Tales of a Chaat Wallah

Thunder Mountain Curry Spices Up Troy

A selection of help-yourself condiments including pickled chilies, fried shallots, roasted peanuts, and chopped cilantro.

As much as anything, it was the “30-30-30-10” rule that sent Mike Gordon on a food pilgrimage to Thailand. That’s the axiom of restaurant economics Gordon learned as a student at the Culinary Institute of America more than 15 years ago. Roughly 30 percent of your income goes into food costs, 30 percent into labor and 30 percent into overhead. What’s left, that’s yours. Maybe.

“Do everything by the book, and you make 10-percent profit,” Gordon explains. “You’re investing 200 grand in a business. If you’re lucky, and no one’s stealing from you or throwing meat in his car or robbing the register, you might make 10 cents on the dollar. That’s pretty tight.”

So as Gordon rose from dishwasher to chef through a succession of Albany, New York, restaurants, he took careful notes and gathered one essential fact. Most of the restaurants that succeed are either really big or really small. In a very competitive world, independents—who can’t advertise as much as the chains and can’t bargain with mammoth food distributors like SYSCO—have a tougher row to hoe. This is not a problem if you haven’t known since you were eight years old that you wanted to be a chef, and if the need to create and serve innovative food isn’t in your blood. But for Mike Gordon, who fantasized about owning his own place, it was a definite problem.

A problem he solved, inadvertently, by going broke and getting mobile. In 1999, Gordon’s marriage fell apart, he lost custody of his kids and, struggling with a drinking problem, he got fired, all within a few months. Just as he hit bottom, he found himself in love with a woman named Susan. The day he was driving north to Keene Valley, New York, to move in with her, Gordon passed a hot dog stand on the highway that cuts through the Adirondacks. “You know, I could do that,” he told himself. “But I would do it with a fish fry.”