What do pop-up chefs do with their leftovers?

I would never consciously construct a menu around resuscitating day-old seafood. But on a recent night, that’s exactly what my husband and I, both chefs, we did. My husband, Ari Miller, used to run the now-shuttered restaurant Musi. I used to run Poi Dog, which is now a sauce company. Now, we often do private dinners and pop-ups.

We had oysters and ahi poke left over from an event we cooked at Samuel’s Seafood, cooked egg yolks and Chili Peppah Water Ranch from a collaboration dinner at La Colombe Fishtown with event company Citrine, half a bottle of Everleaf’s Marine alcohol-free aperitif from another event, and crumbled tortilla strips from a Poi Dog sauce tasting event that were too tasty to toss, but useless to serve. We ended up whipping up a meal just for us: fried oysters, battered in panko and rancho powder, which we dipped in homemade Chili Peppah Water-Ranch dressing. We also had seared ahi poke and a deviled egg-yolk dip dusted with tortilla strip crumbs, and an oyster brine mock martini spiked with Everleaf’s Marine aperitif.

My cobbled together dinner of event leftovers got me thinking: pop-ups and one-offs are all the rage on the Philadelphia dining scene right now, so what on earth is everyone doing with their leftover mise en place? Is everyone else also sitting at home eating re-imagined leftovers? I spoke with a handful of chefs behind our city’s hottest pop-ups to find out.

The plight of a pop-up chef is that one has no restaurant to put leftovers to use on a menu and no staff to feed a staff meal of leftovers. Our pop-ups mostly sell out days in advance, so we have an exact number of diners to prepare for and very little waste, unless some natural catastrophe prevents us from serving food.

When you sell out of an item at a pop-up, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re selling out of every component of that item. There will be extra garnishes. There will be a few inches left in that squeeze bottle of sauce.

Chef Reuben Asaram of Mexican-Indian concept Reuby is well known for his bright blue “Smurf sauce” and bright pink beet-lime crema, which he has served roughly twice a week upon tacos at venues around the city like Hale & True and Herman’s Coffee. “Are you sitting at home eating everything with leftover technicolor sauce?” I ask him.

“I put the beet lime crema on hot dogs and tacos for myself at home,” Asaram admits. “But I always have leftover queso made with Cooper Sharp and it makes a great base for mac and cheese,” he says. Asaram also ladles leftover queso into spicy ramen for himself.

Alejandro Gonzalez, the chef behind Senor Slices, runs pop-ups around the city, serving gloriously stuffed Mexican sandwiches and, around the holidays, an eagerly anticipated sushi tray. (After a pop-up at Fishtown’s Gilda, there was a snow day, and he came out of his house bearing a tray with leftover bounty to children playing in the snow: sandwiches stuffed with chicken cutlets, eggs, Oaxaca cheese, escabeche, and salsa verde. “Regardless of what is going on the next day, nothing ever goes to waste! Our neighbors get fed lots! Sometimes we’ll donate to the community fridge, and during peak COVID we’d wrap all the sandwiches before we left a pop-up, drive around and hand out sandwiches all over the city,” he says.

Often only a single component of a course is unused, according to Evan Snyder of Emmett, which serves what Snyder terms “modern Jewish” food four to five times a month. “I had so much crab leftover two events ago where I made a smoked crab toast, that I took home a pint and a half, mixed it with cream cheese and turned it into a dip.” Yes, like me, Snyder also re-thinks dishes into next day dip. “There’s always herbs leftover and one or two portions of pasta along with one ingredient left from each course. It’ll get turned into a mishmash ‘staff’ meal,” he says, feeding himself and his family.

Snyder also uses events to use up older well-preserved mise en place from previous events. In a recent dinner with Alejandro Martin Sanchez of Mesona he concocted a mole of 69 different ingredients. “All our old vinegary stuff, weird fermented stuff, seeds, and nuts – we were able to utilize all our old weird things. Once you make the mole, it can sit. Some restaurants have 15-year-old moles. It’s a preserving technique.”

Liz Grothe of Couch Café (and soon, Scampi) brings pot pie to the table. Revisiting a trip through Italy through pasta-laden dinners has left her from time to time with extra ragu. Her go-to solution is to transform it into pot pie. “I put everything into pot pie! I love pot pie!” she declares. For single serving pot pies, she’ll run to the store for Pillsbury dough within which she stuffs leftover ragu.

“One time [at her previous position at] Fiorella, we had all this guinea hen filling from a mezzaluna pasta. Then the next day, guinea hen came off the menu.” The filling was frozen. When it was her turn to make a staff meal, Grothe made an enormous pot pie, decorated with a pastry smiley face, taking up an entire sheet pan. “It was an insanely good-looking pot pie,” she reminisces. “And then I took it out of the oven, and it just fell. This still hurts. It just fell upside down. Since then, I’ve been making pot pies as redemption. So everything gets turned into pot pie.”