A Hot Dog Cart Experience to Remember

Making food with my mother has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.From the first time we made blueberry muffins, in our tiny third floor apartment kitchen which was more like a closet.  The whole process from cracking the eggs to the final  beautiful muffins. I would be the happiest kid on the planet, mixing and measuring all the ingredients to put in the famous red plastic bowl my mother always used. It was our weekend ritual too make some kind of baked goods that made our apartment smell like heaven on earth. As I got older I spent less and less time in the kitchen, but I seemed to have a natural ability too cook things and make them taste good. I had other things to do besides spending the night baking with my mom and at this point she was working her way up the culinary ladder. She had become an assistant manger at Friednly's and then moved on to becoming a sous chef at Timothy's. What she really wanted was her own restaurant and when i was about twelve she got her wish. I didn't think anything of becoming a chef. That wasn't a dream for me. I wanted to be the next Roger Clemens or Tony Hawk. Cooking was something girls did not a kid like me. I had big dreams and cooking Swedish meatballs was not in the picture but off to work at my mother's first restaurant I went. This was the beginning of my culinary career and where I learned some valuable lessons. 

   I think it was my freshman year of high school and I would work every Saturday and every other Sunday. My mother had rented out a space in the Quality Factory Outlets which had a lot of discount stores and needed a cafeteria style greasy spoon. It was in the late eighties and there weren't all the crazy diets we have today.  My first Saturday on the job was a long one. I didn't much appreciate my mom waking me up at five in the morning to get up to go to work. This day was already off to a great start. I walked into the restaurant and flopped down on the first booth i saw. I was hoping to hide from my mom for a little while but no luck with that. She gave me the job of sweeping and  mopping the floors because the night before the guy had done a horrible job. Me being the FNG or F*#$%**  New Guy I got the job. After that the rest of the day was spent wiping tables,cleaning dishes, and eventually helping to run the  hot dog cart we had on the upper level of the outlet. I really enjoyed this because I got to do something else besides cleaning and i liked dealing with the customers. It really never got that busy so I mostly did it by myself for  most of the day.  Mary Beth, who was  one of the girls working for my mom and was supposed to be helping me. To say she was working would be stretching the truth a little.After a careful inspection from my mom, she said "You still have all your fingers and haven't run away screaming". She decided that I would be able to come back tomorrow and maybe i could get paid. I said to her "If I am not getting paid then she better find a new FNG". We all had a good laugh and day one of my culinary career was a success!

    It was the beginning of a new school year and i went back to working my Saturday and every other Sunday shifts again. This year I got complete control of the hot dog cart. My mother sat me down and had a big talk with me about how it was a big responsibility,well i just stood up and told her bring it on. Now to say I was a little nervous was a slight understatement. I remember getting all the stuff ready for the cart which was upstairs from the restaurant. So all the stuff had to be brought up every morning and brought back down every night. So I started chopping my onions,stacking my soda,filling the mustard and ketchup and all the other prep items I had to do to get the cart ready for the rush. It went along pretty smoothly for the first couple a weeks. I had some rough patches but all in all I thought I was the master of the hot dog cart. It was Christmas time and buses from New York would bring people down to the outlet to shop. shopping. We had stationed the hot dog cart right in front of the entrance where all the buses let the people out.  On average for a Saturday I would sell about three to four hundred hot dogs a day plus the chips and sodas. So when time came for the holiday rush I made sure I was stocked, locked and ready rock when the Greyhounds pulled in. Every day the outlet manager would tell my mother how many buses were coming that day. The most we had ever done was fifty five. George who was the manager told us we had a busy day and that forty one buses were coming but only twenty five would be full. Usually most of the buses would be full but during the holidays they would send extra buses even if they weren't filled. I Set up my stations and got ready for the madness

  The first bus rolled in right at eleven and they kept coming until the bay was full. Most of the people wouldn't eat right away and some would head right down to the restaurant. I had my customers who would get right off the bus go to the bathroom and grab a dog, bag a chips, and a Coke soda or Sprite soda. I never really thought about it until I heard it called that. It kinda makes sense, I mean we call it orange soda and grape soda why not call it Coke soda. So around two we had gone through most of the buses.and maybe were waiting on five more. Then i saw George,who was the outlet manager and my mother talking. It didn't look like it was a good conversation. My mom turned towards me and started walking a little to fast for my liking. She finally got close  grabbed  me and said "get ready for some fun because one of the other outlets had a fire and all their buses are coming here in twenty minutes". I didn't know what to say except that I needed more onions.She just gave me a smile and said "Maybe some hot dogs too". I just nodded and mumbled some buns would be good. I got a list of all the stuff I would need and stocked my self for another big rush. I saw the first buses pulling in and got ready to do battle with these people. It was like a parade one after the other they kept coming. I had a line about fifty people deep and it wasn't getting any smaller. By the time I had gone through my first box of a hundred dogs, the second wave of people were getting off the buses. I had to tell the people they had to wait while I cooked their dogs, One after the other I put the dogs in the buns, dug into the ice, grabbed the sodas, offered up some chips and rang them up.By five o'clock I had gone through fifteen hundred hot dogs and a whole bunch of soda. I never thought the line would come to an end.. I just keep going and going until I was able to see the end of the line.When I saw that last person in line, I started thanking God and wondering just how much money we had made on this crazy day. The most the cart had made was one thousand dollars and that had been one of the craziest days or so I had been told by everyone in the outlet. I cleaned up and got ready to go home. I went down to the restaurant and saw my mom in the back doing the books for the day. When it was over, I had made twenty five hundred dollars in six hours. On record it was the busiest day our restaurant, the hot dog cart and the outlet had since the place had been open.

  I just remember on the ride home , sitting in the backseat so tired that I didn't want to move. I kept Remembering the people saying " look at this kid go". I was a machine that day but my body was in need of a full tune up. A hot shower and my bed were the only things in my future. Then my mom told me how proud she was that I had made it through the day without losing my cool or having any major problems. She said to me"You need to be able to do  these things if you are going to be able to make it this business". I think after that day no matter what situation I was in I would be able to handle it. I think that's why when I have interviewed for a head chef position with a new restaurant. I am supremely confident when I tell them anything they throw at me I can handle it. I think back to this day a lot. It gives me a great deal of pride to know that I am able to handle situations like these and learn from them. I think that is the most important thing you can learn. It doesn't matter so much if you succeed  completely, just that you did your best and learned from your triumphs and your failures.