Galactic MegaStallion: Why I broke the law, & threw the restaurant playbook off the Empire State Building

This is the story of how and why I traded in my well-loved, internationally acclaimed vegan restaurant and food truck business to cook inside of a kitchen the size of an elevator that almost no one knows exists. Galactic MegaStallion is not trying to be well known on yelp. There's no social media for it, and the only way you can know where/when it is happening is through my email list. But damn, if it's not super yummy.

This is a kinda long blog post, so I have included a table of contents so you can skim around it, if reading through it seems daunting. Some of the stuff in here might bore you to tears, and some of it you might find really interesting, especially if you work in food service, or care a lot about the state of modern food culture.

Jump to:

• Why the heck I closed the doors on Cinnamon Snail
• Personal Growth and Introspection
• What I was looking to do with Galactic MegaStallion:
• Weird Marketing & Fuck the Law
• Keep following me here; I promise this eventually makes some kind of sense…
• 🎙️ Blabber to the hackers
• The Food Itself...

Why the heck I closed the doors on Cinnamon Snail

Times were tough for my popular vegan food business The Cinnamon Snail before the pandemic hit. I had expanded from my humble early days running a food truck, often by myself. Now I had 60+ full-time employees, a 24/7 operation with overnight pastry production, and catering, and a flagship location above NY Penn Station right in front of Madison Square Garden.

Our overhead had skyrocketed, and I found myself stressed out all the time, less able to be creative with food, and finding myself more often in meetings, on calls with lawyers, and dealing with emergencies at all hours of the day and night. I was burnt out, and felt like I didn't have time to apply my creativity to the food anymore in the way that I had when I started.

When the city announced a lockdown in March 2020, I knew there was no way my business could survive for months with astronomical rent and expenses with no money coming in. I closed everything up, and sold off the contents of the production kitchen I had built just 7 years earlier for over $300K at auction for just under $5K, which didn't even cover half a month's rent for our Penn Station location. I had to sell off our food trucks for pennies on the dollar to make sure we could pay our staff their last paychecks. It was pretty hard to accept disassembling this business I had created that so many people had loved, which at one time was the #1 highest-rated place of any kind to eat in NYC on Yelp. Within a few weeks, all business debts were settled, and I walked away with nothing, at least nothing material, but with lots of great experiences and doors open to me.

Personal Growth and Introspection

After the dust settled, I spent the first few months of the pandemic mentally and spiritually recharging.  I got to spend the last months of my aging dog Mossy's life with her, so much more present than I had been able to be. Lots of long daily walks with time to think. Mossy passed away peacefully in her sleep next to me in the bed by the end of the first year of the pandemic.

These long walks with my doggo gave me plenty of time to reflect on my culinary career and figure out what the heck the path forward was. I realized that from years of running an extremely catastrophe-prone, complicated business, I basically had PTSD. Every time my phone rang for years, I would think: "Oh God, what's happened now?"

Doing consulting and vegan recipe development lets me behind the curtain of people's food businesses worldwide. One thing has been consistent all over the planet since the pandemic- the restaurant business is an increasingly unprofitable, volatile, and risky way to make a living with food. Ingredient cost increases, and frequent supply chain issues as well as how hard it is to find qualified staff. And when you find them, almost no amount of money is enough to keep a good team together. After years of financial stress for consumers meant people had less money to eat out with anyway.

Additionally, I recognized there were a ton of things I really couldn't stand about the direction that modern food service had gone in. This shit where 90% of fast-casual restaurants meet you with the hospitality of someone looking disinterested, staring at an iPad at the counter? All of the seemingly required parasitic third party delivery services like grubhub and Uber Eats were only making it harder for restaurants to survive. 

Worst of all, was how social media had become the standard of how restaurants got the word out about the food they serve. Did you "check in" on Foursquare? Did you like and subscribe? Make sure to use this hashtag and follow us on Instagram. Give me a fucking break! The whole thing just seems so corny, desperate, and utterly un-fun, and for what? People were being conditioned by an algorithm to consume and produce more gimmicky food that would be gooey and pornographic. The idea of objectifying my food and hyping myself up felt dishonest. If my food was really that great, I shouldn't need to shove it down people's throats right?

