Welcome to Eater Twin Cities’ Pop-Up Watch series. Pop-ups are as integral a part of Minneapolis and St. Paul’s dining world as restaurants and bars are: They’ve brought us hand-rolled bagels and cardamon-laced chai and scallion pancake burritos, to name just a few; and they shape the baked goods scene especially, offering everything from from whimsical cakes to impeccably gooey S’mores cookies to passionfruit pop-tarts. In short, Twin Cities pop-ups are movers and shakers, ushering the next generation of talent onto the scene. Over seven weeks, we’re highlighting seven pop-ups that are on the up-and-up — most are very new; a few have been around for a bit, flying somewhat under the radar, but are gaining steam as they reach new audiences. Here’s the fifth installment.

Mike Yuen and Tony Gao met in 2021 on the opening team of Union Hmong Kitchen at Graze food hall — they connected readily over their shared experiences as Chinese-American chefs, as much over their personal grapplings with identity as their fierce love of Chinese American food. Yuen, a veteran of the Lexington and Lat 14, grew up on the South Side of Chicago, “far enough away from Chinatown where my siblings and I were typically the only Asian kids in our neighborhood, and certainly the only half-white Chinese kids we knew,” he says, though their parents raised them to take pride in their identity. Gao grew up in Robbinsdale, where his parents owned Canton Garden. (His kitchen resume includes his family’s restaurant as well as the Birchwood Cafe, Saturday Dumpling Co. and Wise Acre Eatery.) “A telltale sign of a good Asian restaurant is a kid doing homework in a corner booth,” he says. “That was me.” But there was a stubborn duality to his identity: At school he was always the Chinese kid; visiting family in China he was always the American kid.

Yuen and Gao’s new pop-up, then, is called “Jook Sing,” a Cantonese term for a person of Chinese descent raised in a Western country: It translates roughly to “bamboo,” evoking the way that water poured into a bamboo stalk doesn’t flow out the other side, but rather stays suspended in the stalk’s sections. Labeling the kind of food they make was tricky, they say — they wrestled with terms like “New Chinese,” “Contemporary Chinese,” and others before settling on Chinese American, an imperfect label but an homage to the cuisine that “made them who they are.” Crudo served with crisp lettuce, for example, evokes both the Sichuan dish “Couple’s Delight” as well as steak tartare; Hainanese chicken rice is imagined in slider form; a sliced steak dish nods to the classic Chinese American dish beef and broccoli. “We don’t want to replace or reinvent classic Chinese American cuisine; we want to honor it,” Yuen and Gao say. “Names and labels aside, we hope that our food brings you comfort and joy.” Instagram is the best place to find information about upcoming pop-ups or Jook Sing’s website; later this month Jook Sing popping up at Steady Pour. In the long run, Jook Sing is looking for a permanent home in the Twin Cities.

Jook Sing

Jook Sing