May 2011, Brooklyn, New York
The company, Shanghai Stainless was founded by his father in 1979 after escaping Maoist China as a teenager. At first the company built Chinese cooking equipment and furnishings for restaurants. About a decade and a half ago it branched out into building customized mobile food vending trailers for street vending, an industry that in for the past five years has experienced a great transformation and a veritable boom in the city. His family has been working with metal for generations.
Ernie himself exudes an air of tranquility for all the chaos going on around him. He is apt to prattle off long lists of things be them machine parts, business situations or cooking accessories that are pleasing to the ear and somehow reflect the teeming insides of his buildings. He speaks rapidly and jumps between sentences cutting himself off with better responses.
It’s about eight fifteen on a hot Friday morning in April. We stand in front of the two two storied buildings that comprise his company on a small street in a tiny industrial enclave between rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in north-west Brooklyn. Food carts and trucks in various states of construction and transformation line both sides of the street. Inside the building it seems like a combination mechanic garage and fabrication plant. Workers move around quickly, speaking a loud Mandarin above the smash of drills and welding, industrial polishers and saws slicing steel. These sounds mix with those of spring birds and cars driving by over which he speaks.
I help run a family business. We do everything from fabrication to service. The family, my mother, myself, my father; we handle the day to day operations, sales, we handle service calls we also do the administrative work. That’s pretty much in a nutshell what we do but it’s a lot when you boil it down, when you actually get your hands into it, it’s actually a lot.
It’s definitely stressful especially working in a family environment.
Have you been in it your whole life?
Oh, no, no I’ve only been working here for eight years. This past February will be eight years.....I was in finance, actually I was working at Lehman Brothers for a year and a half, I got out in time. That, was way before but yeah I got out... I started working there after 9/11 and then I left about oh, maybe a year and a half two years before or actually no, three years before it collapsed.
The company’s been open since 1979 so we’ve been around for quite some time thirty-two years now. I am thirty-five, almost as old. it’s a second child for my parents or fourth child ‘cause I’m a sibling of three.
We do carts, we do trucks I take care of a lot of the residential work, my mother and father used to do more commercial work and when I jumped on board, there’s a high demand for high quality stainless work for residential. So I do a lot of that, I don’t want to say it’s a lions share of it, it’s far from that, it’s probably about five to ten percent of our sales revenue but it’s fun, it’s always challenging. You know it’s good not to have all your eggs in one basket.
I didn’t think I was gonna end up here no. I took on the opportunity because I felt, I mean I was convinced by friends and.. mostly friends and not family... that this was a golden opportunity that I shouldn’t give up and if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work but at least you say you gave it a try so, worth a try and so far so good, so I been here for eight years.
What was the golden opportunity?
The golden opportunity was to be, you know, self employed or work for yourself, be a... you know, work a... Make the American Dream happen when you’re working for yourself, be an entrepreneur... It’s working so far, so far. I probably couldn’t do anything else at this moment. I mean it would be hard for me to swallow a pill as an employee, but so far so good, we’ll see what happens, nothing is set in stone we’ll see how it goes... It’s more enriching. There’s definitely more enrichment when a product like this truck goes out and the customer comes and congratulates you and they’re so happy. It’s definitely more enriching when you’re comparing that to: you’re one employee out of 16,000 employees, no one cares who you are, just finish the work. So, that’s a big difference...Yes, the stress, the enrichment justifies the stress. So it’s not, it’s definitely not like working at Lehman Brothers. I mean I’d get reamed out every day, but here its every day’s a deadline, so every day’s a deadline.
When I go out, when I have time and I go out with my friends and we go out and we talk and people ask me what I do and I say ‘I build food trucks’ that tends to lead to long conversations, two three hour conversations about food trucks in general. The persona of food trucks ten years ago or eight years ago was definitely not the same as the food trucks or the mobile food persona now, it’s definitely, the attitude toward it is very different. People are less reluctant to talk about eating at one. It’s true people are more free to talk about it because its kind of glamorous so people talk about it more. They’re like “We ate here, we ate there, we ate there” or sometimes say “we just...” (laughs) eight years ago, be like “ummm yeah I’m just gonna grab chicken and rice on the corner, street meat...”. Now it’s a little different. No I don’t want to say little, it’s quite different.
Do I have any favorites? Personally I like the Waffles and Dinges Truck, I like The Eddies Pizza Truck......The Red Hook Lobster Pound (Another food truck) is very nice.... Every truck that we work on has a signature. It’s just a signature, their theme or something that will identify them as their truck. It used to be, back five years ago, it used to be color; it used to be this truck was blue, this cart was red, this truck was yellow. And now it’s, let’s even identify it even further with like, awnings, with like, just maximum exposure windows, with tiles, with glass, it’s...everybody has a different, different twist to it and we’re able to do it so it’s really fun, it’s challenging, but it’s really fun.
