Now that we had settled on a menu, the next question was how many baos should we prepare?
Krisanna created this menu for the event!
According to Arthur’s, their Friday evening pop up events usually draw between 10 and 20 people, so we used that as a baseline. Based on feedback from local social media groups, there was a strong interest in our product, but we didn’t want to prepare too much food and have leftovers that we would have to dispose of. We decided to plan for about 50 people, a little more than twice their usual turnout.
However, as the day drew closer, we noticed that the event page on Arthur’s site was drawing a lot more interest than expected. Arthur’s events usually have between 10-40 responses, but in the week leading up to our event, over 100 people had expressed interest in our pop-up!
I prepared enough ingredients for an additional 50 baos, but Krisanna, having full confidence in the quality of our product, pushed me to continue to prepare fillings right up until the time of the event.
Making baos is a messy business! For our pop-up event, Krisanna convinced me we needed these aprons!
On the day of the event, we got to Arthur’s early to set up the kitchen and coordinate with the staff. We were told from previous events to expected a slow start leading up to a dinner rush, after which things would calm down.
My first time working in a restaurant kitchen was a literal trial by fire!
Well, the hours between 5pm and 8pm were a blur as orders started immediately and never stopped until the end of the night. With only 2 of us in the kitchen, cranked out baos as fast as we could. An hour into the event, we recruited our friend, Jenelle, to help assemble baos. 90 minutes in, Haley, the owner of Arthur’s, stepped in to help with the cooking. 2 hours into the event, we drafted another friend, Cigdem, to help expedite orders. We had prepared bags of frozen baos to sell to customers, but by the end of the night, we were tearing into those to fulfill orders!
Friends tell us the line went out the door for the first 2 hours of the event!
By 8pm, things finally slowed down enough for us to catch our breaths. We had completely sold out of pork belly and tofu, and only had some portions of fish and bao-nuts left, which sold in the last hour. We had also gone through most of our inventory of frozen baos which we had planned to sell separately. By the end of the night, we had sold over 300 baos, more than twice what we had anticipated. That meant we were making a bao every 35 seconds for 3 hours straight!
A trio of pork belly, fried fish and tofu baos!
Needless to say, our first pop-up event was both a success and a great learning experience! We were initially worried we wouldn’t bring in enough people to justify the quantities we were making, but you guys blew us away with your interest and support. If we had any doubts there was demand for our product, you helped eliminate them. We are so grateful for all of you for showing up and supporting us, and promise that the best is yet to come!
Thanks to Cigdem and Jenelle for helping us out! We could not have done this without you!