Takin’ it to the streets
English teacher-turned-entrepreneur opens a food truck
On a typical day, Justin Wert teaches literature classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and returns home in the evening to help his wife serve up sliders from a pink truck. The English professor and his wife, Keshia Barnett-Wert, recently hit the streets of Charlottesville in Mouth Wide Open, a brightly painted retired ice cream truck that they converted into the city’s newest mobile food business.
Wert and his wife arrived in Charlottesville about five years ago after living together in Mississippi and South Carolina. With her hospitality experience, his handyman tendencies, and their collective love of food, the two put their heads together and came up with the concept of Mouth Wide Open.
“The creativity was the most fun,” Wert said. “Putting the truck together, deciding on the logo, what kind of food we wanted to serve.”
The food, handled and cooked predominantly by Keshia, was inspired by years of traveling all over the country together. They decided on sliders because, “couldn’t you put almost anything on a bun?” Regular sliders include chicken, beef, and portobello mushroom, and each week the couple creates a special—a fried oyster mini po boy, for example. Wert plays a large behind-the-scenes role in the business—driving and maintaining the truck, loading and unloading materials—but one of his favorite aspects of the job is coming up with new recipes inspired by places they’ve visited. The crab cake is his current favorite, but he and Barnett-Wert love creating new sandwiches to “keep it interesting, for the customers and for us.”
Like a lot of first-time entrepreneurs, Wert was asked more than once if he was off his rocker for taking on such an endeavor. Building the business was exhausting and at times frustrating, he said, but after two months, they’re already starting to build a regular customer base and feel like the work was worth it.
Wert said he loves being in the classroom and would never give up teaching, but he’s thrilled to be running a small business on the side, and may even look into a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the future. As a kid he had a love for music and aspirations of being an engineer, and is often surprised to find himself where he is now.
“I never thought I’d be an English teacher or a food truck owner,” he said. “But it’s been really great so far.”—Laura Ingles
Growth in our future?
The unemployment rate for Charlottesville shrank from 4.9 percent to 4.4 percent from 2011 to 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Good—especially against the national average of 7.6 percent for the end of 2012— but will it hold? Another economic indicator might offer clues: the housing market. An uptick in recently sluggish home sales indicates stability and confidence, and a healthy housing market provides a lot of jobs, too. So what do the numbers say? According to Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors data, the market appears to be stabilizing, if not soaring:
Home sales in Charlottesville-Albemarle so far this year: 159
For same period last year: 165
Average time on the market in 2012: 111 days
That number as of February 2013: 92 days
Inventory average for 2012: 1,213
Current inventory: 1,260
Average list price, February 2012: $335,599
Average list price, February 2013: $400,474
Anecdotal reports sound rosier. Jamie White, a realtor with Montague Miller and CAAR’s 2012 realtor rookie of the year, said the uptick in activity over 2012 is noticeable.
“This time last year, I was holding open houses that often had few visitors,” he said. “Fast forward to 2013 and I’m getting a much better response—it just seems that there are more potential buyers checking out what’s on the market and thinking of purchasing a new home. The phone has definitely been ringing more this year. Buyers seem to feel an increased urgency to get on the property ladder before interest rates rise.”—G.B.