So, I started thinking about what I did and didn't want to do going forward with food. I already had a couple of dimensions in full swing. Having taught at culinary schools for years before the pandemic, I found it easy and fun to set up ongoing online vegan cooking classes. I was still doing some vegan wedding catering, and providing consulting services and recipe development for restaurants, food manufacturers, and food trucks, but I truly missed the joy and rush of cooking for people directly.

How could I continue to serve people food without exposing myself to tons of financial risk, or having my next food business grow into an enormous monster that would eat me alive again?

The vision started coming together for a new seasonal pop-up eatery. I called it Galactic MegaStallion, and it had a spooky, celestial pony theme.

I found and modified a used falafel cart (you know, the kind you see on the sidewalks in NYC). I fitted the inside with a grill, fryer, two-burner stove, refrigeration, and warming drawers. A set-up that could be super-versatile for the idea I had in mind. Rather than doing a vinyl wrap on the outside, I covered the outside with laser-cut steel panels, and attached nice wooden counters, not for people to eat at, while they watched me cook, and also to support planters full of Tulasi (holy basil). Additionally, when we would roll up every week, we would put out tables and chairs, and operate less like a food truck, and more like a pop-up outdoor restaurant.

What I was looking to do with Galactic MegaStallion:

1. Every year, the Galactic MegaStallion would have a completely different theme and concept.
2. Every time we were open, I would create a 100% new menu within that year's theme, riffing off the nuances of that year's style.
3. I would keep this project small enough to pull off with just the help of my daughter, because who would I rather spend the day working with? For real, tell me who!
4. I would serve completely sattvic vegan food, made according to the religious principles of Vaisnavism without onions or garlic.
5. All of the food would be prasadam, having been offered as bhoga to the precious small deities I installed in a special shrine in the food cart. Beyond being delicious, and creative, this menu would be strictly sanctified food. That was important to me.
6. No point-of-sale system, which meant cash only, but it made it so we could make the experience warm, friendly and human with no screens in sight. Like the early days, we would know our customers' names, and it would be a weird cult little community more so than strictly a business. 
7. This was a big one: no to-go packaging! This food was going to be much more beautiful than the yummy-but-kinda-sloppy fare I used to make on The Cinnamon Snail, and I wanted people to sit and enjoy their food while it was fresh and still beautifully plated. 
8. Recognizable logo? Scratch that, this shit was gonna be illegible. On purpose. I had a talented death-metal logo designer help me make the dopest-looking logo that only psychotic people could maaaaaybe read, like if they were lucky. 
9. And then the biggest, maybe bravest thing of all: no social media, and almost no discernible online presence at all. 

Weird Marketing & Fuck the Law

But wait, with no online existence, how would people find out about this rad new thingy I had now sunk a couple of years of planning into bringing to fruition? They weren't. And I was ok with that.

But I wanted to do something different to get the word out, in a way that would fit the elusive nature of this new food venture.

NJ is famous for one thing, and one thing only: there are a ton of poorly designed billboards and ads for realtors and shit like that. I took high-resolution photos of my favorite bad looking ads from NJ transit platforms, and had a Photoshop savvy friend remove all the text. Next I had another friend help me create a custom font where every letter was given a different abstract geometric symbol. Then I rewrote the text on the billboards, which were written in symbols. The only thing you could read in the ads was a phone number.

So once the billboards were designed, I got like a zillion of them printed. My plan was straightforward: I would illegally put up these new and improved billboards over the original ones. So commuters would still see the same ugly advertisements they were used to seeing every day, but now they were written in alien hieroglyphics or whatever.

