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Soulyve makes spontaneous return for one day only

July 15, 2019   ·   0 Comments

By Makayla Pereira

Chef Phil DeWar advertised on Instagram that Soulyve would be hosting a pop-up sale of the popular former downtown restaurant’s authentic reggae wraps last Friday July 5.

The idea to do a pop-up sale began when one of chef Phil’s friends came to him and asked if he would ever be able to get his hands on another Soulyve famous reggae wrap.

“Since closing in December of 2018 we’ve been hearing a lot about how the people miss Soulyve,” he said.

“The idea actually came from one of my friends; we kind of made a joke about it Wednesday of last week. I’ve been doing a dinner series in a few other towns around but I haven’t really done anything in Orangeville since closing and I thought, ‘Let me do something casual and see how it goes.’ ”

Phil says there was very little preparation needed to be done in order to host a reggae wrap pop-up sale. He organized help and ordered the product right away and they were ready to sell by Friday morning.  

He went on to say, “I needed to do something and I decided I wasn’t doing anything this Friday, why not do a pop-up? I called a few friends to come help me cook and my family all joined in to help that day”

“The reason we only had reggae wraps was because they are specific to Soulyve. You can get Jamaican patties or jerk chicken anywhere but the reggae wraps were a creation of Soulyve’s. You can’t find them anywhere else,” he said.

The pop-up began at 11 a.m. and continued until 4 p.m. that day. They had planned to prepare 100 wraps for sale when the idea initially came up. After posting about the sale on social media,  Soulyve sold well over 300 wraps by the end of the day.

The sale was firs-come, first-served and by noon the line was out the door and the reggae wraps were almost sold out. Chef Phil says there was many large groups emailing pre-orders for the wraps the night the post went out and that’s when he knew this was going to be big.

Since Soulyve closed the people of Orangeville have been missing the authentic Jamaican cuisine. However Chef Phil says they too miss the people of Orangeville and the continuous flow of support their restaurant always had. 

“We miss the people as well and as much as we feel the people are missing our cuisine we do miss the interaction with the community, we miss being in the pulse of the downtown core and having everyone visiting,” he said.

“I was very pleased with the turnout, I was honored and blessed to see the community supporting us, we just opened up the back of the kitchen and to see the number of people who came out was just awesome.”

Chef Phil recently found a new way to keep Soulyve alive. He has committed to doing cooking classes, catering, restaurant consulting, and private chef services.

“Now that I’m out of the restaurant industry I am enjoying discovering other restaurants and trying their dishes. Each time I go out and do that we host a dinner to expose to other people that this is what these restaurants have to offer and expose them to my following on social media. I’ve been using my status here in Orangeville to help promote other restaurants in the industry,” he said.

As of right now there aren’t plans for another pop-up sale, but you never know what the future holds. 

“I think the response we got has influenced me to want to do it again, I don’t know when just yet but I do think we’ll do it again. We want to keep it spontaneous like that and I think it’s kind of fun that way when it’s just a pop up and you only get 48 hours notice,” said Chef Phil.

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