00:07 - My name is Stirling Sowerby.

00:08 - I'm the owner of the Flying Dutchman food truck.

00:11 - We serve German authentic German food.

00:15 - No bread, just real, homemade,

00:19 - wholesome German cuisine.

00:29 - The food industry.

00:30 - 47 years total in the hospitality industry.

00:34 - Shall we say.

00:34 - And in the kitchen and the restaurant field.

00:37 - Now, 37 years.

00:42 - I opened the restaurant

00:44 - and my partner was the chef.

00:47 - And what he did, I can't say on camera, but he did some naughty things

00:52 - and he wouldn't open the restaurant on time.

00:55 - So at one point I said, if that happens again, I want to

00:59 - I want to find an owner but not a chef.

01:02 - So I said, if it happens again, we're going to close down.

01:05 - And that's what happened.

01:06 - So we closed the first restaurant down and after that

01:10 - I said, if I ever do a restaurant again, I want 24.

01:15 - I think if I ever do a restaurant again, I need to be a chef.

01:18 - I need to know what's going on in the back of the house

01:21 - before I make an investment into a restaurant.

01:24 - So that's what happened.

01:26 - A couple of years later, I sold my club.

01:29 - What?

01:30 - Moved it on to a friend of mine, and then moved to another town

01:34 - called Hamburg, and again with another friend who was a chef,

01:39 - opened a restaurant, and he trained me basically. To.

01:59 - When you come from the blue color back, where did I come from?

02:02 - And, I'm not really exposed to the approach.

02:07 - The long, fine dining scene,

02:10 - you get taken there.

02:11 - And I always thought, oh, man, if I'm a chef, I can do all this myself.

02:14 - So in the end, that was a big motivating, motivating factor for me.

02:18 - No matter what will happen, I will always be able to take

02:21 - some ingredients and make a nice healthy meal out of it.

02:25 - So that's really what got me motivated to becoming a professional chef.

02:42 - And. I wanted to open a restaurant,

02:48 - just like in the movie. Chef.

02:49 - He didn't want to open a food truck, but then once you get into it,

02:53 - you discover there's actually a lot of interesting facts about it.

02:57 - So the original story is my

03:00 - my sister in law came up with the name Flying Dutchman.

03:03 - When I heard Flying Dutchman, I was like, oh, pirate theme.

03:07 - That's me.

03:08 - We can connect it to the Flying Dutchman.

03:11 - What everybody does, usually they call me the Flying Dutchman, but

03:15 - it's a real ringing name.

03:18 - I saw it and it got my fantasy going.

03:20 - What I could do was I can take this.

03:23 - And that's how it started.

03:25 - Normal days.

03:26 - I ran fine between, to be honest.

03:29 - But you deal with everything you know, and it is kind of similar

03:32 - to a regular kitchen.

03:34 - The banquet where you goes down the stove on one flame is out, and so on and so on.

03:39 - You got to deal with problems.

03:40 - Now on a food truck is or combined into a small space.

03:45 - And it happens way more, especially when you have a 40 year

03:48 - old lady like this that need maintenance all the time.

03:51 - Right? Heidi?

03:56 - You. Just German

04:05 - regular German made cuisine.

04:09 - So the same stuff that my grandmother used to make back in the day.

04:12 - It's a lot of Mexican trucks around.

04:13 - There's a lot of

04:14 - of all kinds of different trucks around, but there's really no German truck.

04:18 - It's a handful across the country, but most of those

04:21 - also fall into this, what I call Americanized cuisine.

04:25 - So they take a schnitzel, they put it on a sandwich and then say, That's German.

04:29 - Well, yes, on the fairgrounds they sell schnitzel sandwiches.

04:33 - But as a chef, I learn maybe one day I will.

04:37 - If I'm famous enough and I have enough trucks, we will have a schnitzel sandwich

04:42 - truck out on the field somewhere with 50 other trucks.

04:46 - But for me, it was more showcasing the actual cuisine.

04:50 - How we really how people really sit down at dinner and eat.

04:55 - They eat meat, potatoes and vegetables or used to

05:00 - nowadays it's a little bit different.

05:02 - They eat a hoagie, a pizza and mac and cheese.

05:06 - I'm not for that.

05:08 - I'm totally against that.

05:09 - It's industrialized, feeding and and it's not healthy for us.

05:14 - And in the end it will come back to haunt us

05:16 - because we need cholesterol medication and blood pressure medication

05:20 - and God knows what now phenomenon.

05:23 - The first couple of years were tough.

05:26 - I had a lot of people come up to the truck and go, can I get a sandwich

05:31 - I want? No, this is not a sandwich time.

05:33 - We are real here for real food.

05:35 - We are not.

05:37 - And I'm not saying that it's not real food.

05:39 - When you put it on a sandwich, but I can't put myself behind.

05:44 - I want to sell stuff that I can put myself behind it, that I will eat myself.

