobile one. She’s delighted to hear the term “nomadic kitchen”.

“It sounds so much better than mobile catering,” she says, although it wouldn’t seem to matter too much what she calls it. Her on-the-move cooking has been much in demand since she took the leap six years ago. Long before it was the du jour thing to do, Ruth had a solid career cooking with hyperlocal and seasonal produce and had become well known for this at Deasy’s Bar in Clonakilty, Co Cork. When its owners decided to close in 2019, she thought she would try something different.

“I wanted freedom. I’d always loved outdoor cooking, moving around and being able to go to a beach and make something amazing with what I had in the back of my Jeep,” she says. And so, she built a bespoke food trailer and was ready to start experimenting in 2020, when, of course, the whole world changed. People stuck at home were soon scrambling for food trucks, so she got to work. She imagined easing into it, but custom came in droves.

“I’d pop up on Dunworley Beach [in Co Cork] with a bunch of stuff, put it on Instagram. I had a romantic idea of it, but then the queues were insane. I’d run out, and there would still be people waiting. I felt so bad for the customers who had waited so long.”

When the opportunity to pop up out the back of Levis Corner House pub in Ballydehob, Co Cork, came along, she thought, “Oh, this is better. I’m more used to sit-down dinners, in a way, but I still want the freedom to go wherever I want. And that’s become my main thing now.”

Ruth has been popping up behind Levis for six summers now. She says the set-up improves every year, but there are always a few challenges, including her parking spot on a narrow hill beside the pub.

“Somebody ran into me recently because they were eating an ice cream. The whole kitchen shook; things fell off counters. These are some of the problems you encounter,” she laughs. “You’ve gotta be super adaptable; you have to go with the flow. Every single place that you pop up is going to have a different set of pros and cons.”

Ruth’s calendar fills easily. Summer this year included weekends in Ballydehob, sold-out nights at Blacks Distillery in Kinsale and Ballymaloe Food Festival, Co Cork, and Waterford Festival of Food.

Caitlin Ruth: 'ou’ve gotta be super adaptable; you have to go with the flow'

Caitlin Ruth: 'I want to care about what I’m doing, and I want to be in complete control'

Between events, there is plenty of prep and admin. When a batch of tomatillos arrived late, after an event, she spent a day removing their papery husks, rinsing and freezing them. Another day involved processing 30kg of chillies and cherry tomatoes into ferments, dried produce and pickles. Her ferments and preserves have become a sideline, with the recipes gathered for her book Funky and sometimes shared on Substack. But Ruth has learned that keeping things streamlined is key to making the pop-up business viable, admitting it’s not about making lots of money,

“I’m trying to wind down at 56 more than ramp up with an ambitious business plan. I’m trying to keep it small rather than expanding. I want to care about what I’m doing, and I want to be in complete control. That’s huge for me.”

Pre-pandemic, Dubliner James Gabriel Martin had already been living and working nomadically in his career as a photojournalist and touring musician. He dabbled in food writing and was an avid home cook, but it wasn’t until Covid hit and he found himself back in Ireland, unable to travel abroad, that food became his focus.

“I was cooking all the time and using my skills as a photographer to take photos and, because of that, I got an Instagram following quite quickly. Everything looked really professional, the recipes, the website.”

This popularity spurred him on to pursue cooking further, and he attended the Ballymaloe Cookery School 12-week course in 2022 and met Kelly Keogh, who turned out to be a neighbour, although their paths had never crossed before. After graduating, Keogh suggested hosting pop-up dinners at her family home and farm, Whitestown House in north Co Dublin. The Dining Club, their series of seasonal pop-up dinners, was born.

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These events garnered a strong following and became Martin’s calling card for branching out. Whitestown House provided valuable prep space for other events, something that can be a challenge for nomadic chefs. He credits both luck and hard work for the collaborations that have followed, “The spirit of collaboration in the food industry is incredible. Whenever I’ve collaborated with someone, something good has come out of it.”

James Gabriel Martin on a beach in west Cork. Photograph: Jacky Galm

His previous 10-year career as a musician has also proved useful.

“There are things I compare to being a touring musician. A lot of the time, I’m showing up at a place I’ve never been. You’re coming into the kitchen, it’s like doing your soundcheck, getting set up, getting the ingredients in place and talking to the team about how you’re going to work.”

