Happy Gringos Pizza

So we officially started our own pizza business down here. We closed it down the same day, but we’re still declaring it a success J. We’ve been talking about opening a pizza place since we arrived, because that was one of our first experiences of culture shock here in Honduras… our disappointing discovery, as a bunch of recent college students, that we couldn’t eat pizza at any hour of the day or night, and we aren’t even able to find a pizza within an hour’s radius of home. As a part of feria, on Sunday the 23rd which was the last day, the church held a giant Expoventa in the park in the center of town. It mostly consisted of numerous different food stands run by the various church communities, but we were also expected to participate, so we came up with this pizza business making our dreams a reality. We bought our supplies, made signs and even came up with a slogan for Happy Gringos Pizza… “La Pizza que siempre lo hace sonreír”… or the pizza that always makes you smile.We found personal pizza sized crusts with sauce packets at the grocery store we go to in Tegus, so we bought 120. Mozzarella doesn’t really exist here, and if we do find it it’s imported and really expensive, so we substituted it for Honduran quesillo which tastes a little different but still melts as well. We found some pepperoni that had been imported from the US, making it more costly than normal, yet delicious. We had a number of suggestions to put hot dogs on the pizzas, because people here love hot dogs, but we vetoed that idea and used ham sandwich meat instead- which ended up being a huge hit. We showed up on Sunday morning at the Expoventa, not really sure what to expect, but ready to sell pizzas. The church had built a huge vending area the length of the block, all out of bamboo and suyate (some type of fern), and it was actually an impressive structure. It was separated into stalls, and each group had their space to sell from. People would occasionally stroll by and read our sign and makeshift menu, normally looking confused or some just straight up laughing. The other groups there were selling different types of comida tipica, or the usual Honduran dishes like whole fried fish, mondongo (intestine soup), carne asada (beef shish kabobs), fried plantains, pupusas, etc., and they all seemed to be doing really well. We, on the other hand, sold 0 pizzas for the first 4 hours we were there… pretty impressive if you ask me. My host brother, thankfully, was the first one to feel sorry enough for us and buy one of our pizzas, giving us a glimmer of hope. We knew going into the day that pizza wasn’t the favorite food of most Hondurans, but everyone knows what it is- they’re apparently just apprehensive about trying something new. After that first pizza, business started picking up… we sold one to a little girl who had lived in Miami for a while, apparently discovering a love for pizza there… we sold 8 to a man from town who insisted there were no other good food choices, which completely was not true because all the best Honduran foods were represented, but he ate 4 and bought 4 for his friend… and from there on out our pizzas sold like hot-cakes. Lauren and I were topping and cooking the pizzas at home while Mike and Joe sold them in the park. We had some amazing helpers, 2 little girls who visit our house daily, who gladly ran the 3 blocks back and forth to the park carrying around 8 pizzas each trip. Our selling spurt lasted only about 3 hours, but we had no break in making the pizzas, and the girls made probably 10 trips to the park. In that time we managed to get rid of every single pizza including a few that we used as payment to our helpers. At the end of the day, we had made 3000 Lempiras ($150) for the church, which we thought was pretty good for a few hours of work. We still dream of setting up our own business in town, especially know that we know it’s possible, but we figure that it’s unlikely the Passionists will approve of us changing our mission to “bringing pizza to the people of Honduras.”