We recently connected with Jean-Louis and Yvette Ledent and have shared our conversation below.
Jean-Louis and Yvette, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
My wife Yvette and I were born in Belgium. I am a trained Chef. We own and operate restaurants since 1982. After selling our last restaurant in Illinois, we decided to move to the South. We visited some friends here in Columbia, fell in love with the city and decided to stay here and start a food truck. It was in 2014. We bought our used truck in Durham NC and brought it to a company there where they were supposed to build it to find out that the owner of the company was a “crook” who used our deposit money to do other things than building our truck! Long story short, we came back in Columbia with our truck and decided to finish it up ourselves… in our friend’s driveway! Yes, the ones we visited, and yes, we are still very good friends! At that time, less than ten Food Trucks were in service in Columbia. The theme for the truck comes from the fact that Belgian Waffles are a big part of our culture and tradition, we just wanted to share our experience and heritage with our customers. We served our first Belgian waffle on November 1st, 2014. As I said, I am a trained Chef from Belgium. I have been cooking since I started the cooking school at age 15. I graduated in 1977. I love to cook and share my cuisine with others. My wife Yvette and I are in the food/hospitality/restaurant business for a long time. This is our passion. I am “back of the house” and Yvette is an awesome “front of the house” person. We are a great team and we love working together. This is probably the best job we ever had! Sharing part of our culture with our Food Truck is what inspire us to pursue.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
My wife Yvette and I were both born and raised in Belgium. I, Jean-Louis, am a trained chef, I graduated from “Ecole d’Hotellerie de Liege” in 1977. Yvette has a Degree in Physics and Biology. She also graduated from a Pastry Chef School in Chicago Illinois. We have more than 40 years of experience in the Food and Beverage Industry. We opened our first restaurant in Huy, Belgium in 1981 and operated it successfully until 1987, when we decided to move to the USA, with our two young daughters. In 1988, we opened “The French Embassy” in Arcola Illinois and operated it for 10 years. We closed it to open another restaurant called “Chef Jean-Louis Restaurant” in Urbana Illinois. In 2003, we both started working as Academic Professionals at the University of Illinois, in the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department, teaching the students how to manage a business. We proudly became American Citizens in 2009. In 2011, we started managing Retirement Homes and traveled all over the Midwest for 3 years before moving to Columbia in 2014, to start our now famous Food Truck Business: The Belgian Waffle Truck! In January, we celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary!
“Rouge, Jaune et Noir” …Red, Yellow and Black: The Colors of the Belgian Flag AND “The Belgian Waffle Truck”! We are serving our favorite National snack, the Belgian Waffle! The sweet, delicious and “briochy” Waffle is full of imported “Pearl Sugar” when the savory options are rich, full of flavors and so addictive! Yvette and I are in the food/hospitality/restaurant business for a long time. This is our passion. We love sharing part of our culture with our loyal customers.
The adventure continues… Last year, Yvette started her own franchise business: “The Belgian Waffle Cart”. It is a “woman owned business” and Yvette is the CEO of the company. Information can be found at The Belgian Waffle Cart Company The franchise provides everything to start your own business under the form of a waffle cart (not a waffle truck). Everything is included in the package, including training and support. This is a great opportunity for people willing to make some extra money on the weekend or even start a new full-time job. We provide the waffle dough to be cooked on the cart as well as all other equipment and requirements. Yvette hopes to open 4 to 5 new franchises per year. She is actually looking for franchisees in South and North Carolina. Her next goal is to open 2 or 3 Waffle carts in the Greenville, Charlotte and Charleston areas.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
We are October 31st 2014… at the time, we lived in Hopkins SC. We are signed up for our first Soda City Market the next day. We just finished building our truck and received our A+ sticker from DHEC after their inspection. We are ready for business! The weather is bad, it is very cold and windy. We stared loading our truck with what we needed for the market and decided to re-test our brand-new propane waffle maker imported from Belgium. Yvette is making the waffle dough, using her Mom’s recipe while I am turning the waffle maker on. Once the machine reached the right temperature, we started cooking the dough, to find out that it was sticking to the cast iron very bad to the point where we could not use any of the waffles we were trying to cook! We don’t remember how many batches we waisted trying… oh, and the weather is getting worst as the night grows! We now started panicking at the idea that we will be at the market in a few hours with nothing to sell! Then, Yvette got the genius idea to use the small electric waffle maker we have and started cooking the waffles, two at the time! It is probably 2 or 3 in the morning by now. Outside, freezing rain started to pour! We are cold, wet and tired! By 5am, the weather is so bad that we lost our electricity! No more waffles to cook but we had a descent amount ready for the market. It is cold and now… dark! What should we do? We decided to leave early with the truck and the car, direction Columbia, to the covered parking on Tayler Street, where the market was going to take place. The drive from Hopkins to Columbia was a miserable 45-minute journey! We finally were able to set-up our truck, ready to serve our first customers by 8am (after a few problems with our generator but it would be too long to explain)! Surprisingly, our sales were very good that day and we came back to Hopkins very tired but happy! Today, seven years later, we have not forgotten that story of course, but we laugh about it now… and we keep thinking that, maybe, somewhere, somehow… “something” was testing us, saying: “Do you really want to operate a food truck?”. The morale of this story? Never give up! Pursue your dreams! You can do it! PS: After that episode, we re-seasoned our cast iron waffle maker and never had any more problems with it.
We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.
We have sold many businesses in our lives but the way we sold the last one was interesting and unusual not to say unique! We are in Urbana IL, in our restaurant called “Chef Jean-Louis”, we started that business five years ago, in 1998. The business was successful but our landlord at the time did not want to spend any money in his building we were renting. Things were deteriorating and had a negative impact on our business. We then decided not to sign a new 5-year lease and to sell the business. We posted our business for sale and got a few people looking at it until a friend of ours suggested that we could try to sell it on Ebay! The same night, I posted an ad on Ebay saying: “Restaurant equipment for sale, from the salt shaker to the Christmas tree”. We got a call from a man from California who asked us what we meant by that ad. We explained the situation to him, he told us that he was flying to Illinois the next day to take a look at it. He sure did and by the end of that day, we had a deal and sold everything! So, the day we had to vacant the space, two semi-trucks parked in front of the establishment and a team of workers started emptying the whole building! We did not keep contact with our buyer but the funny thing about this story is the fact that we know that “somewhere” in California, there is a restaurant exactly looking like the one we had in Illinois!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.thebelgianwaffletruck.com
- Instagram: thebelgianwaffletruck
- Facebook: The Belgian Waffle Truck