Owner of Lasy Chef pop-up Richella Acosta is anything but lazy. She held her first pop-up at Bar Rollins downtown on Valentine’s Day this year, slinging gluten-free and vegetarian Filipino food made with ingredients from her home garden. But before this event, Lasy Chef was just an Instagram account meant to keep her healthy eating habits on track.
“I started [the account] for no reason other than to hold myself accountable for eating good and healthy,” she said. She created the Lasy Chef account in 2018 with the handle @lasychef (@lazychef was taken, she said), posting photos and videos of food she made in her home kitchen. After moving out of her parents’ North Charleston house to attend College of Charleston, Acosta wanted to prove to herself and her friends that making a home-cooked meal doesn’t take a lot of work.
The support of her friends eventually pushed her out of her home kitchen and towards her pop-up concept.
“I’ve always hosted dinners at my house, fed my friends and had little picnics,” Acosta said. “And people have always been like, ‘OK, Richella, whenever you start a restaurant or start feeding other people, let me know and we’ll be there!’”
Taking the next step
Acosta recognized the potential of launching a pop-up in Charleston.
“I’ve worked in food and bev in Charleston for a while now and saw that pop-ups were exponentially growing,” she said. “I just think it’s a really cool structure because you don’t have to invest money upfront and or have a kitchen or food truck. It’s a way for people that don’t have that money off the bat to still get their name out there.”
Acosta specializes in Filipino cuisine, which is normally meat-heavy, and instead uses vegetarian and sustainably sourced ingredients in addition to offering gluten-free and vegan options.
“It’s exciting because I’ve been cooking vegetables and cooking as a vegetarian for years,” she said. “So even though I’m not vegetarian anymore, with that experience, it’s like I’m always thinking with those people in mind.”
Valentine’s Day was the perfect time to showcase her meals to a wider audience, she said.
“Building that first menu was like, ‘Oh, what little gifts would I give to my friends for Valentine’s Day to show them that I love them?’” she said. “It ended up just flowing really easily because they were honestly things that I was excited about and excited to share with my friends, and it did feel like a special little gift.”
Some of the menu items at the pop-up were bright-red beet hummus, heart-shaped savory squash, caramelized hand pies and periwinkle-colored focaccia bread tinted by butterfly pea flower. All the items were created to taste good and appear aesthetically pleasing on the plate.
Acosta has participated in two more pop-ups since launching earlier this year. Her second pop-up at Bar Rollins was on the spring equinox, followed by an Earth Day collaboration with Filipino and Asian fusion pop-up Bok Choy Boy.
“It’s really exciting making Filipino food because I feel like I grew up in America, and I don’t speak Tagalog (the Filipino language),” she said, “so, the way that I’ve been connecting with my family and my ancestry more is always through food.”
A DIY spirit
Acosta grew up surrounded by horticulture and gardening, thanks to her parents who moved to Charleston from the Philippines when she was young because of the similar humid, tropical climates.
At her parent’s home, her dad has transformed the backyard into a luscious garden with fruits and vegetables native to the Philippines, like bittermelon, upo (also known as bottle gourd) and moringa, a plant often used in soups. This childhood oasis, as she called it, has extended to her own home.
Acosta said this horticulture and gardening background is part of the ethos of cooking “lazy.” After picking produce from her home garden or from a market, she can just throw everything together for a delicious, healthy meal, she explained.
“When it comes down to bringing it into the kitchen, you don’t have to nuke the ingredients or spend 40 minutes cooking these things. You should be celebrating the natural flavors that come from like all these delicious ingredients that you source.”
This homegrown approach has extended to Acosta’s other passions or “identities,” as she calls it, such as her musician moniker DJ Dijon of Rave Salon, a DIY underground collective of DJs and electronic music producers.
“That’s also why I felt really excited about the pop-up scene growing, because it is this kind of DIY approach,” she said. “[Pop-up chefs are] finding a way to get their food to the people, which is really, really cool to me.”
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