Riding high off of success bred by ignorance from the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience we continued, what in essence, was a bluff. I never thought it would work. Somehow fast forward a week later and I’m drinking beer on a patio at a brewery in New Orleans and I hear the foodtruck yell out the name of the person listed on their website as the tap room manager.
I pound four beers.
After the booze kicks in with seemingly nothing to lose I approached the tap manager, mumbled a few words about tacos, and hoped for the best.
This shit is all about luck.
Lucky to be there, lucky to be somewhat drunk, lucky to be desperate. Most of all lucky that they needed someone to pop up the following Friday badly. Without hesitation I said yes, begged friends for a Restaurant Depot card, and bought way too many ingredients.
We sold out our first day. Then again, again, again, and again.
We moved on to more breweries in the rotation (some more profitable than others) and learned that as long as you’re helping people keep butts in their bar stools there isn’t really a such thing as “health code”.
New Orleans is a magical city. One where a random dude can decide he wants to make tacos using an oversized turkey roaster and a pancake griddle and no one is really going to stop him (unless his food sucks). We were riding high. Broke, drunk, over-worked, and pretty happy. The one thing they don’t warn you about though is tourist season. You don’t see it coming, you hear about it, but you don’t believe in it. Like some mythical creature that turns everyone’s wallets into bear traps and the city into an abandoned heat wave. If you were one of the 10 people at the bar ordering tacos, better believe that the extra seasoning was sweat.
A string of bad gigs at the start of this season crapped all over the high times. From snagging $500 in cash on a Friday happy hour under the table, to being lucky if we moved 20 tacos in an entire evening, it was rough. I’m not happy, wife’s not happy, tacos aren’t happy, liver…it’s New Orleans so the liver is still happy.