Back in the summer, when the weather was nice, we’d sit out on the deck and watch the view. And one day, there was smoke coming from Johnson. We didn’t know what was burning, but something sure was. We saw it in the paper the next day, on TV soon after and, eventually, on the web and Facebook. I like that, in an age when information travels fast, smoke signals, newspaper, and TV, in that order, brought this fire to my attention.
It was Hot Tamale that burned to the ground.
Hot Tamale did Mexican take-out in a college town, straight out out of a Mexican lady’s kitchen. (Is that even legal?) We’d never eaten there, and I filed it away under “That’s a shame” and moved on.
Well, Mary’s business is floors, and she keeps her ear to the ground. At some point, she heard that the old floors in a downtown restaurant project were beautiful, and she went to take a look. It was Hot Tamale, planning to rise from the ashes.
“Whoa, cool! Need some help? I’ve got some tables you can use.”
That’s the short version, of course, but it was enough to get Monet, the cook’s daughter, up to the Mill to take a look at some tabletops Mary’s got left over from a job in Boston. And while she was visiting, Mary got the whole story.
It seems that Meryl’s friends loved her cooking, and encouraged her to try selling tamales at the Farmer’s market. So she made 50, and they sold out immediately. So she made 100, and they sold out immediately. So she made 1000, and they sold out immediately. All of this on a 2-burner stove in her home.
The next summer, she had a 4-burner stove and did 14 farmers markets, and they all sold out. Her customers were knocking on her door that winter, wanting tamales.
By the next year, she had an even bigger kitchen in a house on Rte 100 and she hung up a sign, “Hot Tamale,” and sold take-out. Her customers started asking whether she had a place where they could sit and eat.
And then the whole place burned to the ground.
When I was in third grade, everyone in my class had to memorize and recite a poem.
Mine went (in part) like this:
I found a little beetle, so that Beetle was his name
And I called him Alexander, and he answered just the same.
And I put him in a matchbox, and I kept him all the day.
And then Nanny let my beetle out.
Yes, Nanny let my beetle out.
She went and let my beetle out!
And Beetle ran away.
She said she didn’t mean it
(and I never said she did)
She said she wanted matches
and she just took off the lid.
She said that she was sorry
(and I really mustn’t mind
as there’s lots and lots of beetles that she’s certain we could find)
I mention this because Monet didn’t mean to burn the place down.
It’s the difference between a watched pot and an un-watched fryolator, though, and she really is very sorry about it, and she’s working hard to put Hot Tamale back on the map. And that’s when Mary heard about the beautiful old floors in a restaurant project downtown.
Mary and I have a morning routine that usually includes some variant of: “What are we having for dinner?” And a week later, Mary started off the morning with: “What would you think about turning this place into a Mexican kitchen?”
“Ole'”, I thought! “Mexican for dinner! Works for me!”
Except that that’s not what she meant. Mary has a heart of gold and, if she could, she would save the world. Short of that, she wanted to help Meryl by giving her a place to cook enough tamales to sell, and maybe get back on her feet. After all, I’m over at the other house most of the day, and she’s at work, and the kitchen is idle, and who knows? Maybe Meryl will cook us dinner once in awhile.
A week later, Mary invited Meryl over to talk and look at our kitchen. Mary is a salesman, and she was selling the kitchen. “We have a 4 burner stovetop! We’ve got an oven you can use, and a sink, lots of counterspace, we’ll put some shelves over here for you, and you can freeze 50 dozen tamales in our freezer. We’ll put an ad in the Stowe Reporter, and people can pre-order their Holiday Hot Tamales.” Meryl is listening to all this, a little shell-shocked, and I’m taking it all in, thinking to myself: “This is crazy.” We had coffee and tea and continued to talk in the living room.
Put yourself in Meryl’s position. You’re jobless and broke. Your home and business have burned to the ground. Your husband’s been deported, and you’re having tea with some strangers in an old house with tarps for ceilings, and they want to give you their kitchen.
“What do you need to make tamales,” Mary asks?
“Crisco, masa, and monterey jack,” says Meryl.
“What the heck is masa,” thinks Reid?
Masa is corn meal, and you can get it at the International Market in Winooski. Mary called to find out what time they were open on Saturdays, but the guy didn’t speak English. We found it, though, and arrived just as the owner plunked down a bloody goat carcass on the scale. We bought 8 5# bags of masa and headed to Costco for Crisco. The next morning, we were missing some masa, because BZ got into the bag.
Mary busted her butt rearranging everything, making it easy for Meryl to cook. And tuesday morning, Meryl showed up with her tamale pot and a bunch of ingredients, and started cooking. Mary went off to work, while I stayed home, available but trying to stay out of the way, because I’m a pretty intimidating sight. Meryl cooked for several hours and left. And left behind rice, beans, salsa, chile rellenos, and sauce.
That night, Mary and I ate Mexican food. The rellenos were fabulous. The salsa was savory. The rice was moist and fluffy and delicious all by itself.
And the beans. The beans made you want more beans. I have never had beans like that before. This lady is the real deal. I think that the message she was sending to us that day was, first, “Thank you,” but also, “Taste it for yourself. This is what I can do.” This is someone I’d met exactly once. She showed up when she said she would, did what she said she was going to do, cleaned up after herself, and left. Good job.
