Steve Berry hopes his cooking will pay off as he doggedly pursues success.
LEWISTON – Henry Brimigion drives all over southern and central Maine delivering seafood products for Deshaies’ Lobster Salad.
But every Monday and Friday he detours to the corner of Lincoln and Beech streets where he gets lunch from Top Dog hot dog stand.
“He got me hooked,” says Brimigion as he laughs and points to Steve Berry, owner of the mobile eatery. “I haven’t found anything I haven’t liked.”
Brimigion is particularly fond of the barbecue pork and chili that Berry sells.
As Berry opens the lids on the steamer bins that keep the concoctions hot, the air is saturated with the sweet and spicy smell of meat and seasonings.
It’s a powerful marketing tool.
“I know if someone samples the chili or the barbecue pork, they’ll eventually buy it,” says Berry. To that end, he keeps a stash of sampling spoons handy.
Berry is eager for feedback from his customers. He hopes to begin manufacturing and distributing his pork and chili this fall, after he closes Top Dog for the season. He’s looking for a USDA-approved kitchen right now and already has a distributor lined up.
And he has a brain to pick if he needs advice – his mom’s.
His mother, Mady Smith, has been making and selling specialized beer-based foods for more than 20 years.
A friend of the Coors beer family, she has several products in Safeway and Kroger stores throughout the West, as well as in the Coors brewery gift shop, where her beer-based mustard is one of the top sellers.
Berry proudly displays it on his condiment rack, and encourages customers to try it. If they really like it, he can sell them bottles. He’s hoping to include his mom’s mustard in his distribution area if he succeeds with his own products since no one in the East carries it.
Brimigion doesn’t need any encouragement. He’s already a fan of Mady’s mustard and groans when he realizes he put the wrong mustard on his hot dog.
“Oh well,” he says, and with a shrug, and proceeds to squirt Mady’s mustard all over the conventional mustard.
Berry is pleased that Brimigion is such a loyal customer. He has quite a few. With more than 1,000 employees at Peoples bank in the Bates Mill, construction workers and the folks from the neighborhood, he’s been having a good year in sales.
Not that it happened instantaneously. When he first set up shop this summer, he carried brown-casing hot dogs.
“I threw them away,” he says. “Everyone wanted red dogs.”
Now he carries only red dogs, which he steams. He buys fresh rolls every day. Customers have a choice of a plain hot dog, or one topped with chili or cheese, the barbecued pork or sausage.
He offers diced onions and red-pepper relish on his condiment tray as well as ketchup and the mustards. A selection of chips and soda round out the fare. Prices are under $2.
“Chili dogs are my best sellers,” he says.
Berry says if he were operating in Freeport or another tourist-based town, he’d be making a killing. But he likes the old mill neighborhood where people are friendly.
“You meet so many people,” he says. “That’s the fun part.”
Comments are no longer available on this story