Through June 30, visitors at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in Crown Heights can look forward to enjoying fresh and bold bites, served up by the Caribbean American style burger joint Rogers Burgers.
On Mar. 1, the immigrant-owned fast-casual burger restaurant, located in the heart of Little Caribbean on Rogers Ave in Flatbush, Brooklyn, opened a pop-up location in the museum’s upstairs cafe area. The residency will feature a smaller version of their traditional menu that blends Caribbean flavors like jerk and pikliz with ubiquitous American fast food items like burgers, fries, and wings.
The restaurant operates from Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The pop-up location is made possible by the museum’s Culinary Residency Incubator Support Program (CRISP), which invites local food entrepreneurs in an effort to help expand their local reach.
Josue Pierre and Jonathan Pierre-Lafleur, Haitian immigrants and the co-owners of Rogers Burgers, say they’re excited to introduce the flavors of their homeland to a new customer base.
“Being able to go to a place like the museum, where there’s a diverse set of folks that are there and watching them say, ‘I want to try this,’ it’s a great experience,” Pierre said.
Atiba Edwards, president and chief executive officer of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, said CRISP supports the development of businesses like Rogers Burgers in the same way the museum supports the advancement of children and families. “Rogers Burgers brings their Caribbean-American flavors to the children and families who visit this space to learn more about Caribbean culture through food,” Edwards told Documented.
Although the museum is located in the heart of Crown Heights, a heavily Caribbean neighborhood, visitors come to the museum from all over the city. Pierre said he spoke with families who traveled from Park Slope and South Brooklyn to attend. On their first day, the Rogers Burgers pop-up made more than 115 sales during the museum’s Lunar New Year event.
“It was a strong start and a great sign that museum visitors are excited to have a burger concept with a kid-friendly menu inside the space,” Pierre-Lafleur said, adding that several menu items sold out.
But the co-owners say that their pop-up experiment is about more than just the food — it’s about finding ways to connect with new customers and teach children and their families a bit more about their food’s Caribbean roots. The pop-up’s menu features kid-friendly options such as sliders and chicken tenders, and is decked out with word puzzles and fun quizzes that test kiddos’ knowledge of the food — and even challenges them to identify which countries’ foods are represented in their offerings.
“There’s a lot of education and informing them that there’s a story behind this food,” Pierre-Lafleur said. “It’s not just spicy, but it comes from somewhere. We want to explain that aspect of the food.”
Now, the Haitian entrepreneurs are considering how to maximize their efforts. Based on live customer interactions they’ve observed at the pop-up as well as from surveys and sales data, they’re testing out which menu items could be used for potential cooking classes at the museum. Pierre and Pierre-Lafleur said they hope visitors’ consumption of their Caribbean-American fusion foods at the pop-up can be a gateway, sparking curiosity about trying other cultural staples beyond the museum walls.
“It would be the easiest way for them to be exposed to Caribbean food — by eating a burger with pikliz, by eating a burger with jerk sauce,” Pierre-Lafleur said.
Running a small business in New York City has never been easy, but especially so in recent years.The second quarter of 2025 saw a net decline of almost 5,000 businesses across the city, according to a report from the city’s Economic Development Corporation. The Rogers Burgers shop owners told Documented that while expansion has always been a part of their business plans, it’s a blessing to do it in a pop-up capacity, which carries inherently less overhead and risk, during a time when many businesses are being forced to downsize or shutter their doors.
“This [CRISP] program allows us to just be in the market and also there’s a capacity to expand very quickly and in a very short time,” Pierre-Lafleur said.
Many of the shop’s workers are immigrants, from the Caribbean and Latin America. And while the shop owners say their business has yet to be negatively impacted by reports of reduced foot traffic in immigrant neighborhoods due to immigration enforcement fears, the owners have engaged employees to understand their rights as immigrants.
“I think it’s important for us to make sure our team knows their rights in this country,” said Pierre-Lafleur. “We’re also immigrants, so we’re going through a similar situation as them in general.”
Pierre said that when the residency program ends, he’s excited to have a better idea of what business activities they can pursue beyond their existing brick-and-mortar storefront.
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“We’re not McDonald’s, we’re not huge, but we are a small part of that,” Pierre said, speaking to the consistent throughlines involved in running a food business. “Our suppliers, for example, are still shocked at how many orders we placed for such a small burger shop.”
The next big move for the burger joint is right around the corner: the restaurant will join a host of vendors at Prospect Park’s Smorgasburg food market, which will run every Sunday between April and October.
“Us stepping out there, it’s job creation. It’s also economic development in its own way,” Pierre said.
