Daniel Harthausen

“I have Young Mother. It’s been a restaurant for three years that people recognize and know, but it’s not real. It’s just on the internet,” jokes Daniel Harthausen, winner of HBO’s first cooking competition, The Big Brunch.

Awarded a $300,000 cash prize, Haurthausen is setting up shop for Young Mother to finally live in the real world. He’s also designing the space to help other pop-ups live IRL, too.

It’s apt we’re meeting at Helen’s, an institution of Richmond’s restaurant community- the city Haurthausen calls home. Supporting ‘pop-up culture’ before it had a name, Helen’s has not only hosted aspiring chefs’ projects but also served as a launchpad for numerous DJs, curators, and other talents before they took off.

For lunch, we enjoyed a pop-up frequent to Helen’s, Eat Boi, having its Gai Bites and Spring Rolls. Harthausen is wearing a 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup shirt, highlighting a core part of Young Mother’s origin story. Growing up in a Korean household, he lived in Japan for an extended period. The inspiration for YM comes from “trying to find similarities between the two cultures.”

“There’s a pretty long and traumatic history between the two countries, but we’re hitting that point where people start to see how these two overlap each other,” he explains. Diving into how Japan occupied Korea from the early to mid-20th century, Haurthausen describes that this history is often talked about in an “apologetic way that diminishes the trauma”. Instead, he views Young Mother as a way to reshape the narrative around resilience.

Food provided by Eat Boi

“Why is it a story about what Japan gave Korea? Why isn’t a story about the resilience of Korean culture? How did they resist and keep their culture while being pushed away?”

Transcribing this story to the public through a pop-up took a lot of testing and iterating until it was polished enough to be picked up by the likes of a major network. The support along the way is what inspired Harthausen to dedicate Young Mother to helping other pop-ups have a home.

Harthausen notes that marketing Young Mother was often a labor of love, getting food into the hands of friends and industry peers to increase word-of-mouth.

“People can’t really drop $150 on dinner, so I made my price point $50 per seat,” recalls Haurthausen. With a relatively low price point for a multi-course meal, Young Mother’s exclusivity in its marketing brought the pop-up a lot of allure. Even before The Big Brunch fame, Young Mother has always had sold-out waitlists for its dinners.

Outside of Young Mother, Harthausen also uses his pop-up Bad Name as a sandbox for experimentation. This enables him to focus on trends. He says that since the pandemic, food has shifted towards a focus on nostalgia.

“With any niche, everything's cyclical,” remarks Harthausen, “People are finding that nostalgia play: the thing that's inaccessible will always be what's new and sexy. If I can’t get what used to be in the 70s and I make it, that’s a way to market it.”

Taking his education on marketing and managing Young Mother’s pop-ups, Harthausen hopes to make the process of reaching out and asking for pop-up space easier. He says that a challenge is the awkward process of cold calling, which can be daunting for novice chefs.

“When I first started cooking, there was a clear path to take as a cook where you could eventually have your own restaurant, accolades, and make connections," Haurthausen tells Knead. “I got tired of not being able to cook what I wanted, so I asked Alchemy, the coffee shop I was at, ‘hey. can I cook here?”

Young Mother will offer pop-ups ranging from wings to ramen to fine dining concepts and anything else in between. It’ll have some criteria for the regularly rotating mix of restaurants, including the ability to handle large dinner or bar food service. The assortment of restaurants aims to be diverse and focused on replicating quality. Regardless of inspiration for a chef’s menu, YM aims to be a kitchen where creativity can thrive. After all, that’s what pop-ups are about.

Special thanks to Helen's for hosting this story.