Hello friends, its been a crazy two years! Our First mobile pizza oven however has pretty much run its course. After roughly 10,000 miles traveled, and close to 10,000 pizzas cooked, I’d say I got my $8000 worth. My first attempt at building an oven from scratch without any prior knowledge of running this type of business, and never having even set foot in a commercial cooking environment has kind of worked out for me. But it is time to send “Fisty” the pizza oven into the shop, and move up to 2.0.
We started out small, man, I remember the old days, getting up at 7:30 am, packing up and heading up to the Laurel Farmer’s Market, very small neighborhood market that barely had their permits in order gave us a chance to field test our operation. Arriving there by 8:30 am on a saturday, setting up by myself, and sitting there from 10-2, waiting, ahh yes. Waiting and watching as would be customers would overlook us and settle for what they knew, a $5 Giant burger Combo meal. I distinctly remember the sales, the 10 or so pizzas, and occasionally 15 whole pizzas! Plus I had a regular customer who would always pay me in $2 bills, her dad loved them and was always giving them to her. I think she’s a mommy by now, I think she was one of my first Pre-natal customers, but I digress.
A lot has changed since October 2010, mostly the look of things, the size of things, and the taste of things. And they are changing again. By late September we should be operating a brand new, state of the art Pizza oven trailer. Professionally built and assembled by the folks up at Pizziaolo Ovens. We are starting the planning process this week, and will be plunkin down a serious chunk for a deposit on a custom built 56″ behemoth, the Modena2 G series from Forno Bravo, nor-cal local company I found while researching my first oven. Back then I had just enough money to D.I.Myself, and was crazy enough to try it. I didn’t have the business yet, so I had all the time in the world to design and build from scratch. This time however, there is no time for fun. We have gigs, real gigs, and they are stacking up. Our current setup will barely get us through the building process of 2.0. I may even be cancelling any non essential gigs until the new rig is complete, if i think the oven is deteriorating even more. I gotta save it for the ones we’ve either paid for or been paid for…
But we’re not there yet, and all scheduled gigs are still happening. Shit, I need the gigs to help pay this beast off, we can’t stop. I’m going to run this 1.0 into the ground and turn it back to powder if I’m not careful. This new oven trailer combo will be well worth the investment. I’ve proven to myself that I can do this, and now I believe is the time to grow. With 2.0 on the streets by September 20th (I hope), I can spend the necessary time to fix, repair or rebuild 1.0, and I will have essentially cloned myself. Two separate gigs in one day, oh I can’t wait. Or we find a good ol’ place to park the trailer and we find it a permanent home to run gigs and demos out of. Now considering any offers for a parking space, just let us know!
Heres a preliminary sketch, super preliminary…
rough sketch for CAD designer