Snap Pea: Creative Dining
Late September wind gently sweeps past the edge of a long, wide tunnel that cuts through a greenway on little-treaded part of NC State’s campus. Beyond it, shrouds of lush bushes, shrubs, and trees frame the trail to no visible end. There are no signs at the entryway, nor at the foot of the narrow wood-planked ped bridge that led here.
Underneath the tunnel, a pine-colored table stretches across almost its entire length, flanked by a row of cushioned wooden chairs on either side. On the table, 64 places have been laid out: a fork to the left, a knife and a spoon to the right, and a crisp white napkin folded atop a menu card in the middle. The rest of the table space is tinkling with glass: water glasses alternate with wine glasses, carafes, and candles in both tealights and long votives, their sheen casting an ethereal glimmer onto the table. Along the edges of the tunnel, stage lights have been plotted at small intervals, emitting an enveloping red-orange glow that dissolves the descending evening chill. As the time approaches 6:45pm, a single string of exposed bulbs above the table lights up. Dinner is ready.
This is Snap Pea’s September pop-up dinner. Every month, a host of culinary devotees in North Carolina scramble to secure tickets to the catering company’s creative conception. The dinners are always themed, exclusively focused on local produce, and the location is never revealed to guests until 48 hours before. Past spots in the Triangle area that have hosted the pop-up include UNC’s Morehead Planetarium, a Tesla dealership in Raleigh, a deserted Kmart, St. Agnes Hospital, and the historic Bynum Bridge. Tonight, dinner is served in a greenway tunnel on NC State’s Centennial Campus, with a vegetarian menu showcasing the best of this season’s harvest.
Snap Pea is all about the vegetables, and has been since chef and founder Jacob Boehm first moved into a big vegetarian co-op in college, cooking nightly with the fifty-odd others who lived there. Inspired by a class his senior year called “Food and Performance,” Boehm sought a way to bring his skills in theatrical lighting design to the more performative elements of food. As a final project for the class, he construed a conceptual menu centered around bitterness as a flavor, and from then on started to put together his own dinners for a commercial audience. A Chapel Hill native, Boehm moved back to North Carolina after college and started Snap Pea.
“At first I was just sort of doing a dinner here and there. I did a private event once every two or three months, because I didn't have a name for myself here at all. And then slowly it picked up a little bit. Eventually, we had our first public pop-up in September of 2014. So five years ago this past September, and we've been doing them almost monthly since then,” Boehm says of his experience of launching the business. Now, Snap Pea is a fully-fledged catering company so busy with bookings that Boehm has to guard weekends for pop-ups and spends the week leading up to them planning: “Typically, the pop-up is so intense that that is our event for the week.”
The amount of forethought that the Snap Pea team puts into the pop-ups really shows. There are nine courses on the menu for this pop-up, and each, it seems, has brought something new to the palates of their guests, who coo and gasp in delight at the reinventions on their plates. Zucchini Carpaccio, BBQ Potato-Chip Spiced Corn “ribs,” Jujube with Sourdough Cake—Snap Pea introduces unprecedented ways of consuming both unusual and common ingredients. As an homage to its location, each dish has been associated with a specific building on NC State’s campus and is accompanied by Boehm’s energetic storytelling about the produce, from which guests learn that Southern Yuzu is the only citrus that grows in North Carolina (but it’s not an actual citrus) and that Mahleb is a spice made from the seeds of a particular species of cherry.
Throughout the dinner, Boehm runs back and forth between the dinner table and the kitchen, set up in open air just outside the tunnel, to interact with the guests. He invites them to observe the cooking process, emphasizing that there are no limits to this experience. Standing amongst tables of neatly laid out plates, Rachel Schmidt, Snap Pea’s pastry and sous-chef, explains how the sourdough came to taste nothing like itself in her impressive dessert concoction. By the end of the night, it’s almost as though the guests have just been to a festive holiday dinner, and even the most ardent carnivores leave satisfied and merry, maybe even with a few new friends at the table.
Although the menu doesn’t get written until Monday of the pop-up dinner—they only know then what produce will be available—the Snap Pea team is working on other aspects of their creative project all the time. Sourcing ingredients, menu-design, location-scouting, Boehm himself is always immersed in his duties. Pulling up a video on his phone, which appears to be taken from the vantage point of a tractor driving through a vast expanse of field, Boehm shows me where he had been right before our meeting: looking at a possible setting for the pop-up next month.
“I always worry about finding new cool locations and the bar getting higher. I don't worry about there being no more places, but it is a constant struggle to keep—as the bar raises—blowing minds at that same level… It’s hard, and as you do a really cool location, that just raises the bar for next time. And now it’s like, how am I gonna top that?”
So would he ever consider doing a pop-up in the same location twice? Boehm’s answer is a staunch no.
“It feels unfair to people who came to that pop-up with the idea that we're doing this thing that is only ever gonna happen once, and then we do it all over again. What if that person buys a ticket, they come to two pop-ups, and they happen to end up being in the same location?”