05:58 - I. I cried so many times.

06:12 - You have no idea.

06:14 - I laid in parking lots for the guy that worked with me.

06:18 - Vicky.

06:20 - She saw a couple of those incidents.

06:22 - Now you think this is it? It's all right. No.

06:24 - You can't recoup from this.

06:26 - Whatever it was.

06:27 - Brake line rupturing or no tank leaking or so many things.

06:32 - It's just indescribable.

06:35 - As much as you talk about with the wall.

06:39 - Like she's supposed to be my successor, hopefully.

06:42 - But I call her my retirement, so I don't have A41K.

06:47 - I don't have these things, you know, so info for me.

06:51 - Hopefully she will be the one that takes this company then to the next level.

06:56 - And she's really good at when Vicky works.

06:59 - She works the girl.

07:01 - She likes to be on the backside of the house so to speak.

07:04 - I take the order, I put it up on the board.

07:06 - She prepares it, puts it out, and then I call the customer

07:10 - and say, here's your food.

07:32 - We do have the koi type.

07:34 - Not where the salad fries, that's all.

07:36 - Our salads.

07:37 - And then sometimes cakes and sauces and stuff like that.

07:42 - Then we have the hot bang, Marie.

07:45 - That's where we keep the hot sauces and, like, things, like

07:49 - for slice for us to get heated up in there.

07:53 - And on bigger events, we use it to, to pre-cooked schnitzel.

07:56 - You know, when we do, like, 500 people, you can't just doing one by one.

08:01 - So we start out by cooking, let's say 50 minutes.

08:03 - So keep them in the warmer,

08:04 - and then we walk through them in the beginning to get the flow going.

08:09 - And then once we go through the 50, we start cooking per order.

08:13 - So but it helps to get it started.

08:16 - And then next to that is the fryer.

08:18 - Well everybody know it's what we do in the fryer right.

08:21 - We took the schnitzel and they brought us in.

08:23 - And traditionally I know chefs in Germany

08:27 - you don't do bratwurst in the fryer.

08:29 - I'm aware of that.

08:30 - But you have to speed it up.

08:33 - It's just no way we can do all these broads on that little grill.

08:37 - It's not possible.

08:38 - So we we drop them in the fryer.

08:40 - Plus, I found out that here in America, there's only a handful of Germans

08:46 - that know that still know that there has to be the white stripe.

08:50 - Normally, when I served it like that,

08:51 - we did that in the beginning because I'm a purist

08:56 - and people would say that, can you cook

08:57 - that all the way?

09:01 - I would let

09:01 - it is cooked already before I even saw it in the fryer.

09:05 - I was turning up a batch was the one that I'm doing.

09:08 - It's not fresh meat, it's cooked meat.

09:10 - So they get get boiled before they actually come on the truck.

09:14 - You can eat them coy.

09:15 - No, it's not a pleasant feeling, but no, you could.

09:19 - In theory, nothing will happen.

09:21 - Then next to that is the the plating and prep station, basically where

09:25 - everything puts everything together.

09:27 - The big refrigerator that holds all the meats.

09:29 - And so it touches the potatoes.

09:32 - All that stuff is in a big upright refrigerator.

09:35 - It's about enough food for roughly 500 people.

09:38 - Three compartment sink, because the health department

09:41 - wanted one, which is really ludicrous on a truck.

09:44 - We don't wash anything on the truck.

09:46 - You know, you you you take your dirty stuff, you put it in the bin,

09:49 - you bring it back to your commissary and you wash it there

09:52 - rather than in these little toy things that are back there where you can

09:55 - basically you get one pan in it and that's it.

09:58 - So while it is a requirement, it's really a requirement that it's illogical.

10:03 - Shall we say.

10:17 - That the idea was really not the live stream.

10:19 - The idea was there's a there's a monitor behind the window here.

10:24 - So people that stand outside can watch us make their food.

10:28 - So I call it the open restaurant policy, just like you have restaurants

10:32 - where you can see the kitchen

10:33 - from where you are sitting, and you can see the guys making your food.

10:38 - I had the same idea on the food truck.

10:40 - I don't want people to go like this.

10:41 - They can just stand there comfortably and watch it on the monitor.

10:45 - A schnitzel is just anything you bread and throw in the fryer.

10:48 - A breaded cutlet here in a in America, that's the culinary term for it.

10:53 - The sides, traditional German side.

10:55 - That's actually where my grandmother's cooking comes in.

10:58 - So I do the sauerkraut and the red cabbage,

11:00 - just like she did back in the day, with the same aromatics, the same,

11:05 - ingredients.

11:06 - So, for example, with the.

11:08 - Let's stick with that cabbage and sauerkraut,

11:11 - two main things, you add lard to give it a creamy

11:15 - feeling in your mouth, and you add pig feet or pick ears

11:19 - and let them simmer in the crowd to to bring out those flavors.

