Kids of immigrant parents: relax. Bragging rights are no longer limited to those who raise doctors, lawyers or engineers.
In an era where everyone’s a chowhound or wanna-be chef, the new American Dream might not be delivered by medical school or Wall Street, but the kitchen.
When Richmond Hill native Patrick Oropeza started selling the Bolivian empanadas known as salteñas at street fairs and the Rockaway Beach boardwalk in 2012, his parents had their reservations.
“You’re working with your hands,” Oropeza remembers his mother saying, “you should be working with your brains.”
Small business owners who emigrated from Bolivia in the 1980s, Oropeza’s parents hoped their son would seek another career.
“The whole American dream is being a lawyer, or having some kind of tech job,” says Oropeza, 32, who worked in advertising before running the Bolivian Llama Party food stands citywide with his brothers, Alex, 35, and David, 26.
But now that Bolivian Llama Party’ s $6 salteñas are in demand at hot spots like Smorgasburg or Williamsburg’s Output nightclub — and the brothers are being featured everywhere from MTV to Bolivian newspapers — Mom’s a supporter.
“She was like, ‘Holy crap!'” says Oropeza, “‘This is big!'”
The Oropezas are among a growing number realizing that if you run a small restaurant or stand based on your own heritage, you can be your own boss, find more fame than any ordinary office worker, and have a job that’s anything but impersonal.
That’s why Johnny Rivera, 22, decided to join his family’s El Rey Del Taco trucks in Astoria after high school. Rivera moved here from Guerrero, Mexico, to join his parents at the age of 13, and once dreamed of joining the police department.
“I used to tell [my parents], ‘Oh I never want to do it,'” says Rivera of running the trucks, but after spending weekends serving diners who raved over his mother Guadalupe’s tacos al pastor, he changed his mind. Finalists in 2014 Vendy Awards (honoring street food vendors), the family now also runs The King of Tacos restaurant in East Elmhurst.
“It’s really nice to see other people like your food, especially because it’s Mexican,” says Rivera, referring to the not-so-distant past when tacos weren’t always held in high regard by city foodies. “I mean, who would have ever thought?”
The increased desire to swap a cubicle for a food cart is driven by several reasons, says Ann Daw, president of the national Specialty Food Association, which has seen membership applications roughly double in the past five years. Not only is there a “relatively low cost of entry” to the industry, she says, “Part of it is being a little bit in control of your own life” as an entrepreneur, which Daw says is extra-enticing to younger generations.
“The appeal of food — the awareness, the entertainment — has never been higher,” Daw adds.
For 27-year-old Alex Gomberg, who runs Brooklyn Seltzer Boys with his father and uncle, joining the family’s 62-year-old Canarsie seltzer company after high school wasn’t even an option.
“For all of my life it was not a booming business, it was a declining business,” says Gomberg, who earned a masters degree in sports management.
But with elevated interest in old-fashioned foodstuffs like seltzer, Gomberg is helping breathe new life into the business launched by his Russian great-grandfather.
For the past two years he’s wooed high-end clients like Dutch Kills cocktail bar in Queens and The Arlington Club, catered parties and sold egg cream kits, a particular passion. “One of my dreams,” Gomberg admits, “is to one day have an egg cream truck.”
Sharing old traditions is also part of the appeal for Homa Dashtaki, 35, who runs the Brooklyn-based, cult-favorite yogurt company called The White Moustache.
Though in her case a business with her father — who supplied both the initial recipe and the facial hair in the company’s name — began “as a joke.”
An Iranian immigrant who moved to the States in grade school, Dashtaki worked as a lawyer before being laid off in 2009. After two years of “incubating,” she says, she and her father started making thick, ultra-smooth traditional yogurts with sour cherries or quince preserves as a lark, selling them at farmers’ markets in California where she grew up.
“They thought it was going to be a temporary thing,” says Dashtaki of her parents, but instead it became her passion. In 2012, she moved to Brooklyn because the borough better supported her small-batch, hands-on methods, which have scored her a shout-out in Vogue magazine and a wait list of retail stores.
“I thought I loved [being a lawyer] at the time,” says Dashtaki. “I didn’t even know that I could feel this fulfilled in a job.”
If Dashtaki was surprised to realize cooking was her calling, Outer Borough food stand owner Carson Yiu knew by the time he’d graduated from Baruch College in 2009.
His mother encouraged culinary school — she made specialty tofu for Chinese restaurants in Flushing, where he grew up — but Yiu, now 30, had another path in mind.
He worked up to 70 hours a week at other small food businesses, splitting his time between a Brooklyn Flea taco stand, a food truck and a bartending job, completing his self-guided training with a stint as a manager at a catering company.
Inspired by his own Cantonese heritage and a research trip to Taiwan, he started a shaved ice business at South Street Seaport before securing a stall at Smorgasburg in 2013, making flaky scallion pancakes wrapped around roast pork and cucumber or Chinese sausage and eggs.
He sells them for $8 to $9 a pop, caters parties and even consults with friends who dream of following his lead.
“Food gave me the opportunity to express who I am,” Yiu explains of his boisterous personality. “If I were a doctor, I would probably be too loud or too crazy.”
