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).