Category: Before

I’d bought all the free time and goodwill I could, but there was no stopping the train. We were moving back to Austin and there was no taco that could turn it around. I gave halfhearted pleas, but it was no use. The lack of movement for the previous month and a half had kicked the leg out from the half-assed tripod of hope I was balancing on. A few more gigs, an apprehension from revealing the entire truth to the breweries that had opened their doors for us, and a few more lonely cash register nights.

One of the big rules of cooking on a low budget is to not get high off your own supply. That taco you just ate might have “cost” you 59 cents, but it really cost you $4.50. At this point there was nothing left to do but eat my own tacos (literally and figuratively) and pack it up.

The last gig we ever did while living in New Orleans was at a brewery that saw three people come through on a Saturday.

Three…people.

Every single brewery owner I encountered in New Orleans was a saint. Not in the traditional way, believe me they were getting high on their own supply as well. They were a saint in the way that someone sleeps next to the beer tank, employs friends even though they don’t have enough money to pay themselves, and doesn’t give a damn about food permits so long as you make good food and don’t act like an idiot.

I mention this paragraph, because as much as it pains me that I had three people come through (two of which bought $85 worth of tacos, which, holy shit), it hurt to see them struggle. A month after this gig they closed the brewery, three people can’t sustain an expensive dream.

I got drunk in an old bar the size of a toolshed that night and vowed to be more selective. Advice I quickly forgot.

We packed things up, loaded the car, and drove back to Austin.

When we arrived back in Austin I had an email waiting for me. It was an offer to open a stall at the St. Roch’s Market new concept next to the convention center in New Orleans.

Little to no downpayment, guaranteed customers, high visibility stall with no similar food-type competitors allowed. Fuck.

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.

A few beers, a long ass day, and one email changed the course. Fed up with never getting anywhere with job applications I saw an advertisement for the New Orleans Food & Wine Experience, and a light bulb came on. If I could bluff my way into the event, I’d have a bullet point, some sort of dot, that said “I have cooked in public for strangers and it didn’t totally suck”.

Armed with a handful of Guinness and a hint of desperation I wrote the shortest, most over the top email I could think of:

“I was curious if you all had any spots left for any last minute food additions? We ran a Spanish/Creole popup during the EAST event in Austin and I’d love to do a simple Mexican showcase (with a little Cajun love) here in Nola.

If something is available just let me know what info you need and how I can help.”

To the point enough to say “we’ve cooked for the masses before” (false), vague enough to sound like a super easy addition to the event (false).

To prove just how beautiful of a city New Orleans is they simply responded with “are you local?”.

We were off to the races.

I emailed my sister in Texas and told her to bring any spanish speaking friends and I’d pay for all their drinks for the weekend, oh and it was in two weeks. Throw in one other New Orleanian and we had a staff…only thing missing was the food part.

I had never made carnitas in my entire life. I had never made tomatillo salsa before. I had pickled onions once. All I had going for me was that I’d eaten them hundreds of times.

Borrowing the Restaurant Depot card from the frog leg popup (which was borrowed from a friend running an Italian food truck) I stacked over 300 lbs of pork shoulder into a rented Airbnb freezer. How I ever got my deposit back I’ll never know (my only assumption is that cooking 300 pounds of pork shoulder in an apartment is somehow less damage than the typical bachelor party does). Eight days of round the clock cooking, marinating, shredding, frying, and packing ensued.

Take pork from freezer, thaw in fridge, take thawed pork in the fridge and soak in jalapeno & lime juice marinade, take pork that was marinating the night before and place in giant turkey roaster, take pork that was in turkey roaster for 6 hours and shred, take pork that had been shred and place in giant paella pan with peanut oil and seasoning and fry, take pork that had just finished frying and place on cooling rack, take pork from cooling rack and place in giant ziplocs and place back in the freezer. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Even my dog couldn’t stand the smell of frying pork anymore. Everything I owned reeked. Somehow after several sleep deprived days it was done. The group showed up and we somehow knocked out 1,000+ tacos using the same turkey roaster and a pancake griddle in just over 3 hours of festival service. Surrounded by Emiril Legasse & John Besh restaurants we held our own. Did everyone respect us? Nah. Did it matter? Not a bit. I got drunk (also may have yelled “yo ceviche bitch” at a respected chef later that night at a bar at 4am, story still isn’t clear).

$400,000 of debt, a bluff, and a caffeine and alcohol fueled illegal taco stand. Is this what 31 is supposed to look like?

Let’s backtrack for a second. We were supposed to move to New Orleans, get amazing jobs, and live the lassez faire lifestyle to our fullest hearts content. It was supposed to be easy. Instead the chef I was supposed to be training under had her mom pass away a week before I started (and a month after I had already signed my lease and put down a deposit), my wife couldn’t find a job without getting hit on by “good ol boy” bosses, and the company that I had just founded a few years before (and was supposed to float my finances while I chased this chef dream) took on $400,000 worth of personally guaranteed debt.

Things were low, something had to give.

I had ridden the grey area of restaurant life once before, and figured there was no such thing as “restaurant jail” but that was just for a weekend. On a sunny November weekend with nothing to lose we setup an unpermitted, unlicensed, frog-leg gumbo stand in the front of my house. Like a kid’s lemonade stand…except if that lemonade stand was ran by 5 “adults” with an unlimited supply of booze, an espresso machine, sold frog legs, and was attached to a wood crafted furniture store display.

To many observers I’m sure they saw a weird way to lose money on a Saturday. What I saw was much, much worse. Validation that you can sell food without a permit so long as you keep a low profile.

Don’t get me wrong, by all business standards this was not an overwhelming success, and I don’t think I’ve eaten a single frog leg since. Literally as I was taking my first order my dog was in the background urinated next to the serving pot. Janky is a word I’d use to describe the situation.

But that weekend came and went, the party was over and it was time to move on and the only tangible thing to show for it was a bullet point on a resume that could hopefully get my completely inexperienced ass into an actual kitchen.

Then came New Orleans.

Phone tags, email messages, dramatic long responses and it seemed I was in. We moved and it all came to a halt. With nothing else to do, and nothing else to lose, I fell back on the one thing I had just worked in Austin (and promised I had moved on from), bluffing the legality and legitimacy of my food business.

The first step was a travesty. Job requests went unanswered, job offers were revoked, and insane amount of hours were spent in the makeshift kitchen of an Airbnb. There was literally a moment at 3am, holding 10 lbs of under-ripened roasted tomatillos that tasted like someone was squirting limeade that not even a bar on Bourbon St would serve, knowing that I would only get 30 minutes worth of “napping in” if I was going to redo the entire batch for the next day’s farmers market that nearly broke me.

What the hell was this all for? There was “tens of dollars” coming in for “hundreds of hours” worth of work.