‘Selling food in the margins’: Embracing chaos in search of takeout

With limited ordering windows and nondescript locations, San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho details the complications of picking up takeout during the pandemic and advises to embrace the chaos. Pop-up restaurants are a broad category of ad hoc restaurants, which she likens to the ephemeral activities of novel performance art and flash mobs. Ho suggests that not everything has to be easy and comfortable, and that pandemic pop-up culture has the potential to rewire diners’ ways of thinking about who makes their food, creating a more equitable, exciting way to dine.