Sando Pop-Up (サンドポップアップ)

On Sunday nights in the spring of 2018, a line formed inside Kura, a family restaurant on West Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, for sandwiches that most of the room had never seen. Chef Daniel Son, who had taken the place over from his parents, was frying muenster-stuffed chicken cutlets and flattened pork cutlets, tucking them into house-made milk bread, and selling most of them for about ten dollars. His sister took the orders. A sandwich could go as high as seventy dollars if it carried A5 wagyu chateaubriand. That was the Katsu Sando pop-up, and Time Out Los Angeles wrote it up on April 12, 2018, which makes it the best-dated early example of what a sando pop-up looks like outside Japan.

The format asks a sandwich to do three jobs at once. It has to be made in bulk, because a stand with a few hours and a line cannot cook to order. It has to survive being wrapped, carried, and eaten twenty minutes later on a curb. And it has to look like something when it is cut, because the cross-section is the advertisement. The cutlet suits all three. A fried pork or chicken cutlet holds its crumb for a short while, the soft bread gives a little under the fingers, and the sauce and cabbage sit where the knife shows them. The failure is just as easy to name: fry too early and the coat goes grey and damp inside the paper, and the bread takes the moisture and slumps.

Konbi, a small Echo Park restaurant in Los Angeles, took the same idea east on May 30, 2019. Its founders, Akira Akuto and Nick Montgomery, ran a one-night pop-up at the Manhattan office of the cookware company Great Jones, 39 East 20th Street, for a $40 ticket that also covered Threes Brewery beer and natural wine. The sandwiches were an egg salad and a pork katsu. Konbi's egg sando had already spread on social media, and its egg salad runs cool and soft, nearly spoonable, with the mayonnaise doing the binding and the white bread dissolving at the first press of the teeth. A pop-up lets both sit side by side, one crisp and hot, one cold and yielding, and the queue picks.

Sandoitchi turned the format into a recurring business. Chef Stevie Nguyen, formerly of Momofuku Ko, Morimoto, and Uchi, started it in 2020 as an experimental pandemic pop-up in Dallas, working out of the kitchen of a Deep Ellum Japanese barbecue restaurant with partners Keith Tran, Andy Sirois, and Angel Acosta. Its sandwiches were modeled on what Japanese convenience stores sell. By January 2023 it was running two-week stands in Oklahoma City, in a former coffee bar space, where pre-orders opened on a Sunday evening and pickup ran Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Scarcity there is a schedule: ordering opens, the slots fill, and the sandwiches are handed over in boxes.

Everything in a good pop-up sando exists to survive that handoff, and the eating shows it. The lid comes off on warm butter and fryer oil, the bread is softer than a deli roll and a little sweet, and the first bite crunches only if the cutlet was fried late and sauced lightly. The weak point is the queue. A sandwich memorable mostly for the wait tastes thin once its buyer sits down with it, and the pop-up gives a mediocre filling nowhere to hide. The stands that last are the ones whose cutlet or egg salad brings people back a second time with no hype attached. The dated cases share a route: a restaurant lends a kitchen or a room, a chef sells a small menu on a few nights, and a convenience-store staple becomes an event with a ticket, a pre-order window or a Sunday-night line.

Origin and History

The sandwiches inside the pop-up are much older than the format. Crustless sandwiches on soft white bread are a long-standing Japanese staple, and the katsu sando is widely credited to a Tokyo tonkatsu restaurant in the 1930s, a claim that rests on secondary sources. Japan also runs limited-run counters on department-store food floors and collaboration sandwiches from bakeries and coffee brands. How much those shaped the overseas stands is undocumented; the American operators name konbini sandwiches as their model.

The earliest documented Western sando pop-ups date from the late 2010s. After Los Angeles, the route repeated in New York in 2019 with Konbi's one-night ticketed dinner and in Texas in 2020 with Sandoitchi, which began in the pandemic and grew into a tour of pre-order runs from borrowed kitchens and empty storefronts. Katsu Sando began as a pop-up in Son's family restaurant in 2017, with the Kura nights most likely starting that October. Kura closed in late 2019, when its building was cleared for redevelopment, and Katsu Sando moved into a storefront of its own in Chinatown, around 2020 by most accounts, later adding a second location.