Linda Falkenstein
food-cartsadapt-05-11-2020
Caracas Arepas is vending at Mifflin Street and Wisconsin Avenue.
The lone food carts downtown are Caracas Empanadas and Caracas Arepas. Owned by Luis Dompablo, they showcase Venezuelan street food and customarily vend on Library Mall, where a steady stream of students ordinarily line up for lunch on weekdays. With UW-Madison classes moved online in March, Dompablo arranged to move to the Capitol Square as an alternative. But few people are working downtown, and business is slow.
“I’m continuing to do the carts because of my employees,” says Dompablo, who has a staff of three who prep food and operate the carts. “The sales weekly don’t even make payroll, but I feel that I have to help my guys as long as I can. But it’s really not worth it.”
Like other segments of the restaurant industry, food carts have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the cart model — takeout only, no in-house dining — would seem to be primed for our new carrout age, most carts in Madison depend on lunch traffic from downtown workers and UW students. And as entry-level restaurant businesses, most carts are operating on thin margins anyway.
Dompablo now keeps his carts open into the evening until 7 p.m. as pickup hubs for delivery services ferrying food to customers who have ordered online; he’s also doing weekly home delivery via Christine’s Kitchens. Some days the empanada cart does well enough to break even, he says, but the arepa cart — a newer venture for Dompablo and less well known — is struggling.
Dompablo has a little more time to see if things improve. He received a Paycheck Protection Program loan “so I can go another month and a half before I run out of savings.” But he’s not optimistic sales will improve if people are afraid to go out. Unless something changes — until there’s a vaccine or treatment to alleviate fear or the government introduces another round of small business relief loans, he says — he figures he’ll have to close the carts.
Matthew Danky of El Grito doesn’t see food carts kicking back in for 2020: “This year will probably be put in pause,” says Danky. “It does not seem likely that the city will be ready for street vending,” and he expects to see some carts go out of business. Danky is in the process of switching to a pick-up model for El Grito’s specialty tacos (updates on Facebook).
Meghan Blake-Horst, street vending coordinator for the city of Madison, says that as far as she knows, no carts have definitively thrown in the towel yet.
The city has waived the normal vending license fee to remove that additional financial burden, and is reimbursing those carts that had already paid the annual fee. The city didn’t want that additional cost “to be the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Blake-Horst says.
But the cancellation of summer events like the Art Fair on the Square and neighborhood festivals is also hitting carts hard, as is the new “just-business” model for farmers’ markets, with no recreating or lingering over a smoothie and a spring roll from a food cart.
Blake-Horst says the city of Madison and UW-Madison Division of Extension collaborated on a best practices brochure for food carts that covers everything from health standards to child care options to ideas for new business opportunities, including delivery and takeout from the cart’s prep kitchens, and selling family meals instead of individual entrees or larger frozen packs of their foods. The guide also offers advice on switching over from cash to credit cards, something that many carts were not set up for, and offering online pre-orders to lessen contact.
Blake-Horst has been impressed with the creativity that carts are showing. Some are using their base kitchens as pick-up sites for frozen meals or family dinners, and others are expanding their reach through delivery.
Christine’s Kitchens, the commercial prep kitchen in the Madison East Shopping Center, has been at the forefront of creating new avenues for small food entrepreneurs to get food to customers. Along with the FEED Kitchens and the city of Madison’s Market Ready Program, Christine’s Kitchens launched a delivery service that takes weekly pre-orders from food carts: Looking Glass Bakery, Taco Local, Caracas Empanadas and Arepas, The Ugly Apple, Slide, Curt’s Gourmet Popcorn, and The Aloha Wagon. The Aloha Wagon, which makes Hawaiian food, is selling prepared family meals “ready to put in the oven or microwave” of its huli huli chicken, Hawaiian mac salad and purple rice, with guava bread pudding for dessert, as well as pork slider meal kits.
Other catering companies and small food producers are also participating, including Melly Mel’s and International Catering Co. In addition to the weekly home deliveries, Christine’s is now offering a once-a-week curbside pickup, Saturdays from 11 a.m.-2 p.m.; orders must be placed a week ahead of time.
“I imagine at some point more people will be going back to work,” says Christine’s Kitchens owner Christine Ameigh, and so she foresees switching to weekend deliveries from the current Thursday-Friday schedule. But “from everything I’ve read, I believe there’s likely to be a resurgence [of COVID-19] in the fall, so I don’t see us stopping or changing the delivery model until next year.”
Right now, the weekly deliveries are doing well: “If I scheduled deliveries every two weeks, there would be too many to do right now. People have been really excited about having their favorite food cart food delivered at home.”
Other carts have been cooking meals for the FEED to Go program which distributes free meals at neighborhood centers in collaboration with such groups as the Northside Planning Council, the Boys and Girls Club and the Madison Community Foundation.