Later that week, she did it again. She showed up on time, built 6 dozen tamales, froze them, cleaned up, and left, leaving some cooked ones in a pot for us. Best tamales I’d ever had.
Then she did it again, with a different kind of tamale.
Then she did it again, with chicken enchiladas.
And pretty soon, the freezer was full.
Nice job.
Somewhere along the line, Meryl showed us the space she and Monet were trying to turn into a restaurant. It’s right downtown, across from the movie theater, down the street from the high school, by the town offices and the post office. The River Arts building is a block away, and the Oxbow Park is 2 blocks down the hill. It’s in an old crooked building with a front room that will hold 50 people, a galley and a big back room for prep. An electrician has been working on the wiring, and commercial kitchen equipment and furnishings were scattered everywhere. There was a plan taped to the wall. I watched and listened, but didn’t say much. Big lot of work.
The left side of my brain said: “I have a lot on my plate, trying to finish our new house and maybe get my life back on track. The last thing I need is to get involved in a Mexican restaurant.”
The right side of my brain said: “I am exactly what they need. Meryl wants to cook. Mary and Monet want it to look nice, but they need someone to put it all together – to make it physically function. And I happen to have all the skills, time, equipment, and know-how to get it done. Heck, I’ve even got a large stash of barn boards in the barn to use in the front room.”
But what a job! I met with the landlord and inspected the basement. The plumbing’s been altered a dozen times, and there is no hot water. In Monet’s plan, there are sinks in front of the electrical panel. The layout has foot traffic taking a left and then a right past the fryolator, and she wants to put the refrigeration unit thru a wall into space she isn’t renting. There is no financing, and the business plan estimates that at least $50k is needed to open.
“Run,” said my left brain! “Run away!”
The back room at the restaurant, full of equipment.
I thought it through and decided that the best way to ease into the project would be to assemble the Walk-In Cooler. This is an 8’x16′ unit bought at auction for $500 and then disassembled and moved to the new space for another (un-planned) $2k. It’s the elephant in the room, and if you want a credible floorplan for the back room, you have to start with where the WIC goes. So I moved all the panels aside and built a planar base atop the crooked floor using 2-by’s and a chalk line. I started re-assembling the WIC’s floor, but quickly found that nothing lined up, because condensation in the cooler had caused the particle board in the floor panels to swell and disintegrate. So I peeled off the sheet metal, removed the MDF, replaced it with plywood, and put the metal back on. Basically, I was on-track to re-build the floor before moving on to the walls, doors, ceiling, and compressors. Once that was done, we could move sinks and equipment around.
2×4’s nailed to the crooked floor and chalk-lined flat to create a planar base for the WIC.
All this time, bits and pieces of information filtered in. Meryl had cooked at our house enough times that she was starting to trust and talk with me, and I looked hard at Monet’s business plan. I’ve never seen a business plan before, and hers looked pretty thorough to me. But it also seemed like a lot of it was boilerplate that could have applied to any restaurant. They’d struck out with banks, municipal and state small business development agencies, venture capitalists and crowdfunding, and it wasn’t really clear why. Meryl and Monet have very different visions for the business: Meryl wants to cook. Monet wants to ‘develop the brand.’ Before the fire, Meryl invested in trailers and equipment. Monet spent on staff and fees. Meryl wants to do take-out. Monet wants people to linger. Monet was trying to manage the project from 3000 miles away. She claims she only wants what’s best for her mother, but it sure seemed to me that it was Monet’s own agenda that she was pushing.
Monet emailed me an introduction, and I emailed back, offering a lot of help for an ownership stake. After one more exchange, I got a written ‘stop work’ order. So I stopped working on the cooler.
Meanwhile, Meryl had a gig lined up at the River Arts building, feeding 25-50 people at a swing band concert. She showed up to cook at our house the day before, and again the day of the gig. She spent all day in the River Arts kitchen, preparing the meal, and when we showed up, she was just about ready. Every oven and burner was warm, and a long row of serving trays were full.
The kitchen help
I’ve never done food service, and I was supposed to be cashier. You would think I’d be good at that, right? Well handling other peoples’ money made me nervous, and I traded cashier duty for taco assembly, where I excelled. There were fresh-pressed tortillas, 3 kinds of tacos, 3 kinds of salsa, 4 kinds of tamales, rellenos, rice, beans, and a Mexican drink. Just about everyone who came to watch the band bought food. Everyone loved it, and nobody farted. I scrubbed pots and pans for 90 minutes. We took a lot of food home to freeze.
Meryl ran the show like a pro. She cooked way more food than they ate, but if she had been working out of her restaurant, it would all have been sold the next day. Monet’s stop-work email had shown up the day before, and Meryl was beside herself, but she still showed up, got it done, and even made a little money. Good job!
The next day, we heard nothing. Nor the next. No calls, no returned calls, no texts or emails, and nothing since. My guess is that Monet has Meryl under her thumb and told her to stay away from Reid and Mary, who are dangerous predators, trying to take advantage of her. Which is odd, because that’s what people say about Monet.
It was over so suddenly that it’s a little unsettling.
The right side of my brain wants to stay involved, but I cannot do business with Monet, and I don’t want to be messing with their mother-daughter bond. Even without Mexican food, my plate is plenty full.
So the left side wins, for now.
Good luck, Meryl. You deserve better.