At first, I was going out at night to put up these billboards like a graffiti artist, with a friend watching out for the cops, but it was too difficult and a paranoid feeling. So I got a safety vest, a hard hat, and khaki pants, and just went out and took my time putting up the billboards in broad daylight. I sometimes would wave to the cops parked at the train station parking lots as I headed onto the platform with my rolled-up billboards, bucket and tools. Sometimes people waiting for the trains would ask me questions about the schedule while I put up the billboards. And I did my best to answer them authoritatively. I was SUPPOSED to be there. This was my job.

Before my days running my own food business, when I was still working in other people's restaurants, I used to do extreme sound design and audio engineering to make weird music for people to listen to under the influence of LSD. So I dusted off those long-forgotten skills, had the phone number on the billboards go to a Google voicemail box, and created a special message for people to hear if they called the number.

I made this witness protection plan-esque recording of an artificial voice reading of a cypher that could help people decode the symbols on the billboards, which would send them to a special website, and give them access to the creepy, hidden back side of the site.

Keep following me here; I promise this eventually makes some kind of sense…

Anyway, the website, which I no longer have up was www.wwwcomwwwcomcom.com and it basically looked like a 12-year-old's MySpace page from back in the day. Lots of glittering pictures of horses, misleading things that intentionally didn't work (like a prompt to follow us on social media), and block advertising that visitors should vote for us on something called "Britney's Top Horse Sites." I don't even have a clue WTF Britney's Top Horse Sites is. Basically, the site had very little in the way of public facing hints that this was a website for a food business. But if you decoded the billboards, you would get onto the hidden page of the site that gave you GPS coordinates for where you could find us and get a whole bunch of free food if you cracked the code.

I was pleasantly surprised that quite a few people figured it out and found us! The rest of everyone who found us in our first year operating either just stumbled upon us or heard about it through word of mouth. I didn't have to artificially hype up my food, spend hours posting photos every week, or make (kill me) reels for Instagram and Facebook. Fuck that.

One of the nice things about doing this smaller project, and making it intentionally a little less likely to "go viral" or whatever, is that I could go back to a volume of service that allowed me to personally prep, and cook 100% of the food we served. And employees? Other than someone I hired to help with the mountain of dishes and powder washing that every day ended with, this small mobile kitchen is only big enough for 2-3 people to work inside it. So while I did all the cooking, my daughter Özlem, and occasionally my older daughter Idil (who used to work with me back in the day on my food truck) would serve the customers. 

Working with my girls has been lovely. First of all, spending the day with them is such a nice bonding time. And it's our little family business. Unlike regular employees, they are truly excited about working with me on it, and we look forward to our weekend together all week. It's so much more the energy I was to serve people food with. Doing it because we want to, and because we love serving our food, not because we feel like we have to and are solely looking to this venture for our survival.

For the first year, I told myself I didn't want to explain this new thing. I didn't want to do interviews or podcasts, or whatever. But now I am ready for this upcoming season for more people to enjoy this very sweet little thing my family and I created. So, that's why I am sharing all the weird, juicy details here with you.

The Food Itself...

The first year's theme was vegan Middle Eastern food. And I riffed on adaptations of Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese and vegan Turkish cuisine. Here are a few photos of some of my personal fave dishes I served from season one:

Second season? We are going hard with Southeast Asian street food dishes! These are mostly drawn from my experience spending time in Malaysia and Indonesia, but there are some vegan Filipino vibes in there too. Thats a throwback to my time cooking at the World Street Food Congress in the Philippines, where the conditions were so bad, that one of our helpers at the event died, which is a story for another day.

Here are a few Galactic MegaStallion, Season Two bangers:

My mission with Galactic MegaStallion was to create a food experience that gave me lots of room to be creative within a non-flexible framework (the theme I pick and force myself not to deviate from all year, through hundreds of menu items). I always liked that. Back when I used to do graffiti art as a kid, I always loved the freedom to do expressive things within the limits of typography, and this venture has a lot in common with that.

Similarly, this has been a bit of an experiment for me to answer one important existential question that was on my mind during the pandemic: Can a food business thrive without playing by any of the rules of modern food service? No credit cards, no P.O.S., no delivery, no social media, no set menus, no hard and fast rules that I don't create for me to operate within the confines of. Let's find out.