A Food Chain Unlike Any Other
We've written a number of times about how we'd like to see more diverse food carts in the city and how the permitting of carts has been the biggest barrier to diversity. But Food Chain DC's Coite Manuel has found a way to get around that problem. He has established relationships with existing hot dog vendors to sell his simple, quality food alongside them. Manuel currently has three locations, at M Street between Connecticut and 17th St NW, at 14th and New York Ave NW, and at North Capitol and E Street NW, with more planned. You can check their Twitter feed as more are added.
We were first tipped off to Manuel's operation a few weeks ago, when a reader mentioned some great new street cart burritos. I stopped by one of the carts and sampled an excellent jerk chicken, coconut rice, black bean and mango salsa burrito (check out the full current menu here).
Manuel took some time to fill us in on the details of his operation and plans for expansion.
How did you approach vendors to sell your products?
Initially I just started chatting with lots of vendors to see if there were folks that might be interested in trying different food concepts. Once I got up and running in one or two stands, word just kind of spread among the vending community and I started being introduced to other vendors.
How did you get started on this idea?
I got interested in street vending in my previous job, where I worked in local economic development helping lower income individuals to start up businesses. We had a few street vendor clients, and I learned a bit about D.C.'s vending scene. Given the city's recent interest in diversifying street food offerings, the timing seemed to be good for the Food Chain concept. One goal of Food Chain is to offer a way for longtime D.C. street vendors to grow their business: we enable them to do better economically by opening up street food to a whole segment of the D.C. population who do not necessarily patronize the hot dog carts but might be interested if other options existed.
The branding issue is difficult for us, because the hot dog carts are quite old and many are pretty battered up. It is so ingrained in most everyone who lives in D.C. that all of the carts that have a certain "look" only sell hot dogs and packaged food. We are literally trying to change our city's expectations of what comes out of the old school hot dog carts by serving up great food. It's a huge challenge, but it has been a blast so far trying to make it happen.
You mentioned to me that your aunt has been helping you with the recipes. What is her culinary background?
My aunt Deane Somers has been helping me get this thing off the ground. She's been a caterer and chef for decades across the Southeast, and she is really the culinary visionary behind Food Chain. My background is more in distribution and logistics, so we make a good team.
You told me you had a taco planned next? Any other thoughts or maybe vegetarian options?
We're essentially piloting the concept now with the Jerk chicken wraps. We intend to expand to other cart themes such as Thai, Mediterranean, etc. so that we can express the diversity of the city in the food that is served on its streets.
As for vegetarian options, we currently offer a Caribbean bean taco at the Jerk carts, but we're looking in to other ideas as well.
How do you plan to expand Food Chain DC?
Our expansion plan is to continue to pilot with the Jerk carts a bit longer as we improve our operations and give more folks a chance to try out what we're offering. We've gotten a ton of positive feedback so far, but really very few people even know we exist. Many people have a Food Chain cart right outside of their building but would never know it because the carts can just kind of blend in with the street scene and not really get noticed.
I see these first few Food Chain carts as the initial drops of a monsoon. Every day I'm trying to make it rain a little harder!