Sarah and Brad Gavigan, the husband-and-wife team of restaurateurs behind the popular Little Octopus and Otaku Ramen, announced today that they will close their dedicated pop-up space, POP, at the end of the year. Located at 604 Gallatin Ave. in East Nashville, POP was the incubator that helped launch both Otaku and Little Octopus, in addition to hosting special events featuring accomplished chefs from within Nashville and around the country.
The Gavigans opened POP in 2014, with a mission to house chef Sarah Gavigan's Otaku concept (originally called Otaku South) a few days a week while also to providing a kitchen, dining room and gallery that would be "available to chefs who have a singular or ongoing pop-up concept they would like to introduce Nashville to."
Among the local projects taking up temporary residency was a well-regarded brunch from Daniel Forberg of Actual Food. Out-of-town chefs who visited and cooked at POP included the distinguished Dominique Crenn of San Francisco and Beard Award winner Andy Ricker of Pok Pok in Portland, Ore., and New York. (Ricker's take on Thai cuisine mightily impressed the Scene's Steve Cavendish.)
Last year, Otaku departed POP and moved to its own Otaku Ramen space in the Gulch, drawing a large and lively clientele for Japanese noodle bowls and other snacks, plus sake, beer and cocktails.
Little Octopus, which opened in in the POP space in May 2015, with a globally inspired menu from chef Daniel Herget, has proved so popular that it is moving to a 100-seat space in the Gulch sometime in December, taking over the former Ru San's site at Ru San's at 505 12th Ave. S. Its final day on Gallatin is this Sunday, Nov. 20.
But the POP party will continue temporarily. From Nov. 29 to Dec. 23, an Otaku Ramen spinoff, called the Otaku Annex, will serve up ramen and charcoal-grilled Japanese fare (aka robatayaki), along with sake and a full bar, says Sarah Gavigan.
“We are coming full circle with this pop-up and adding some outlandish options from the yaki grill (custom-made by my husband Brad Gavigan) as our last event at POP," she says today in a release. She added that the POP name will continue as the name for their holding company.
As the official chef and founder of the company, Sarah Gavigan tells the Scene that she's proud of what POP brought to Nashville, but it's time to move on, especially given the blowout success of the couple's two restaurants. "I don't think we ever expected Little Octopus and Otaku to take off the way they did," she says. "We'll always love POP, but it achieved for us what we wanted it to."
As for whether they considered continuing to lease the POP space to provide a site for special events, Gavigan says it wasn't really feasible to continue the effort there. "It's five years too early for the neighborhood," she says, adding that Nashville's restaurant scene is so vibrant that even without POP, it will surely continue to generate pop-ups and other new restaurant ideas that we haven't even imagined yet.
As for Otaku Ramen, Gavigan says that the fall season has brought a new menu and an extra boom in business. "The second the temperature dropped, our sales doubled. People naturally crave ramen more in the fall."
But unlike the early days, when the noodle bar had only 30 seats, Gavigan says lines aren't too bad despite the popularity. It helps that Otaku has added about 50 more seats over recent months, having added a bar and enclosed the patio for year-round use.
