Three weeks ago I posted Doing Something About the Economy, a diary about our personal effort to resurrect the U.S. economy: my wife and I acquired a small blue collar café in Fruitland Park, Florida, three miles south of The Villages, the community of 70,000+ retirees where Sarah Palin made 30,000 fans swoon in her first post-convention campaign debut.
We are serving healthy, nutritious, tasty food at the lowest possible prices to blue collar families who are steadily losing their jobs as the Bush economy crumbles. I was an idealistic social worker 30 years ago, my wife lives to cook ‘green,’ we both feel like missionaries in Zambia.
I meant to post weekly updates detailing our progress converting the heathens. So far, we’ve logged 392 hours of darn hard labor, and today is our first day off since Dec. 1. I have about an hour before we go back to re-wax floors and bake brownies we can sell for 50¢. So here goes...
I’ve posted pix below, and the story of the Battle of Biscuits and Gravy. If you’re into Zen, you might find it entertaining.
Here’s what the interior looked like the day before we re-opened. The back wall and counter are white bathroom tile. (Caucasian) flesh-colored walls. Meaningless pictures. Eighteen seats and three decrepit barstools.
The good part: we bought the business assets and an eight-year lease, total cost about $230,000, on two handshakes and a $1,000 first-month payment. We don’t have a single piece of paper that says we owe anybody anything. We could walk away tomorrow, legally.
This is the way good old boys did it in the olden times of someone’s nostalgic fantasy. I’m still amazed that it worked for us, but I can be a hard negotiator when my wife’s looking over my shoulder. The former owner was eager to sell, the landlord was eager to get his first month’s rent, and we were enthusiastic (and organized) about our growth plans.
They like us, sort of, despite the fact that I have the longest beard in Fruitland Park, the longest hair on a man and an Obama bumper sticker on our 39 mpg Hyundai (a prime asset as the business is an hour’s commute from our home).
My wife (of five years next Sat.) looks far less threatening, that's her on the right.
This deal was no small accomplishment: the landlord is a born-again rightwing Christian who thinks Obama may be a terrorist plant (and who saw our Obama-stickered car before he agreed to lease to us). The former owner is a Reagan Republican car dealer who’s stuck in 2005. He thinks we’re a little crazy, but his monthly payment is all he’s after and the whole world’s turned upside down anyway.
On Day One, the average customer saw three different names on the outdoor signs and inside the café: "Scooter’s Sandwich Shop, "The Sub Factory" and simply "Sandwich Shop."
In our first 10 days of operation, we served three people of color. This is where poor white working-class Republican rednecks eat, and some of them say prayers to Sarah before they chew. I’ve vowed not to wear my Obama T-shirts until at least June.
This is also where the local police chief, volunteer fire chief and two or three city commissioners eat two or three times a week, due mostly to the fact that the next closest diner is two miles down the highway.
The TV---satellite---is tuned to Fox News. When we change it to CNN or MSNBC, a customer invariably switches back to Fox.
Every surface you can see in the ‘before’ pic is greasy, the result of years of deep-fry mist that has covered everything. It took me 10 hours to scour and rinse the dinette chairs, tables, walls and counter.
Here’s a couple of ‘after’ pics. I’m proudest of the under-the-counter skirting: $40 worth of renewable resource reed fencing and lumber hides the bathroom tile and gives the place a ‘Florida’ feel. When we found rattan barstools for $10 each at a used furniture store (new ones cost $70-$300), we knew God is on our side.
The menu---burgers, fries, sandwiches, griddle-fried breakfast stuff and thick sweet tea that would kill a diabetic in a minute---is 1950’s fare. One of the most popular items---biscuits and gravy---comes straight out of the can. And they buy the can at Walmart.
Clearly, there’s room for improvement here.
On Tuesday, Dec. 2---we started the War of Biscuits and Gravy.
I love biscuits and gravy. I only eat it once a week for obvious reasons. It’s the sort of filling food that hard-working poor people relish because it’s cheap to make: pork sausage, grease, milk, flour and salt and pepper. It can be very tasty.
We don’t have a real oven (budgeted for March purchase), so we ‘bake’ frozen biscuit dough in a commercial toaster-oven. They are passable, but not great.
My wife’s improvement on the gravy is quite remarkable. Along with ground pork, she adds a little Chorizo sausage, a discovery we made on our first trip to Mexico’s back country (and have enjoyed ever since). Chorizo is a standard throughout Central and South America, it uses lots of paprika, and it’s very tasty in small amounts but not "spicy" or hot. It makes chili golden. Unfortunately, it makes sausage gravy a little yellow.
She also added some finely chopped onions and green peppers to add both vitamins and flavor.
When I tried some, I swooned. It’s fantastic.
So we tried it on the first customer---the police chief.
He sent it back. "Tastes cheesy," he said.
It didn’t. But the yellowish tinge made him think ‘cheese.’ Brains can be funny things. No wonder Sarah Palin is so popular around here.
The second customer---an ex-city commissioner who’d not doing construction work these days---sent his back too.
"I don’t like vegetables in it," he said. "I want it the old way."
"But the old way is straight out of a can and it’s just heated," I said. "This is home made."
Our counter person, Janie, tried to tell him it had Chorizo sausage in it but she couldn’t pronounce Chorizo. "Some kind of Mexican sausage," she sputtered.
"Okay," he said. Then he got up and left.
When the fourth customer rejected our masterpiece, we threw out the remainder---maybe $6 worth of ingredients. This is no way to run a successful café.
I took it personally (and so did my wife). We tried to create something unique and valuable in a community where nothing unique and valuable exists. We paced the kitchen, muttering things we could have said to our recalcitrant customers. They all ended in profanities.
Then we rethought our recipe. We made a new batch of sausage gravy from scratch, this time pureeing the onions and peppers and discarding the Chorizo. We’ll save it for a special sometime.
Over the next week, we gained another 8-10 customers. Now we have a regular breakfast crowd of about 12 people who come in and order biscuits and our special home-made Southern style gravy. Most of them agree it’s the best they ever had.
I know this says something about political compromise, but I’m late now and I’ve got to get back and wax the floors.
Next week, if I’m not dead, I’ll tell you the story of the percolator coffee and the Beef Brisket sandwiches. And a thoroughly interesting conversation I had about Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and the future of American democracy in Fruitland Park---with an air conditioning mechanic.