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.