The toughest job I had to do was actually a twenty-two foot truck which was called -it’s out there now- It’s called the Munch Truck and that was the toughest job, that was the most difficult. It doesn’t see too much, you know, media attention. It is the largest truck out there, twenty-six... from bumper to bumper it’s like thirty-two feet. It was the toughest job I’ve ever taken. The guy, he was a telephoning engineer and he was... His standards of what he wanted in the truck, he, uh... I thought for a second he was building it for his home, just the level of attention and just the demands that he wanted inside the truck were amazing. I didn’t know realistically if it, you know, if it made sense, but everyone.... different strokes for different folks. It has two t.v.’s, it has security system, it has a satellite t.v., it has two hundred gallons of water recirculation, it has a Bosch water heater, it has a Frankie faucet sink; huge, huge sinks, it has massive custom refrigeration with racks inside, it has a Vulcan range, which is definitely above and beyond what most people want to put in their trucks...it’s a high end commercial range....He didn’t pull any strings to build the truck, everything that he could put in, he put in. He has a security system, a twelve volt system so that the security system doesn’t go down when the truck is off. Or at least when the generator is off the security system will continue to run because he has a twelve volt system and then the generator charges the twelve volt system, the twelve volt system gets inverted back into the the twenty so that it, it powers the camera system. It’s...it was intense, definitely intense, the truck was here for ten months..... Normal turnaround, even in our busiest season would probably be three to four months. In our slower season which is wintertime, early winter we can usually turn it around in about two months.
Skilled labor, craftsmanship and industrial work is not something you find much around here anymore, you guys are hold outs...
...I consider myself kind of a boutique, I don’t term it that way too much, but we offer a lot of services and just levels of work inside just one small business. What we usually, what we provide a customer from start to end would be: in the beginning we sit down, we design, -we actually offer a service to do design, once have the designs, we actually have the ability actually to put it on paper with CAD systems, once the CAD systems are set we can build we can build our truck or our carts based on that, on those, those drawings. So we have sheet metal workers that are involved, we have hot roll steel, we have, sometimes we have elec- we definitely have electricity, we have plumbing, we have refrigeration plumbing, we have ahhh... we have water plumbing, we have special lightings, we actually build our own lighting fixtures, we have the ability to put speaker systems in, so we’re kind of familiar with how to set up a speaker system. We have the ability to do some suspension work, some axle work, there is a slew of items that we can take care of in a one shop , so which is why people actually come to us, people come to us because we’re able to do everything for them. I think one of the highlights is people like to come to us because if you want to build a truck and you want to build it functionally, you really have to start veering into custom work, you can’t just go out to the market and buy standard equipment because it’s not gonna fit. You know, or it won’t be functional, won’t be streamlined, won’t be logistically uh, operationally sound so a lot of these individuals, these new customers, they want a thru-put as much as possible. They don’t want any speed bumps in their process. So this is the result.
So you don’t worry about this type of work not being there?
I mean, I have my concerns, there’s definitely concerns, definitely. Two years ago, a couple years ago we had issues with the use of tempered glass, now we have some issues with propane use because there was an accident, we have issues with, just Department of Health and new regulations. There’s always, everyday there’s new issues, I mean there was an issue recently, six months ago, I think it’s kind of softened up right now, but the fact that food trucks weren’t being able to park in the city for longer than three hours or even vend at metered locations, that was a big issue, very, very big issue, I mean it would have stunted the whole truck growth of the industry. It would’ve came back to me and now we’d have a slew of trucks that don’t know where to do business from so... But it worked out, I mean right now we’re still going strong, many, many people are still very interested in building trucks despite you know, this bill or this supreme court ruling....
..No, It’s impossible to automate this. There’s another business in Jersey, they call themselves Custom but I think they’ve kind of meandered away from the word custom and they’re, they should really be called standard. No... because they only, they give you what they have and that’s it... they just streamline the product and mass produce the product. If you’re mass producing a product you’re not really customizing it, very little customization. The client may feel that it’s really customized, but a true customized product is something that -each truck is identifiable internally and externally, everything is different.
You couldn’t make pizza in a waffle truck...
Exactly, You cannot do one or the other, it has to be specifically designed for that purpose.
That would be opening up a can of worms. There’s tons of things I’d like to change in the industry. Umm... Not the manufacturing part of the business but I think in terms of just trying to get a business like this off the ground and the little speed bumps trying to get it off the ground and trying to get it operational on the streets of New York, some of the procedures or some of the how it works or the street term or the whatever its called, I’m not a big fan of that. I think its, it can be restructured or structured properly so that it works more better. It’s somewhat like taxi medallions and it’s not very healthy for the business, it’s not very healthy for the industry.... Permits in general, it’s not a very good system.
