The Cart Is Open!
Dogmatic opened this past weekend. (“Hmph,” you folks must think, “about time!”) Overall it was great, though of course there were some literal and figurative obstacles we had to overcome, most of which had to do with getting the cart and its contents to and from the site at Bleecker Playground.
On Saturday morning, I emerged from the subway to find Manhattan semi-deserted. Weekend mornings in Manhattan are the blissfully deceptive; very few people are out, and as you jaywalk without having to dodge too many cars or cut off any pokey pedestrians, you get tricked into thinking that the city belongs to you, and that you, for once, are at equilibrium with the oft-overwhelming metropolis. Then you walk into the commissary to pick up your sausage cart.
Pushcarts must, by law, be stored in a facility approved by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. A commissary is like a combination parking garage, car wash, and food wholesaler for pushcarts. In the morning, it is a hive of frantic activity, as pushcart operators and employees of the commissary smash well-dented pushcarts into each other as they try to extricate individual carts from the mess. Our cart, naturally, was way back against the wall.
A commissary is really interesting for about five minutes, and then it’s simply another depressing place you want to hightail out of. It was dark and impossibly crowded, with a potent smell of industrial cleaners. There’s also an intriguing cultural element, which I won’t get into since I’ve only been to the commissary twice, but I think that Saturday was the first time three young, skinny white chicks ever came in to pick up a cart. Men who spoke poor English kept on approaching us and introducing themselves with very wide smiles.
Lots of pushcarts purchase all of their supplies for the day at the commissary, stock their carts, and roll out to feed the hungry masses. Dogmatic’s food comes from elsewhere, but we did pick up several cases of cola. While waiting in line, I peered at other carts’ order for the day—piles of soda, pale and spongy hot dog buns, and mysterious foil bags that had “Sabrett’ stamped on them. These, it turned out, were sacks of onion sauce for hot dogs, which surprised me, until I considered that most pushcarts don’t have the space or equipment to griddle onions and stew them in sauce—of course they don’t make the sauce themselves. Even after having a decent amount of foodservice work experience in some pretty diverse settings, I’m always taken aback to see what happens behind the scenes with the foods we hurriedly eat: paper-wrapped hamburgers that sit under a heat lamp at McDonald’s, or Dairy Queen Dilly Bars that somehow seem to appear there magically, without one trace of human element. Someone in a factory somewhere cooks up industrial batches of hot dog sauce in computerized vats, probably, and then a depositor squirts the proper amount of sauce into the foil bags that wind up at the factory. So many separate elements to one $2 dirty water hot dog!
Once our cart was freed from the pushcart traffic jam inside the commissary, we filled the tanks with water and located a person to tow our cart to the playground—otherwise we’d have to push it about 30 blocks ourselves. 30 blocks is not terrible, really, but it is when you have a gigantic stainless steel cart with several hundred extra pounds of batteries and water.
While the other girls rode down in the truck towing the cart, I took a cab down to Employees Only, the restaurant where our cart’s food comes from—not foil bags of gloppy sauce for us! I found Jeremy Spector, the chef of Employees Only and, by extension, Dogmatic. He’s definitely one of the more laid-back and approachable chefs I’ve worked with—which is fortunate, because I continuously had to bug him to help me locate sausages, sauces, dry ice, bleach water, etc. Jeremy's approach to cooking is straightforward yet highly flavorful, perfectly suited for the offerings of a gourmet sausage cart.
After picking up the supplies, we journeyed several blocks north to meet the cart, now settled into its spot just outside the bustling playground. We installed the propane tank, fired up the grill and baguette-toasting machines, iced down our drinks and food, and were finally ready to sell sausages. Which we did, and which I shall tell you more about in the next post. Until then, please be aware that the cart will no reappear at Bleecker Playground until Wednesday, September 13; we are taking the cart in for modifications so that your sausage-eating experience will attain maximum pleasure.
On Saturday morning, I emerged from the subway to find Manhattan semi-deserted. Weekend mornings in Manhattan are the blissfully deceptive; very few people are out, and as you jaywalk without having to dodge too many cars or cut off any pokey pedestrians, you get tricked into thinking that the city belongs to you, and that you, for once, are at equilibrium with the oft-overwhelming metropolis. Then you walk into the commissary to pick up your sausage cart.
Pushcarts must, by law, be stored in a facility approved by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. A commissary is like a combination parking garage, car wash, and food wholesaler for pushcarts. In the morning, it is a hive of frantic activity, as pushcart operators and employees of the commissary smash well-dented pushcarts into each other as they try to extricate individual carts from the mess. Our cart, naturally, was way back against the wall.
A commissary is really interesting for about five minutes, and then it’s simply another depressing place you want to hightail out of. It was dark and impossibly crowded, with a potent smell of industrial cleaners. There’s also an intriguing cultural element, which I won’t get into since I’ve only been to the commissary twice, but I think that Saturday was the first time three young, skinny white chicks ever came in to pick up a cart. Men who spoke poor English kept on approaching us and introducing themselves with very wide smiles.
Lots of pushcarts purchase all of their supplies for the day at the commissary, stock their carts, and roll out to feed the hungry masses. Dogmatic’s food comes from elsewhere, but we did pick up several cases of cola. While waiting in line, I peered at other carts’ order for the day—piles of soda, pale and spongy hot dog buns, and mysterious foil bags that had “Sabrett’ stamped on them. These, it turned out, were sacks of onion sauce for hot dogs, which surprised me, until I considered that most pushcarts don’t have the space or equipment to griddle onions and stew them in sauce—of course they don’t make the sauce themselves. Even after having a decent amount of foodservice work experience in some pretty diverse settings, I’m always taken aback to see what happens behind the scenes with the foods we hurriedly eat: paper-wrapped hamburgers that sit under a heat lamp at McDonald’s, or Dairy Queen Dilly Bars that somehow seem to appear there magically, without one trace of human element. Someone in a factory somewhere cooks up industrial batches of hot dog sauce in computerized vats, probably, and then a depositor squirts the proper amount of sauce into the foil bags that wind up at the factory. So many separate elements to one $2 dirty water hot dog!
Once our cart was freed from the pushcart traffic jam inside the commissary, we filled the tanks with water and located a person to tow our cart to the playground—otherwise we’d have to push it about 30 blocks ourselves. 30 blocks is not terrible, really, but it is when you have a gigantic stainless steel cart with several hundred extra pounds of batteries and water.
While the other girls rode down in the truck towing the cart, I took a cab down to Employees Only, the restaurant where our cart’s food comes from—not foil bags of gloppy sauce for us! I found Jeremy Spector, the chef of Employees Only and, by extension, Dogmatic. He’s definitely one of the more laid-back and approachable chefs I’ve worked with—which is fortunate, because I continuously had to bug him to help me locate sausages, sauces, dry ice, bleach water, etc. Jeremy's approach to cooking is straightforward yet highly flavorful, perfectly suited for the offerings of a gourmet sausage cart.
After picking up the supplies, we journeyed several blocks north to meet the cart, now settled into its spot just outside the bustling playground. We installed the propane tank, fired up the grill and baguette-toasting machines, iced down our drinks and food, and were finally ready to sell sausages. Which we did, and which I shall tell you more about in the next post. Until then, please be aware that the cart will no reappear at Bleecker Playground until Wednesday, September 13; we are taking the cart in for modifications so that your sausage-eating experience will attain maximum pleasure.
posted by Lefty at 11:04 AM
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