“This Sunday’s Pop-Up” - Meals of the World, Made by Your Local Restaurant : Merchant Tavern
The use of social media by St. John's, NL restaurant Merchant Tavern in order to keep their customers coming and business thriving, amidst a pandemic.
With uncertainty surrounding the restaurant industry as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent operating restrictions and new regulations, the future for many restaurants and their owner’s was unforeseeably bleak. As St. John’s, Newfoundland local and restaurant co-owner Jeremy Bonia discusses in an interview with CBC when referring to the future of the restaurant industry, “Obviously I can’t see it going back to the way it was”. However, as any good business owner would do, Jeremy with the help of the other co-owner Jeremey Charles, decided to attempt to take the future of their restaurant, the Merchant Tavern into their own hands. With revenues down due to the limited capacity and customers, the Jeremy’s has to find a way to get people in the door.
One of the ways they achieved this was through the creative and well-received concept of Sunday’s Pop-Up, a limited menu that focuses on a different culture, type of food, or even style of cooking each week. This “pop-up” menu replaced the traditional Merchant Tavern menu that regular customers were familiar with and provided a new and exciting addition to the type of food locals were able to try. With an already limited restaurant space in St. John’s, NL, this one-a-week menu provided unique and diverse meals found nowhere else on the island, made with the same quality the Tavern’s regulars have known to love.
Although the recent COVID-19 pandemic has been more than troublesome for the restaurant industry, as in the case with many issues, every cloud has a silver lining, for co-owners Jeremey Bonia and Jeremy Charles this came in the creative idea of Sunday Pop-ups. With the intention of not only getting more people - both repeat customers and potential customers - in their restaurants and ordering food but also to re-create the sense of excitement surrounding dining that existed prior to the pandemic. This sense of excitement can be anything from hearing about a new restaurant, or even a new meal at one of your regular spots, regardless of the what that feeling is you, the between the restrictions that restaurants were mandated to follow, or the general uncertainty and potential risk that was involved in dining out, the excitement and overall desire to dine out minimal if not non-existent.
However, luckily for the restaurant goers of St. John’s as well as the staff and owners of Merchant Tavern, the Sunday Pop-ups became the “talk-of-the-town” as locals would say. Through the use of the restaurant's numerous social media platforms, they began to share their pop-up menus, each one more unique and enticing than the last. From Macanese to French themed menus, the range of the weekly menus and themes spreads wide, as their Instagram page has shown there is no telling what the theme of next week’s Pop-up will be.
Using the post and story features of Instagram, the restaurants would share each week’s Pop-up menu on both the restaurants page, as well as stories. This allowed for the followers of the page to share and post about the menus that they are excited about, allowing for the
new and exciting menu to be seen by the community, and even in some cases create some excitement and chatter regarding a particular menu or theme as can be seen in the comments of many of their posts. While this method of communication and information sharing is not unique to the Merchant Tavern, but instead is common throughout the restaurant industry, it was the weekly release and community that surrounded the reveal of that week’s menu that created the needed excitement, and overall success for the Jeremy’s and Merchant Tavern.
The “Sunday Pop-up” as they were referred to provide a sense of excitement not only for the customers who eagerly checked their phones throughout the week in anticipation of the latest Sunday menu, the cook as well as service staff appeared to be excited. The opportunity as a chef or server in the restaurant and service industry to be able to prepare and serve foods of different ethnicities and parts of the world while also complementing and displaying the utility of the province's local foods is quite special.
With the Sunday pop-ups being such a success during the pandemic, the owner’s Bonia and Charles saw no reason to stop the customer favorite, as such, what was originally created as a path to navigate the turbulent times of COVID-19 and resulting restrictions is now a summer special. As seen below, the last Sunday Pop-up of the 2022 summer was Mexican themed, with items such as tuna, cod, or even lamb tacos, and of course tequila.