You should be able to add a button or rich text filed with a link to the new contact page next to your reference field. It wouldn’t be exactly the same as what you are talking about but pretty close. If they don’t find the name in the look up field, they just click the “Add new contact” button or link next to the field to add one.

Thanks for the response Raymond - I ended up creating a template field fed from a separate model that displays my current options as a picklist in a pop-up modal when a user clicks on the default text 'Select your record…". That modal also has a button for ‘Add a new record’ that launches a second modal with the required fields for the record (and a couple others we wanted). When you hit a custom save button, everything is updated in the model, and the modals close. The real magic was adding both the Template field and reference field - which is either populated by choosing an option from the picklist in the first modal or creating a new record in the second modal - into my form with render conditions to hide the reference field and display the template field until the reference field had a value. So now when a user selects or creates the necessary record, the fields swap in the background as the modals are closing and the user see the updated, correct input moving forward.