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Street Food Home Introduction Louisville, KY Cedar Rapids Chicago Denmark Plano/Dallas/Fort Worth Richmond, VA Singapore Trenton, NJ San Antonio, TX India New York City Nashville, TN Olympia, WA	Louisville KY I grew up in Louisville, in a very redneck suburb that had the KKK lighting bonfires in the middle of the highway when court ordered desegregation went in. Yeah. The place had no street food scene, but it did have hot dog carts. I learned about street food by selling it. Times were hard. I was fresh out of high school and discharged from the military on a recruiting error, and finding employment was difficult. The gays had been slowly taking over the company that ran the downtown hot dog carts, and that got me an in. I got assigned the available corner, which was the crappy one, behind the courthouse and out of the main foot traffic lanes. At the time, I had a bamboo flute that was one of my most prized possessions. I played it reasonably well, and had a pretty good repertoire. I combined busking with hot dog sales, picking up the flute and playing it whenever the cart had no customers. It wasn’t quite enough to make my rent, but I got two hot dogs a day and could load them with the available veg, and the Tips cup gathered cash not only from hot dog customers but from people who stopped to listen to the music. Then I had to move on to Nashville to find work, and I’ll talk about Nashville when I get back to it. Suffice for now to say that the first time I was there, I spent 13 years there, and it had no street food scene at the time.

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Louisville KY

I grew up in Louisville, in a very redneck suburb that had the KKK lighting bonfires in the middle of the highway when court ordered desegregation went in. Yeah. The place had no street food scene, but it did have hot dog carts. I learned about street food by selling it.

Times were hard. I was fresh out of high school and discharged from the military on a recruiting error, and finding employment was difficult. The gays had been slowly taking over the company that ran the downtown hot dog carts, and that got me an in. I got assigned the available corner, which was the crappy one, behind the courthouse and out of the main foot traffic lanes.

At the time, I had a bamboo flute that was one of my most prized possessions. I played it reasonably well, and had a pretty good repertoire. I combined busking with hot dog sales, picking up the flute and playing it whenever the cart had no customers. It wasn’t quite enough to make my rent, but I got two hot dogs a day and could load them with the available veg, and the Tips cup gathered cash not only from hot dog customers but from people who stopped to listen to the music.

Then I had to move on to Nashville to find work, and I’ll talk about Nashville when I get back to it. Suffice for now to say that the first time I was there, I spent 13 years there, and it had no street food scene at the time.