I knew Jim Pittenger back in the day. And back in the day before the day, too. I was there when he rolled out his first cart on the 16th Street Mall and freaked out the whole city with his elk sausages and ostrich dogs.
We’ve been on the phone two minutes, Biker Jim and me, and both of us are already laughing. We haven’t talked in ten years. Maybe fifteen. I don’t know. Too fucking long is exactly how long it’s been. But we pick up like it was just last week. Like everything that has happened to him and to me between when I left Denver and when I heard that Jim was packing it in, getting out of the wiener game for good was just one really long weekend, and now we’re catching up.
And Jim was exactly that: an apostle of outlaw sensibilities and tube-shaped meats, whose arrival on the scene in 2005 served to remind people that sometimes the best meals out there are the ones you eat standing up. He was part of a street food awakening in Denver, his chrome-on-chrome hot dog cart a vanguard of un-seriousness that cut the trail for a hundred harlequin weirdos that followed merrily behind him.And okay, that’s done now. That was probably done a long time ago.
“Two thousand twenty,” he says, then pauses, and you can almost feel the shudder in him. Like some cold, bad memory climbing up his spine. “In 2020, we were breathing fumes.” Shutdowns, 25 percent occupancy restrictions, empty streets — all of it was killing him. He’d burned through all of his emergency money, then all of his savings, too. Like everyone else in the restaurant industry, he’d found himself in a hole that there was no good way out of.
The longer I do this job and the more people I talk to, the more it becomes apparent to me that the pandemic is going to persist in restaurant ghost stories for generations. It’s like there’s forever going to be this scar in the industry’s collective memory, and things will be divided into what happened before COVID and then everything that happened after.
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