FROM POP-UP TO BRICK AND MORTAR

Three Culinary Entrepreneurs Open Their Doors

Words and Photos by Ungelbah Dávila

What makes a market magical? Mystery. No two are ever the same, and that sense of wonder and experimentation brings makers and seekers together in mutual exploration. Artisan and farmers markets allow creators to bravely test out the popularity of their ideas, while shoppers—and diners—get to fall in love with creations they never knew existed, all without too much overhead or commitment. In Albuquerque, a thriving brewery and distillery scene offers food trucks and pop-ups a similar opportunity for introduction and discovery. These venues are a place to sample the diversity of a community and find new styles and flavors that are worth coming back for.

For culinary entrepreneurs, popping up at farmers markets and public spaces like bars and coffee shops is a low-stakes way to introduce people to their food, get to know their fans, create a following, and perfect their brand in an intimate setting before deciding to take things to the next level. For these three Albuquerque-based eateries, the transition to brick and mortar didn’t happen overnight. They took the time to, literally, test the market first.

Buen Provecho

Buen Provecho opened the doors on their sit-down restaurant at El Vado Motel in October 2024, after six years of serving from one of the property’s food pods and three years of selling at markets before that.

Owner Kattia Rojas moved to the United States from Costa Rica twenty-five years ago with a marketing degree and a plan to spend just a month in the States practicing her English. But then, she fell in love with the man who would become her husband—and with cooking. In 2015, Rojas graduated from Central New Mexico Community College as a pastry chef and started selling her Costa Rican tamales, desserts, jams, and pickled peppers at pop-ups and farmers markets. She discovered that people loved her food and wanted more. So in 2018 she quit selling at markets and began cooking, selling, and catering out of a small kitchen at El Vado, where the menu consisted of the Costa Rican foods she grew up eating.

When Rojas moved into the kitchen at El Vado, it was just her and her husband. Now she has fifteen employees. Where before folks picked up their arroz con pollo and maduros from a counter in the kitchen and ate on the food court patio or in the onsite Ponderosa Brewing taproom, or took their food to go, now she offers inside seating for twenty-five.

“We have fifty items on the menu,” she says. “That’s a huge menu for this tiny kitchen because my mind is huge! Normally in a small kitchen you just see tamales or burgers, but I do it all: appetizers, drinks, meals, desserts.”

Rojas thinks part of her quick success is that Costa Rican cuisine is an uncommon offering but resonates with a New Mexican palate because it relies on familiar ingredients like beans, rice, corn tortillas, and slow-cooked pork, prepared in a way most people have never experienced and paired with tropical elements like green or sweet plantains, pineapple, passion fruit, lime, and yuca. Her beef-and-potato empanadas are among her most popular dishes, as well as the pork, chicken, vegetarian, and vegan tamales done “tico style”—wrapped in banana leaves instead of corn husks, and stuffed with unexpected ingredients like rice, peas, or olives—that Yelp declared the best tamales in New Mexico in 2023. During the Christmas season, they can sell upward of a thousand tamales in two days.

“If you go to Costa Rica, you’re going to have the same type of food but served in a different way, because I’m more modern,” says Rojas. “I like beautiful plates. I like strong flavors. I like people to remember my food.”

Wolf ’N’ Swallow

For Jennifer Jane and Ryan Houlihan, a.k.a. Chef Houla, the road to their restaurant is currently paved in renovation dust. The couple, who relocated to Albuquerque from New Orleans in 2022, have been in the restaurant industry for years. But it was during the pandemic era that Chef Houla started dabbling with canning, pickling, and pop-ups.

“We started doing the farm box thing and we would get so many vegetables and fruits that we didn’t know what to do with it,” says Jane. “So [Ryan] started making charcuterie provisions without realizing it. We got super into homesteading, basically, in the middle of New Orleans, experimenting with making our own butter, and he started curing his own meats.”

