$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.