Q: How did you get into the business?
A: My wife Nancy and I grew up in the Ottawa/Hull area, and I hated the winter. All through my life, I wondered what I could do that would allow me to work in the summer and then travel somewhere warm in the winter. Ottawa is full of chip trucks—the French make great fries—and I always kept that in the back of my head as a possibility.
Q: Have you always been in Halifax?
A: We actually started out in Summerside, PEI, but it was a cold, wet summer and that didn’t go too well. Halfway through the season we picked up and moved ourselves down to Peggys Cove. We paid for our equipment in that half season. We moved up here in July 1977, and we’ve been here ever since.
Q: Where do you go in the winter?
A: We travel all over the place. Anywhere you can go over, we’ve gone. Florida, Mexico, Hawaii, South America, we drive all over the United States and camp there in the winter. It’s warm, it’s adventurous, it’s great.
Q: How do you decide when to return?
A: In this business, you’re rich in the fall and poor in the spring. When we were younger and a little more foolish we used to come back when we ran out of money, early April, mid-April. Now we’re older, we’ve pushed that back to mid-May. It depends. Thing is, you’ve gotta come to work. You don’t make any money sitting at home.
Q: Do you peel all your own potatoes?
A: Yep. I won’t tell you how many pounds that is, but it takes us a couple hours a night to peel them all. We work six days a week, and for a long time it was seven days a week. It’s tiring, but we work hard and we’ve been lucky. The people are fantastic, sometimes we even get mail that fans from far away send to us care of the public library. We’re two to five years from hanging up our baskets and stopping peeling potatoes, so we can take some time to smell the roses.
Q: What are the secrets to your success?
A: You need three things. You need the best equipment, which we have. You need the best potatoes, which we have. And you need to have a French fry-lover in charge. That’s me. This isn’t a beer belly. This is from quality control! I also have the best counter person in the city. Nancy’s fantastic. She remembers all our regulars, their names, their kids, their health. She knows them all.
Q: Speaking of customers…?
A: Probably the most famous was Jean Chretien. Brian Mulroney stopped by. I tried to get Peter Gzowski to come down—that didn’t happen—but I was on his CBC show once for about 10 minutes. I was trying to get him to start a national chip truck competition, sort of a Canadian French Fry Idol.
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2006.