They started hosting charcuterie pop-ups around the Crescent City, and when they moved west, they brought their pop-up project with them, selling their goods at breweries, bars, and distilleries like Sister and Bow & Arrow Brewing Co. Houla’s creative approach to craft charcuterie earned Wolf ’N’ Swallow a fast following, with boards featuring things like pineapple-upside-down-cake-flavored pickled pineapples and green tea matcha marshmallow bread in addition to the cured meats denoted by the term charcuterie.

“I would just show up, throw up my folding tables, set up my meat slicer, all my pickles, all my dried fruit, nuts, and have everything out and ready,” says Houla.

It wasn’t long before the couple started looking for a building where they could bring their “guerilla kitchen” to a permanent location, with a full menu and wine bar.

“We knew that we wanted to be in the EDo [East Downtown] neighborhood,” says Jane. “We just kept driving by and looking around, and just being like, there’s got to be something here.”

What they found was a hidden gem at 414 Central Avenue SE, in a compound that the landlord had inherited from his grandmother. The couple fell in love with the location, full of quirky, midcentury flair, which was formerly the site of 2G’s Bistro. They started renovating the building in October 2024, putting in new wiring and piping and overhauling the kitchen, and hope to be open by February 2025. The planned upgrades include a wine cellar and, happily for diners and kitchen staff alike, a new cooling system.

“It’s almost like a rehabilitation. We want to enhance this building as much as we can, and we are,” says Jane. “It’s going to be a massive change, but it’s going to look more or less exactly the same on the outside.”

Wolf ’N’ Swallow’s menu will offer snacks like house pimento cheese, crudités, and anchovy tartine, along with a thoughtfully sourced selection of tinned seafood and vegan conservas such as Ekone habanero-smoked oysters or Seed to Surf celery root “whitefish.” Chef Houla will also offer his signature charcuterie boards with pickled produce, spreads, breads, and more, which will change daily.

The Witching Flour Bakery

With about two hundred dollars in her pocket and a burning desire to be her own boss, Kelly Gee, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in San Francisco, started The Witching Flour Bakery in 2018. As a trained pastry chef, Gee skipped the pop-up part and went right to wholesale. She signed up for the Mixing Bowl Incubation Program at the South Valley Economic Development Center and began using their commercial kitchen to create pastries for local coffee shops like Zendo, Little Bear, Slow Burn, and Castle Coffee.

“I kind of went into it all sort of blindly,” she says, “but social media helped a lot to grow my business, and, luckily, people were pretty receptive to my creativity, which was motivating. I feel like a lot of artists have insecurities because it’s a pretty vulnerable thing to share this side of yourself, but everyone’s so wonderful and supportive and sweet. And I just can’t believe how lucky I am. Honestly, it’s pretty neat.”

Along with using sourdough starter for all her pastries, Gee’s whimsical aesthetic and unexpected flavor profiles make Witching Flour distinct. “You can pretty much put anything in a danish,” she jokes, and it isn’t until you bite into a green bean casserole danish or a black rice and mango kolache with violet syrup that the method to Gee’s madness makes sense.

Even with widespread popularity, including ten thousand followers on Instagram, Gee says that making pastries for wholesale out of a shared kitchen eventually became unsustainable, and a storefront bakery had always been her endgame, anyway. So in 2021, Josh Castleberry, owner of Castle Coffee, helped Gee find a space zoned for baking. They spent the next two years getting permits in order, buying equipment, and setting up a bakery space. Then, on Halloween of 2023, Gee’s dream came true at 1431 Eubank Boulevard NE, where she opened the doors of The Witching Flour Bakery.

Open Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 2 pm, or until sold out, the bustling bakery has a constantly changing menu, sometimes themed to complement the season or approaching holiday, such as the goth menu she offered last October.

“I think besides being able to create fun flavors that people are excited about, the funnest part for me is that my aesthetic at the bakery is a direct reflection of my own personality. It is really fun that I can share that with people, and that they like it too,” she says.

Note: Kattia Rojas is a semifinalist for Best Chef: Southwest in the 2025 James Beard Awards.