For no particular reason, I’d never gone to LouFest prior to 2015. For a very particular reason, I finally attended this summer.
As one of the food-and-beverage operators at the two-day music festival’s “Nosh Pit,” Bailey’s Range was a return vendor to the LouFest grounds, serving up a four-item menu, the maximum allowed under LouFest’s rules. Because a lot of workers in the Bailey’s system were already committed to their regular work duties for the weekend (or were, in some cases, attending the concert as visitors), Range needed a few extra bodies to work its 15-person, two-day run at Forest Park’s Central Field. With a personal connection to a member of the Bailey’s management team, I was offered a slot and accepted, figuring that the weekend would be busy and educational.
It proved to be both.
In a mobile kitchen of this sort, the work begins well before the event, of course. In the weeks prior, several things happen.
A.) The menu is finalized; in Bailey’s’ case that meant Missouri grass-fed beef cheeseburgers, Match vegetarian burgers (either of them available on a gluten-free bun), loaded fries, marinated chicken wraps, and chilled soba noodle salad.
B.) Orders are placed, cast against the knowledge that you’re competing against dozens of other food options.
C.) A skeleton crew is assembled, with positions including cashier, expo, grill, fryer, build (puts together the components of an item), and cold station (preps cold ingredients and builds the cold items, like wraps).
D.) On the day prior, the move-in begins, with trucks loading in what’s basically a small restaurant’s worth of materials. From the grills and fryers to the potatoes and pork to the utensils and ketchup, everything’s loaded in, accounted for, checked and rechecked.
And that’s done without a usual crew’s synch; as noted, because of the need for extra workers, staffers at all Bailey’s enterprises were assembled for LouFest, often working jobs that differed from their normal routines.
For me, of course, there was no normal, so being assigned a food-runner job, sandwiched in-between the cashiers and the expo station, was as good as place as any to work. The space for Bailey’s Range was only 10-feet across, with our neighbors coming from Hot Wok and Cleveland-Heath. That’s a thin space, really, and the three-four cashiers (each armed with a metal bank for cash money and an iPad for Square orders) fanned all the way across the front tables. As food-runners, we slotted right behind a cashier, or two, just in front of the main expo station. Within the first hour, tickets were abandoned; even at noon on Saturday, business so brisk that the writing out of tickets was slowing down the process.
My workspace was essentially a couple of square-feet, tucked behind that cashier and close enough to the patrons that I was soon able to skip the cashier’s words to me; instead, I simply picked up on the customers’ comments, then turned to the expo station, where the expo workers would holler out orders to the hot- and cold-lines. In a short amount of time, the system was understood and began to click. Not only content to hear my cashier bark out an order, we learned to simply listen to the order and try to lip-read. Maybe it was small, this approach, but it quickened up the process by seconds. And in this kind of environment, seconds add up to minutes and minutes count.
Each day saw a big bump of business right at the opening gun, as people hit the grounds at noon. The ordering then tapered off for a couple of hours, though folks still ambled up for food in bursts. By 4 p.m., though, the line started to snake outwards, 50-75 deep at times and without a lot of let-up. Each day, at this time and for the next three hours, the whole experience took on a different feel, as we were simply processing orders as fast as possible, sometimes waiting for burgers to cook, as it was impossible to keep enough stored in ready-warm containers to satisfy the crowd.
Time didn’t exactly crawl by, nor did it fly. But entire hours would pass, without really much different taking place, my life being lived in about a square-yard of space, tucked immediately behind, of all people, Bailey’s Restaurants’ namesake and founder, Dave Bailey. If I even thought of slacking, this was the wrong place to be, so I didn’t.
I did get to catch a little bit of music, with an emphasis on “little.” There was a chunk of a set by American Wrestlers, a fantastic new St. Louis band with a strangely-low local profile. And I caught about 20-minutes of Billy Idol’s set, from about 500-feet away from stage. So that guilty pleasure itch was scratched. Ludacris, well, we didn’t have to move anywhere for that set, since the volume was high enough that we were given that show for free, though being a few football fields away from the performance.
All that said, I knew I wasn’t going for the music, but for the experience of working in a hard-working, fast-moving mobile kitchen. I got that and then some. With one experience standing out more than any other. On Sunday evening, as the rush finally quieted, after several straight hours of intense work, Bailey’s executive chef, Stephen Trouvere, walked up to the cashier’s area and looked back at the bulk of the staff. Wordlessly, he began clapping. The staff clapped back and it started to spread up-and-down the row of “Nosh Pit” operations. Though the few customers remaining were a bit surprised at what was happening, some of them began to clap, too, and for about a solid minute, the sound grew, hooting-and-hollering added to the clapping and the whole restaurant row granted a big exhale.
Rush had passed. We’d made it.
I could’ve gone to LouFest and had any number of other experiences, but I wouldn’t have traded this Trouvere-inspired moment for anything on the festival grounds. For a minute there, I was part of Range’s taming the beast, that endless customer line. That participation was truly, deeply satisfying.