This year, he hosted a two-night sell-out dinner at Goleen Harbour in west Cork, cooked at Saint Francis Provisions in Kinsale and hosted a beach dinner with fellow food adventurer Max Jones. The Dining Club’s winter season included an Irish Literary Feast and Samhain dinners, while Martin is also hosting a food-writing retreat and plans to cook in Norway and Scotland next year.

“I think I’ve been incredibly lucky that people want to work with me and pay me,” he says. But rising costs are making the model more difficult. “To make it really viable, you have to be able to charge properly for your time and your ingredients, and that’s getting harder and harder”. His long-term ambition is to find a permanent base that still offers freedom: “A space for food and writing and creativity. I could sculpt it into something really unique that people could come to.”

That draw of creativity is also what drew pop-up cook Pam Chaleka to food. She was looking for a creative outlet while working in compliance for Meta in San Francisco and began cooking with chef Charles Phan of The Slanted Door in Stamford, England, learning all she could about Vietnamese food in her spare time. A stint as a vegan also helped widen her base of knowledge: “It made me really appreciate produce and vegetables. I became very creative with substituting fats and ingredients and making all sorts of vegetables taste good.”

Pam Chaleka: 'There’s so much innovation. I love seeing people doing new things'

From Galway, Chaleka moved back to Dublin last year and is now a trainee solicitor but she wanted to continue her food explorations and approached Marlowe & Co cafe in Dublin 8 about hosting a pop-up. Her first event was a 16-person dinner, under the pop-up name Baby Sis. Since then, she has collaborated with various cafes around the city, including Around the Corner in Portobello, The Day Café in Rialto and Happy Out in Dún Laoghaire. She says cafes are the ideal place to experiment, with their daytime hours leaving room for evening events, although her biggest pop-up has been a Saturday-night takeover of Hen’s Teeth, an events space in Dublin 8. She centred it around childhood memories with nostalgic food, white tablecloths to draw on with crayons, and rice pudding dessert. “It was unreal, so much fun.”

It has to be fun, says Chaleka, because she’s choosing to work on her days off. She sees cooking as a busy but happy hobby, and she loves being part of the burgeoning pop-up scene. “There’s so much innovation. I love seeing people doing new things.” Among the others she admires are Yohan Irani, a full-time doctor who hosts supper clubs; Ethan Tyler and Esmeralda Mochino, aka Two Curious Chefs; and Aoife Kelly, a Clare-based chef with whom Chakela collaborates.

Tolu Asemota, founder of Ibile, a dining experience celebrating west African food, knows plenty about straddling a corporate career with pop-ups. From Waterford, he was working as a pricing data analyst before deciding to pursue the pop-up full time. The idea hit in 2017, when Asemota spent a summer working in the US while he was a student. It was his first job in hospitality, in an upscale restaurant, and it got him wondering. “Why is African food never in a space like this?”

Cooking with Tolu Asemota, founder of Ibile

As a first-generation Irish-Nigerian, Asemota hadn’t seen a lot of representation for African food in Ireland. “There were spots that Nigerian people knew about, if-you-know-you-know spots, but nothing that was in the mainstream. I just thought to myself, it’s about time.”

While he continued to pursue his corporate career, the restaurant idea refused to disappear. He worked up a business plan with a chef friend, realising the restaurant they imagined was out of reach. Instead, they started with a pop-up at Hen’s Teeth in Blackpitts, Dublin 8 in 2024, selling out 100 tickets and having to turn away guests. “It was very overwhelming; we realised we had to scale back, and then we just started growing slowly.”

They worked on creating pop-up dining events that celebrated more than just the food; Asemota wanted Ibile to communicate a broader culture. “When you come in, it’s the music, it’s art, it’s all this kind of stuff. When we do our takeovers of restaurants or cocktail bars, we put an emphasis on the smell, the taste, the sounds, the sights.”

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This year, Ibile appeared at festivals including Beyond the Pale, Electric Picnic, Taste of Dublin and The Big Grill, as well as curating a dinner for Ireland Fashion Week. Asemota has now left his previous job to work full-time on Ibile. “I think that’s from constantly putting ourselves out there and making sure the food is always good. We learned to grow the brand slowly and get people to connect with what we do.”

The pop-ups will continue over the winter, with a Manchester takeover and some more Dublin events on the cards, and then the next ambition is to find a more permanent home and become a go-to spot. “I want Ibile to be the first thing people think of when they think of African cuisine. That’s where we want to get to.”