A hot Atlanta restaurant has a globe-circling menu, regulars lined up at the door, and no building to call its own

By Leah Asmelash, CNN | Photographs by Austin Steele, CNN

Atlanta (CNN) — It was 4:54 p.m. — six minutes until So So Fed opened for Sunday dinner — and nobody had assembled the siu mai dumplings.

Molli Voraotsady, the chef, was up late Saturday night chopping the mushrooms and making the marinade for the pork filling. She’d told the line cooks four hours ago that the siu mai needed to be prepped. Two dozen people were lined up outside, waiting for the restaurant to open.

There was no time, or space, to crash out. At 5, as incoming customers poured in, Voraotsady started shaping the dumplings in the open kitchen in front of the bar, while chatting with regulars.

Though she looked calm, she would later call that service “one of our hardest.”

So So Fed, a Lao-Chinese-American spot that’s one of Atlanta’s buzziest places to eat, has no choice but to pull things together on the fly. The restaurant only exists two nights a week.

Pop-up eateries have become more common across the country since the pandemic, thanks to rising costs associated with opening and operating a restaurant. Generally, they look like a chef temporarily taking over a brewery’s unused kitchen or maybe a dinner service held in someone’s apartment.

So So Fed, though, has turned its weekly sprint into an endurance event. Since 2023, it has operated inside the space belonging to a Japanese restaurant called OK YAKI, which is open five days a week. Voraotsady and her crew take over when OK YAKI is closed on Sundays and Mondays.

Atlanta has become a laboratory of sorts for pop-up service. With funding hard to come by and a lease presenting a daunting commitment, a chef can use a pop-up for proof of concept, building an audience for Texas-style Indian barbecue or modern Polish food — as other Atlanta pop-ups have successfully done — while showing prospective investors they can make those dishes reliably, efficiently and for a profit. OK YAKI itself is a former pop-up that graduated to a fixed, full-time location.

Some pop-ups, though, are just fun projects for chefs who don’t plan to build them into full-scale restaurants. So So Fed started as a hobby, while Voraotsady worked full-time managing her husband’s record label and part-time as a server.

Voraotsady cooked for friends at her home, then expanded to people in her neighborhood, advertising through flyers and Instagram. She didn’t know what a pop-up was when a friend convinced her to do one at his restaurant in the trendy Poncey-Highland neighborhood.

Having never worked in a restaurant kitchen, she thought she could cook the way she did at home.

Instead, she found herself frantically shredding papaya to keep up with the incoming papaya salad orders. “I remember feeling despair, like when you feel like there’s no way of digging yourself out of this hole,” she said.

Voraotsady sold out within an hour — not because it was busy, but because she hadn’t prepped enough food.

“It was fun, but it was awful at the same time,” she said.

She tried again, just to prove she could handle it. And then again, to feel that fun-awful rush. And she kept going.

Supermarket sweep

Today, Voraotsady has a team of line cooks, servers and a recently hired manager. But because So So Fed is a pop-up, meat and produce can’t be directly ordered to the restaurant. There’s no pantry to store extra ingredients.

This means Voraotsady’s husband, Ash Jones — who also does the bookkeeping — does the grocery shopping on Sunday mornings.

He hit a Costco Business Center when it opens at 9 a.m., buying extra silverware, along with bulk volumes of kosher salt, Kerrygold butter and sugar. From there, he headed to a local Hispanic and Asian grocery store, where So So Fed has a wholesale account and the staff know him as “Mr. So So.”

This was a light day, he said — he filled one cart, instead of his usual two, with wonton wrappers, frozen banana leaves, dried mushrooms and coconut milk. He zipped through the aisles, checking items off a list organized in advance by his mental layout of the store; by now he thinks he could map nearly every international grocery store in Atlanta by memory.

“Usually I’m like a maniac,” he said. “Just speeding through.”

A flatbed at the front awaited with wholesale items including 25 pounds of ground pork, 40 pounds of cubed beef, bags of Thai basil and 30 pounds of fresh papayas. He loaded the haul into a white 2003 Toyota 4Runner, inherited from Voraotsady’s grandmother, and headed home. There, he and Voraotsady meticulously packed rest of the SUV’s interior with a giant steamer, spices and produce, soaked sticky rice, brine for fried chicken, plates, serving dishes, heat lamps, a rice cooker — and even a folding table for a rice station. In a small deli container, they brought their own salt.

Local flavor

Voraotsady was born in Atlanta. Her mom is from Hong Kong and her dad is from Laos; the name So So Fed is a play on Atlanta’s So So Def record label. Her menu, which changes weekly, is more a self-portrait than a representation of a specific cuisine. On the Fourth of July, she added a burger to the menu without “Asian twists,” as she put it: just lettuce, tomato, cheese, onions, pickles, fries and ketchup. Peach cobbler is a rotating staple, a nod to the Southern woman who was her father’s immigration sponsor.

