As Wall Street teeters, one victim of the poor economy has stepped out on his own.
After being laid off from two jobs in the food manufacturing industry, Richard Bonilla has started his own business, serving up Puerto Rican specialties from his own free-wheeling van.
His new enterprise, named La Tropical Express, can be found at the edge of Fair Haven’s Criscuolo Park, where a riverside breeze wafts the scent of shrimp empanadillas across a softball field.
Bonilla (in photo above, and below with his wife Sylvia Bonilla, his mom Paula Roche, and his son Richard Bonilla II) opened up the cart two weeks ago Wednesday, on a week when Lehman Brothers bit the dust and the stock market slid into turmoil.
“I had a lot invested,” Bonilla said, “but I’m not afraid.”
“I’m fearless,” he said, stepping out from behind the stove in a white apron, money belt and button-down shirt earlier this week. He crossed into the edge of the park, where a folding table serves as a makeshift restaurant. “I focus on what I want to do.”
Quick to flash a smile despite overcast skies, the East Shore resident recounted how a rocky road of layoffs landed him in the front seat of his own food truck.
Raised in New Haven, Bonilla worked for five years as a supervisor at a now-defunct Lender’s Bagels factory on Grand Avenue. He got laid off.
Bonilla bounced back, landing a job at Hartford CPL Co-Op, which produces and distributes baked goods to Dunkin’ Donuts across New England. He rose quickly, ending up in a position overseeing production for 187 Dunkin’ Donut stores in Connecticut. The company grew dramatically in the eight and a half years he worked there. In November of 2007, his career there hit a wall.
He got laid off again. “I swore to myself I would never work for another person again.”
Bonilla, a father of two grown kids, took some time to gather his thoughts. “I just wanted to go in a different direction,” he said. He took the food services skill set he’d built and decided to set out on his own. To come up with the plan, he reached back to his childhood in Puerto Rico.
Born in New Jersey, Bonilla went back to Puerto Rico, where his family is from, for his teenage years. In the barrio of Pe√±uelas in Santa Isabel, he waited tables in a seafood restaurant where his mom worked for 20 years. He discovered a cuisine they didn’t have in Jersey, soups and turnovers with fresh crab, lobster and shrimp.
Now relocated in the U.S. with five siblings and his mom, Bonilla sought to recreate those flavors. He went around the New Haven looking for Puerto Rican-style Empanadillas, bite-sized turnovers filled with seafood.
“They’re hard to find,” he said. So he made that the staple of his fast-food cart. He got a city license and set up in Criscuolo park, home of a Puerto Rican softball league. He ended up parked right next to La Unica, another Puerto Rican food truck whose owner got laid off from Lender’s.
“It reminds me of the barrio,” he said of the park, which borders the Quinnipiac River.
La Tropical Express serves a mix of Puerto Rican treats, including fried plantains and yucca patties stuffed with pork, as well as simple American staples like hot dogs. Roche, his 69-year-old mom, pitched in with her recipe for special red sauce.
So far, the Bonillas have only got the word out through word of mouth, to their friends, family, and the members of the softball league that show up every Sunday, across the field from the Ecuadorian soccer league.
The food truck sets up at the corner of Chapel and James Streets from 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. six days a week, every day but Wednesday.
Despite the gloomy economic times, Bonilla said he’s glad he took the risk to try to make it on his own.
“I feel great, awesome,” he said, stepping back into his four-wheeled restaurant. “This is really what I always wanted.”