05/27/2024
In 2021 we started Sweet Lorraine’s Latkes as an attempt to create a new sustainable (and hopefully fun!) lifestyle for ourselves. We wanted to do good work, share that work with our community, and do it in a way that kept our money in the community. Keeping an often forgotten aspect of Jewish food culture alive was also an important goal of ours. Food carts were a lower cost option for people wanting to cook and feed their friends and neighbors without the kind of overhead that demands huge profits (or land ownership) to survive. This fit in with our personal ideals - especially coming off the heels of a pandemic, and a mutual aid/social justice movement that we were proud to be a part of. Living and working simply and returning that money back into the community - it was our goal and it seemed feasible.
We were inspired by our ancestors - immigrants that came to America to build better lives for themselves through this type of work. A family business that shared our cultural heritage with our community. Our kids helped out. We bought supplies from people in the community every chance we could get. We never paid ourselves enough, but the connections we made and the small profits were enough to keep us fed and happy.
After our first year in business our landlord sold the property to condo developers. We moved to a parking lot in our neighborhood and kept cooking and serving. Through the course of our second year we struggled with the landlords maintaining the property, local governments imposing new guidelines on food carts that required infrastructure upgrades that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and what seemed like nonstop ‘weather events’. But we kept cooking. We kept paying our bills and growing our community. Continued in comments…
