Courtesy of Kristopher Aziabor

A former Michelin-star restaurant hostess, a restaurant worker of five summers who once helped make Michelle Obama the “second-best” Cuban sandwich she said she had ever had and a Patisserie Diploma-wielding graduate of haute cuisine culinary school walked into the Davenport College buttery. It was a typical Friday, and Y Pop-Up was getting ready for an opening.

Alexis Ramirez-Hardy ’26, Hardy Eville ’26 and Phaedra Letrou ’25 are three members of the 41-person undergraduate cooking club that hosts bi-weekly restaurant-style meals. They spent the evening drizzling neat stripes of raita over aloo chaat potato patties and stylishly delivering flights of Malabar fish curry to expectant patrons assembled for the club’s “Masala Magic” South Asian dinner.

It was clear from the almost 100-item Thursday night shopping trip and the 12-hour, day-of cooking marathon that hosting these multi-act dinners is no small feat: “Let’s keep it simple this time and do only, like, five courses,” Eville said at the Sunday planning meeting. But as laughs reverberated around the buttery, any stress was hardly discernible.

Members being amicable and cooperative is key to the club’s productivity and success, explained Coby Wagonfeld ’26, one of the club’s head chefs.

“You need to be able to work as a team … and to be able to stay somewhat calm in a pressured situation,” he said. “There’s a euphoria to it at the end, and that community of accomplishment is a great feeling.”

Y Pop-Up-hopefuls “audition” for the club Chopped-style. Of the applicants who complete an initial 11-question form, a fraction are invited back to tackle a live cooking challenge. A table full of ingredients such as tofu, cup noodles, veggies, sauces and spices greets them, and a 30 minute clock starts ticking. There are no rules or limits on what they can make, and one of the head chefs helps out as sous-chef. The applicant’s ability to give them directions and banter with other club leadership in the room as they cook is taken into consideration, Wagonfeld said.

Applicants to the club’s business team fill out a 10-question form and then complete an interview to be considered.

The club then makes its selections. This past year, 21 percent were accepted, an unusually high rate according to club leadership. Others are sent an email thanking them for their time and lamenting that “unfortunately, there can only be so many cooks in the kitchen.”

Eville, this year’s other co-head chef, said that the competitiveness of the application process is necessary because of how demanding the club is for members.

“The scale of what we try to put on and the professionalism that we try to have requires that we have to be pretty strict about who we let into the club,” he said.

Despite Y Pop-Up’s competitiveness, members say its ethos remains one of trust and flexibility.

“I came in thinking I’d work under someone and do smaller tasks, but there’s an entirely flat structure to the community,” cook team member Taimur Moolji ’25 said. “They switch up the teams so we get to meet lots of new people.”

James Han ’24, a former head chef, said that the club’s simultaneous commitment to high standards of achievement and an attitude of open-mindedness is reflected in the quality and variety of food they produce.

Most Indian restaurants in America serve North Indian or Punjabi food. Friday’s opening intentionally took a different direction. The menu focused on food from South India, such as masala dosas and the Malabar fish curry, and even included bun kebabs, a dish from the neighboring country of Pakistan.

“There’s a world in which we could have cooked butter chicken and chana masala and naan and called it a day,” Han supposed. “And then there’s the version that we did, which was showing different kinds of India. I’m really happy there’s a culture of learning.”

Y Pop-Up was founded in its current form in 2013 by Lucas Sin ’15. He went on to open Junzi Kitchen, a Chinese restaurant, in New Haven in 2015, adding a New York location in 2017. In 2020, Sin was named one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30 for Food and Drink.

The club, which was much smaller at its founding, vastly expanded its business team in 2019 after holding a popular Harry Potter-themed dinner. In a decked-out Silliman buttery, guests were sorted into Hogwarts houses and handed admissions letters sealed with wax stamps. The success of the event grew into today’s 14-person business team, which now assists with finances, event coordination, table service, clean up, decorations and material transportation.

“Everyone has different skills that they contribute, which makes you feel like people are happy to have you there,” Ramirez-Hardy said of the relationship between the cooking and business teams.

On Friday night, 70 guests arrived at 16 different times between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. to take their seats. Menu adjustments were planned for three vegetarians, a tree nut allergy and requests for no seafood, no gluten, no pork, no coconut, no dairy and no red meat. Birthday candles were added to two mango lassi panna cottas.

Openings are tall orders, but “you get dopamine hits the entire time,” Wagonfeld said. “It’s very satisfying to see a problem coming and then fix it live.”

Y Pop-Up’s next opening will take place on Feb. 16.