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" This is how you know something&amp;#039;s hot: The world&amp;#039;s largest restaurant reservation system \u2014 OpenTable.com, used by more than 200 million diners at twenty thousand restaurants \u2014 offers 120 seats a night at a restaurant that will exist for only six weeks, and so many requests race through the Internet that the site crashes. So the executives at OpenTable call the chef, Ludo Lefebvre, to find out what the hell happened. Then they reconstruct the site to handle more traffic. It&amp;#039;s all hands on deck the next time reservations go live for LudoBites, Lefebvre&amp;#039;s roving pop-up restaurants. In less than a minute, demand swamps the site yet again. How much of this is desire for the exploratory cooking of Ludo Lefebvre? And how much is the clubby allure of the pop-up experience? Hard to measure. But put them together and you see why pop-up restaurants \u2014 temporary dining experiences usually built on buzz and fanfare \u2014 are popping up all over. Lefebvre grew up in Burgundy and was classically trained. Over time he decided that a restaurant with three Michelin stars is handcuffed. It can&amp;#039;t afford to take many risks \u2014 it needs to execute flawlessly to keep those three stars. Lefebvre, meanwhile, is a guy who looks at a codfish and sees panna cotta, who wonders what would happen if you topped cr\u00E8me br\u00FBl\u00E9e with bacon, and who tastes bouillabaisse and thinks: milk shake? When he gets a dish just where he wants it, he throws it off the menu. On to the next!  One day a few years back, he was driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in California and saw circus tents. &amp;quot;What if I could do a restaurant circus?&amp;quot; he said to his wife. &amp;quot;Go from city to city. Like a band on tour.&amp;quot; The style was the perfect complement to his character. He&amp;#039;d find a restaurant that served only breakfast and lunch, rent the place out for dinner, cook as he wished for six weeks, and then leave for his next gig. It was the yang to the yin of dining. Most restaurants we return to because we know what we&amp;#039;re getting. With Lefebvre, you&amp;#039;re lucky to taste a dish once. Which means you&amp;#039;re no longer going out to dinner. You&amp;#039;re getting an experience that will never happen again. When was the last time you ordered the entire menu? People do that at LudoBites because they know they may never have another chance to taste any of the dishes. And because the tables are set close and everyone feels lucky to have scored one, the diners next to you might pass you a taste of the black squid ink croque monsieur with foie gras, and you could pass them a taste of the plancha tandoori octopus with yogurt, cauliflower, and grapefruit. You leave with new friends. I ate at several pop-ups in Los Angeles, the center of the trend in the U. S. Some were more exciting than others, but there was one constant: the feeling that anything might happen. To the diner, it&amp;#039;s always a revelation, as filled with new experiences as one of Lefebvre&amp;#039;s meals \u2014 where an onion can taste like a toasted marshmallow. &amp;quot;Ludo,&amp;quot; a diner said when the chef approached his table. &amp;quot;That was the best onion I&amp;#039;ve ever tasted. And it&amp;#039;s not even mentioned on the menu.&amp;quot; Lefebvre smiled and replied, &amp;quot;Surprise!&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/reviews/a11214/pop-up-restaurants-1111/>