Kevin Smith Details Clerks II-Themed Mooby’s Pop-Up in New Jersey, Teases Future Locations

Mooby’s is back, and this time it’s in Kevin Smith‘s home town! After a successful run in Los Angeles, Smith has opened a pop-up in Red Bank, New Jersey. ComicBook.com had the chance to chat with Smith at the new location and he detailed what makes this spot different from the West Hollywood one and teased more could be coming in the future.

“We honestly thought we’d be done in Los Angeles, and then folks here at Gianni’s reached out,” Smith explained. “It’s a gift, not only to be able to do this in the hometown, like where [Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash] is right down the street and stuff. And we get so much, so we can have a mini Stash here at the same time. Like this Jersey version of Mooby’s is now turning this into something real, because without the Jersey version, it would only happen in WeHo, and people would’ve been like, ‘All right, well. Of course. They do that sort of thing there.’”

“Because it came out here, we got a call from three other cities, where we’re like, we know where we’re going in August, in October, and November. So that was something that six months ago, I was not like, ‘Oh, we’re going to be in the pop-up restaurant business.’ But it’s fun. I mean, I don’t know if anyone’s going to be able to retire off this sort of thing.”

“In terms of leaving what was the home base and trying it out on the road, this is the first model, and it’s done incredibly well. So we’ll keep doing that, where it’s like, we do a Mooby’s pop-up and then do a show in the area… But now that it’s kind of been modeled, like this is something we’ll keep doing until people are like, ‘We’re done with your sh*t.’ Like it’s one more arrow to add to the quiver.”

“In Los Angeles, it forced us to be creative and more charitable than we ever normally are, because we felt weird about like, ‘Should we do this kind of thing during the pandemic?’ We’re like, ‘Well, let’s just cover our bets and give away the money. That way, we’ll give it to charity and stuff… We wound up giving so much money away to charity during the last like six months, and it’s been nice. I mean, I sound like f*cking Scrooge the morning after, but there’s this wonderful feeling of like, ‘Oh.’ We gave like $10,000 to the L.A Food Bank after we did the Mooby’s drive-in birthday show out in Los Angeles… They were like, ‘Just to let you know, one buck buys four meals… So you guys bought like 40,000 meals.’ So when you hear it broken down like that, suddenly you’re like, ‘All right, let’s f*cking do more’… But at the same time, you can break a piece off of it.”

“In this case though, Gianni’s, of course, this is their business. Whereas like they’re lending it to us for a week and stuff, but it can’t be like, ‘Why don’t you give your money to charity?’ They’re like, ‘Our charity is Gianni’s. Our charity is called a business.’”

“It was adorable at one point, Derek [who started Saved by the Max] had sent designs for like, ‘Okay, so this is what the inside’s going to look like. And we’re going to put the Quick Stop here.’ And I was like … ‘You can’t put the Quick Stop there.’ He goes, ‘Why?’ I’m like, ‘Because they got the real thing down the street.’ It’s like when Disneyland Paris put up the f*cking castle.”

“So there were some things that were eliminated by virtue of the fact that it’s like, well, we’re very close to the real thing. They can go see that. But the one thing that I was so delighted that they eagle-eyed is the Elias portrait on the wall. Because technically, if you want to deep dive and be this geeky about the movies… The third Mooby’s we went to was Clerks II, and that was meant to be here [in New Jersey]. So technically this is it. For all intents and purposes, this is where Dante and Randall were.”

“That’s what melted my heart when I walked in, and I saw the Elias picture on the wall. I was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re literally in their Mooby’s.’”

You can learn more about the Mooby’s pop-up here.

Photo by Derek Berry