She was inspired by her grandmother, the best Lao cook she knew. Initially, Voraotsady’s only goal was to learn how to cook like her grandmother. But before she could properly study with her, her grandmother died of cancer. Voraotsady taught herself, picking up what she could from YouTube or other family members — often “going off memory or straight vibes” she said, with lots of trial and error.

Her grandmother’s influence, she said, comes through in her liberal use of herbs and aromatics. “If a recipe called for some, she’d use like triple that amount,” Voraotsady said. Now, she does the same.

On this particular weekend, Voraotsady was starting back up after a three-week break. The menu featured a farmer’s market salad with a Lao-style egg yolk dressing, papaya salad, yellowtail crudo with a yuzu coconut jeow and perilla, vegetable red curry, beef red curry, and the siu mai. There was also a fried chicken plate with jeow som gravy, served with a grilled lemon — a Southern classic reimagined with an Atlanta wink.

One pair of regulars, Dhruv Khanna and Simran Singh, said they come in “every week we can.” Today, they’d ordered nearly everything on the menu and brought Singh’s out-of-town parents, who said the couple labeled So So Fed as a “must-do.”

“I recognize a lot of people here,” Khanna said. “We’ve seen the food change, people come in and go. It’s a nice little staple of the area.”

“It makes it feel like it’s something that’s really intentionally created for the community,” said Lynnea Zhang, who was accompanied by friends, “rather than just any of the 10 million Atlanta restaurants that open up, that are like ‘Oh! Have your cool girls’ brunch here.’”

A scramble to open

At OK YAKI, as the rest of the crew emptied out the Toyota and set about turning the space into So So Fed, a line cook walked in with even more groceries from another international store.

By 12:45 p.m. the stations were set, and Voraotsady went over menu changes and the day’s priorities. Over the next four hours, ’90s hip-hop and R&B played as cooks sliced yellowtail for crudo, shredded papaya and mixed dumpling filling. The simmering curry filled the air with the aroma of coconut milk and red curry paste, while chicken thighs were wet brined in a dining room booth.

In just one two-day workweek at So So Fed, one line cook said, they clock 30 hours. The cook said they spend the rest of their time “trying to be a drummer.”

There are restaurants where line cooks hardly see their presiding chefs. This is not one of them. Voraotsady — whose own focus was a blueberry compote for ube sugar toast — made sure the curry simmered on low enough heat, double-checked the sizes of chopped vegetables, and occasionally reminded the staff to clean as they went and not to get distracted on their phones.

Most of the front-of-house staff clocked in around 4 p.m. The floors were swept, chairs were set up, flowers from a local farm decorated the tables.

Customers accidentally wandered in, thinking the restaurant was already open.

Then it was time for the final steps: putting up the So So Fed sign, shoving red peppers into the walk-in, discovering a lack of batteries in the timer for the siu mai. And then — in a brief panic — discovering there were no siu mai ready to go, either.

A whole restaurant to go

The second day’s work began with a line cook, in charge of a new round of grocery shopping, discovering that the “check engine” light in his car was on. Another cook took over the shopping, and a third cook had to bring him to the restaurant — meaning three out of four line cooks would get in late.

“There’s always something,” Voraotsady said. “There’s never a smooth shift.”

Chaos allowed for moments of community. The manager ran to a small Asian market in search of more banana leaves. At the mention of Voraotsady and So So Fed, the owner — who happened to be Lao — agreed to sell all the banana leaves she had, even though she had saved them for a different restaurant.

It all worked out, and So So Fed made it to 11 p.m. The last lingering customers left, and the dismantling began. Leftover produce, meat and pantry items were divided into items that could be used next week and what could go home with staff. One cook took yellowtail scraps for his cats. The leftover curry and brined chicken thighs were handed out, as were the flowers from the tables.

Surfaces were scrubbed down, while dishes were washed and categorized into what Voraotsady had brought and what belonged to OK YAKI. They’d hear about it if anything got left behind, Voraotsady said, and she didn’t want to drive 30 minutes to pick up a spoon.

A pop-up crew doesn’t have the luxury of slacking off the cleaning at close for the next day’s shift to complain about. As guests, the staff has to leave the space even cleaner than they found it.

It takes a lot of trust for a business owner to open their space up to a stranger. So So Fed’s manager used to work in the Bay Area, and said the restaurant-sharing deal would never have worked there. There’s a willingness to help each other out in Atlanta, she said.

By 2 a.m., cleanup was completed and So So Fed was repacked into the 4Runner. Voraotsady didn’t seem to have sat down once during the night.

The team shared a round of shots — Voraotsady chose Fernet — and cheered. Outside, some lit cigarettes and lingered under the awning, relaxed for the first time in 48 hours.

Until recently, there were days where So So Fed only broke even. Lately, though, they’ve been profitably busy — maybe even too busy.

But Voraotsady feels like she finally knows how to run a restaurant now, with consistent recipes and steady marketing. It’s a huge jump for someone who started by panic-shredding papaya to order. Back home, her husband would unload the car, and she’d be asleep by 4 a.m. In six days, she’d do it all over again.

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