11:24 - And then my aromatics, which if you want, you can see it

11:27 - on my Facebook page, actually how it's done here, you got two sides.

11:30 - It's the mildest one.

11:32 - And literally it tastes like Campbell's mushroom soup.

11:36 - If you want a comparison in your head, that's the easiest way to go.

11:38 - But it's better.

11:39 - No, there's more going on than just in the Campbell's soup.

11:42 - There's way more different mushrooms in that. And,

11:47 - yeah. It's mild.

11:48 - No, it's it's it's it doesn't have a lot of punch to it.

11:52 - And then the next one, it's going out a gypsy sauce is, it's called, it's.

11:58 - It's a tangy, sweet and sour kind of side.

12:03 - So the ingredients are ketchup, crushed tomatoes and diced tomatoes.

12:07 - And then all the peppers, onions and stuff come in, goes in to give it this.

12:12 - This kind of strange flavor, almost where you can't put your finger on it,

12:17 - what it is, and then garlic and parsley.

12:21 - I think that's it's really the ingredients.

12:23 - So it's a little bit like a I describe it like a marinara sauce

12:27 - but with a sweet and tangy,

12:30 - flavored and a curry sauce.

12:33 - The last one is a simple barbecue sauce

12:36 - or ketchup and, and and crushed tomatoes mixed together.

12:41 - And then in it goes curry powder a little bit of cumin powder,

12:45 - black pepper, Tabasco, honey.

12:50 - And that's it.

12:51 - And then you just.

12:52 - Stewart, you don't even have to cook that one.

12:54 - You just do it together. No.

12:56 - And then put it in your container.

12:58 - It's we bring it on the truck, heat it up on the truck.

13:00 - Have it.

13:01 - So bratwurst is our biggest sausage seller.

13:05 - Then we have the currywurst, which is exactly the same.

13:08 - It's the bratwurst, but it gets chopped up.

13:10 - And then with the curry sauce over top,

13:13 - we have a

13:14 - book for us, which is similar to an American hotdog.

13:17 - A little bit more flavorful than a regular hotdog and a little bigger.

13:23 - Vice versa is another one that the Bavarian sausage gets boiled,

13:27 - very mild.

13:28 - And it's it's a veal sausage.

13:30 - And now we just got a new one that we will put on in a couple of weeks

13:34 - called climbing a sausage, which is similar to like, a kielbasa.

13:39 - And we're going to use it with a dish that my grandmother

13:42 - used to make called Queen corn.

13:46 - Kale.

13:47 - It's braised kale.

13:49 - It's a very, very flavorful dish as well.

13:53 - And the sausages come or my meats.

13:56 - There's a couple more things that leave our kids the catalog option.

13:59 - They all come from the butcher up in Honesdale, PA called alpine vet Thomas.

14:05 - Really good Butcher.

14:06 - I've been working with him now for.

14:10 - I think the last four years.

14:12 - The butcher before that shut down.

14:14 - So I had to change. I found this guy.

14:16 - He actually recommended these guys and it's been good ever since.

14:20 - And now they actually deliver as well, so

14:23 - it makes it a lot easier.

14:45 - I operate everywhere.

14:46 - That's that's one of the big reasons why I became a food truck.

14:49 - I finally know where I live now.

14:51 - I go all the way to France as we went.

14:53 - So five Manchester, New Hampshire, all the way down to Washington.

14:58 - When? Almost to Pittsburgh.

15:00 - Not quite.

15:01 - And down to Atlantic City.

15:03 - So our radius is gigantic.

15:06 - Depends, of course, on the budget of the time.

15:09 - When we go to New Hampshire, you're looking at a cost of at least five solid,

15:15 - mostly private.

15:16 - Now, in the beginning, I did everything.

15:19 - I went on to avoid the events

15:22 - that everybody else was doing already food truck events.

15:26 - But the way I serve my food on a plate with knife and fork really doesn't

15:32 - lend itself to be sitting out in a park in the grass eating you can.

15:35 - I'm not saying you can, but it's not the perfect ideal situation.

15:40 - That's why I have from the very get-Go said, we're going to work with breweries,

15:44 - breweries, wineries, distilleries is our main income or our main bread

15:49 - because people sit down and they have a table, they have a chair.

15:52 - They can sit down, have a glass of wine below, whatever,

15:56 - and eat my, my food with that.

15:58 - That's what what's the main idea?

16:00 - And that's what's happened.

16:01 - You know, there's a calendar on my website.

16:04 - It will tell you up until the end of this year where I will be on any given day.

16:10 - And once this October fest craze is over in November,

16:14 - I start populating for 2024.

16:17 - And I already have.

16:18 - I don't know how many in the wings trying to get. That's it.

16:20 - No guys, you gotta wait like everybody else.

16:23 - We're going to start in November.

16:25 - Then give me your dates.

16:26 - And I put them on the calendar.

16:37 - And.