We Walk into a Pop Up

Garden Cocktails Pop Up at The Lime Lite, Fresno, California
Pop-ups are a thing these days. You don’t need a brick and mortar space to get a business started. You also don’t have to run your business strictly through the internet. There are pop ups with everything from pizza to pop tarts. When we heard about a pop up bar with garden cocktails, we knew we needed to go.

Garden Cocktails is the bar that “popped up” at The Lime Lite Restaurant and Lounge in Fresno. We were not strictly in The Lime Lite; we were in the tented patio area next to the restaurant, with tables and a bar that looked a lot like the bar inside, though we were not. (The patio bar faced the window behind the bar in the restaurant, so we were looking at the backs of the bottles behind the inside bar -- which was kind of cool.)

People were enjoying their dinners at the tables on the patio, kept warm by heaters overhead. At one end of the tented area, Luke Fisher, who owns Garden Cocktails, had set up tables. The front table was full of beautiful fruit, vegetables, and herbs. The back table was full of bottles. Gabi, Luke's fiancee, stood at a tall round table on one side, where she took orders.

We asked about drinks. Gabi handed us a paper menu, and we stepped back to consider our choices. Mindy decided to go with the Wild Toyon Berry Gin Fizz (berry infused gin, Cara Cara oranges and Mandarin juices, soda water and egg whites), and I ordered Sage Heaven (whiskey, raspberries, sage and ginger). Gabi charged Mindy’s card with one of those small square devices attached to her phone -- a recent addition to the business, which usually uses a larger tablet for financial transactions. (These devices for using credit cards have certainly made pop ups easier in an increasingly cash free world.)

When Luke had a breather from mixing drinks, we asked him what set his cocktails apart. “I grew the majority of what you see here. The rest is from farmer’s markets,” he told us. And not only local farmers markets; he goes where he needs to go for the best fruit, such as Santa Monica for mangoes and berries. He’s even willing to go to Costco if he can establish the provenance of the fruit, ensuring it is fresh and wholesome (turns out, Fresno Costcos often stock local fruit). It’s all part of what he called his “farm to cocktail program.” He said, “If you’re going to put stuff in your body, you want to know what’s there.”

Most places that make cocktails, according to Luke, have settled into “redundant combinations of sugar, citrus, and spirits.” He credits his search for cocktail innovations to Matthew Biancaniello, the author of Eat Your Drink: Culinary Cocktails. Luke worked with Biancaniello in Southern California, but eventually moved back to Fresno, where he was born and raised. His parents live in the area and have practiced sustainable living for many years. The 5,000 square foot family garden provides much of the produce for Luke’s venture.

Luke has been working on these cocktails for five years, but he’s been a bartender for twenty. He started branching out with pop up events a little over a year ago, but he says catering is currently his bread and butter, and he hopes to “move in a direction no one else is moving” with cocktails that have “a taste that will blow your lid.”

An unusual citrus fruit in the fruit bowl on the front table caught Mindy’s eye, and Luke offered it to her as a sample. (We forgot to write down the name of the fruit, but it was like a kumquat in that it could be eaten skin and all, though it was larger and shaped even more like a pear. It might be a mandarinquat) Like much of his citrus fruit and his herbs, he grew it. Luke even freezes and cuts his own ice, cutting it up with a butcher’s knife.

As Luke went back to preparing drinks for other patrons, I took the opportunity to ask Gabi our standard two questions, “What makes for a good bar?” and “What makes for a good church?”

Gabi said that a good bar has several elements: “A bartender knowing you name; a place you can go and be yourself, where there’s no pressure to be anyone other than yourself.”

She said she’d grown up in the Fresno area, attending charismatic churches but she got tired of certain aspects of the non-denominational church scene. She takes issue with the pressures of emotion driven worship that she described as “experiencing God through chord progressions.”

While attending college at a Christian university in Southern California, she went to what she described as a liturgical Baptist Church. A number of PhDs from her school taught, and much of the music was performed by classically trained musicians. Since returning to Fresno, she hasn’t been able to find any church like that. She’d like a more contemplative worship service, like some Episcopalians do, but different theology. She wishes she could find a worship service that was more introvert friendly, unlike your average charismatic or evangelical service.

Mindy found an opportunity to ask Luke our two questions. He said the bartender or staff “should have a servant’s heart. Growing up, you should have been the kid who shared your lunch.” He said the staff in a good bar will project an attitude of “they matter more than me.”A good bartender listens to people he serves, and he remembers what they talked about last time they were together, mastering how to attend to people.

A church, he said, should do “almost exactly the same thing” as a bar. Luke was born and raised in the church and attends a church in Fresno, but some practices in the church bother him. “I think we need to change our tradition of trying to woo the Spirit in the church.” Applying emotional pressure to people seems to him to be a “slap in the face to the Lord.” “Too many churches attack people’s morality instead of loving them. “God is just enough” to judge people, yet “we get caught up in the outcasting” instead of recognizing that “if you’re running with Him you want to do what makes Him happy. We should strive to be the light of the world but not carry the mantle of it.”

There are good and bad pop ups in this world. As a kid, I loved pop up books. As an adult, I hate pop up ads. Luke’s Garden Cocktails is a very, very good pop up.