The first Sunday after Pocket Change opened, the third-floor rooftop was hosting a husband-and-wife oyster pop-up. Sarah Welch and Cameron Rolka of Mink, the raw bar in Corktown, set up at the top of the building with their portable kit and shucked through what regulars said was the bar's most efficient afternoon since opening day. Welch is a James Beard semifinalist and an owning partner at Mink and Marrow, the Eastern Market butcher shop and restaurant where she was executive chef until April 30.
By May, she was on her way to opening Umbo with Rolka in Traverse City. The Pocket Change pop-up was one of the last Detroit dates the two would do as a unit before the relocation north. Their oyster program at Mink runs east coast and west coast both, and the rooftop pop-up did the same.
Pacific Northwest from one cooler. Gulf and Cape Cod from the other. Mignonette in plastic squeeze bottles.
Lemon wedges in a hotel pan. The format is the format Pocket Change wants to keep running. Sundays are reserved for guest chefs.
The rooftop has a bar and a half-dozen tables and a view of the eastern market sheds. Nelson Kazan, the bar's owner, has run pop-up nights inside other people's bars for years. Now he runs them in his own.
There were plenty of oysters. The Bingo Bangos came up two flights of stairs in shaker tins. The bar's Italian, French, Slovenian, and Austrian wines paired surprisingly well with bivalves at sixty bucks a bottle, which is what most of the wine costs.
Welch and Rolka shucked for four hours. People who showed up at five had to wait twenty minutes. People who showed up at seven got the last of the Pacific oysters.
The kits packed up at nine. Pocket Change is a small bar above an old print shop with a sign that says COCKTAILS in red neon. On Sundays it is also an oyster bar.
The next pop-up was already booked.
1454 Gratiot Ave., third floor patio, Eastern Market.