We do spend a lot of time, personally I spend a lot of time on the computer. I go online trying to see different ideas here and there, but sometimes, inspiration-wise or what the truck finally will look like that vision usually comes from the client. We do more of the inside logistics work, we do a lot of research or I do a lot of research basically on how to improve the contents that go inside the truck, how to make it more functional, how to make refrigeration better, how to make electricity better, how to make uh, plumbing better how to- every little thing for us is detailing-wise makes up an important part of the truck so in those terms, yes we’re always you know trying to revamp or renew things inside the truck but as far as inspiration for what the truck will actually look like? A lot of times the client has an idea already so.. and if they like the floor plans we’ll go with that, and then they’ll introduce different ideas of branding and media or different types of marketing ideas onto the truck so the marketing part is not us, the marketing part is mostly the client, the customers come with the marketing ideas.
But you do get to make your mark...
Well, the truck itself is the signature. You can see the branding on the truck, it could say diff- the name of the business but when you look at the truck and see the quality of the work, that’s our signature there.
How do you feel when you see one of your trucks on the streets?
Oh I’m very proud, it makes me very proud, very proud. I drive around the city with my wife and my kid and you know I say (Pointing in different directions) “I built that, I built that, I built that” and so, it’s definitely proud, it’s definitely proud. I’m sure my parents feel the same way. My father and I, we were just talking, I mean this industry is definitely changing, the people who are coming into this industry are definitely changing. So, there’s definitely room for growth, so we’re pretty happy, so far so good. We’re pretty happy at this moment, at this point.
My son? he’s two and a half right now.
Do you envision him coming into the business?
I think every parent will envision it. Whether or not he does do it or not that’s up to him, if he decides to become an artist or something, I’m going to support him
He’ll be in a family tradition
Kinda-sorta, if he’s not in the stainless steel business he’ll be in something else. So, we’ll see. I just spoke to someone else recently and they were saying “If my parents had something like this, I wouldn’t have gone to college.” I was like “Oh, Okay”....I went to school yeah.....I definitely have not, was not able to learn as much in terms of just dealing with people and dealing with situations anywhere more so than here. You don’t pick up those skills working in a corporate office at all. You don’t deal with people on a day-to-day basis and for me, we meet different characters every single day. Dealing with people is something that you just can’t pick up without doing it and sitting in a cubicle just doesn’t cut it. Soft skill wise, interpersonal skills, business wise, running a business, stress, handling stress, handling curveballs, I hate curveballs... Administrative, operational you just don’t get your hands into so many things, so many facets of running a business until you actually run a business.
Saturdays we work and Sundays I spend time with my family. So, we work six days a week, Monday to Saturday and Sundays we have off. Those are nice days... I think some people have a hard time disconnecting, actually when I put my head on the pillow I try to focus on my family, I’d rather not compromise my family for business, it is important but I like to give a hundred percent when I’m with my family.
If you work with your family just the language is always been like, for us..... None of my employees speak English, maybe, we have one employee that speaks English, everyone else is.... Half my job is translating.
We were originally in Chinatown. This was from 1979, a little over 1979 before we incorporated I guess, around that time, ‘til about 1992, 93. Between ‘92 and ‘93 and about ‘89 it was kind of... We actually had both places, but we officially moved here because rent in the city was ridiculous.
Do you guys rent this out?
No, we own it actually, so it worked out. If we rented we’d be in the same shoes as we were before.
Rents not so cheap around here...
No, no it’s not cheap at all... This area’s definitely been changing. We’re actually not considered Williamsburg, we’re actually considered a triangle that’s surrounded by Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick. We’re called the Broadway triangle.... If you look at the map you’re going to see Union, you’re going to see Broadway and you’re going to see Flushing and in those three streets, you get a triangle and it’s called the Broadway Triangle. There’s actually a lot of media attention based on the Broadway Triangle. This area was... has been rezoned as of last year basically from industrial to residential. There’s a lot of talk about it I was actually getting interviewed by a ton of newspaper people.....from two different angles, because Pfizer is a monster. It’s a gorilla of a business. They own most of the real estate here, Pfizer’s a gorilla. Pfizer’s right down the block, if you take Gerry Street straight down, that big building is Pfizer, they’re not there anymore, they own it. They came in when there was really enticing offers by the city as in like, you know energy rebates, tax rebates; so basically all these rebates were being thrown at these big, big companies helping them start their headquarters here. So, that’s why the Citibank is located in Long Island City where no one else is located, because there was so much incentive for them to come. Maybe after the incentives wear off, you know it may be an empty building....
They don’t know what they want to do, obviously they’re trying to get the most money out of it and they’re thinking about selling it to developers. This area, this specific block a lot of these real estate owners were attempting to go to eminent domain... Yeah, we’re going to be hearing from that. This was three years ago really. I was getting contacted by the New York City Department of Development and Residential Department and they were thinking about eminent domaining. Right now there’s a stay, there’s a Chief Justice Goodman has a stay on it and basically nothings moving as of this moment.....
So now the city is thinking about getting you guys out of here...
Basically... It’s not get out of here but they’ll give you pennies on the dollar.
