Once upon a time, in a previous era of my life, my then-boyfriend and I decided to open a food cart.
He was a talented chef. I had a knack for entrepreneurship. With our powers combined, we could make magic. We dreamed about having a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the future. But the food cart was step one—a way to gain proof of concept and
build a following while keeping expenses low.
On opening day, we were brimming with excitement. We flung open the window. Ta-da! Open for business!
Nobody came up to the cart. Not a single soul.
An hour passed. No customers. Another hour. Still no customers.
People kept walking by—chatting with friends, scrolling on their phones—but nobody purchased our food. They didn’t even glance in our direction. It felt like we were invisible.
Dread pooled in my stomach.
After standing awkwardly behind the cash register for three hours, with zero sales, I said to Brandon, “We have
to get out of the cart.”
"We can’t just stand here inside the cart. It’s not working," I explained. "I’m going to walk up and down the street and hand out free samples.”
For the rest of the day, that’s what I did. I passed out hundreds of samples. I will be honest. It was not fun for me.
I’m extremely introverted. Prancing up and down the sidewalk—chit-chatting with hundreds of strangers and saying, "Would you like to try our sea salt caramel and whiskey-infused brownie?"—is my personal version of hell. I didn't want to do it. But we needed to do something.
The thing is, it worked.
By the end of
the day, we had a trickle of customers. Not an avalanche. But it was something. It was a start.
In the years that followed, with a lot of hard work, our cart expanded into a restaurant space. Then we built a team and moved into a larger space. The restaurant is still open to this day, garnering rave reviews in Eater, Thrillist, Time Out, and more.
