Döners and Nachos

Well school has been progressing nicely so far. 3 weeks in and not too much stress yet, so that has been nice. I'm going to sign up for 3 German classes so I think I will be able to improve my language skills very quickly. Bonus.  I got a little more practice in this week when Erika and I went to a "Neu in Erfurt" Facebook group meeting. Basically you go and meet some other people who are interested to make new friends and then have some dinner. It was a group of about 30-40 people and we went to a pretty nice restaurant in the center of town. It had all kinds of food and drinks on hand, but I didn't want to spend a lot of money so I ordered an appetizer of "Nachos" with "scharf Soße" (spicy sauce). Now, I've already had some questionable experience with Mexican food here in Germany. Last year I went to a Mexican restaurant in Freiburg and spent way too much money for what I deemed as mid-quality Mexican food. It was good, but it wasn't any special, and for $20 a plate, I was relatively disappointed. I've tried making Mexican food here too, but I can only find 1 brand of tortillas in any of the grocery stores and it is complete shit. They come in a 4 pack for 2 euros or so, but each one is just so thin and brittle that it's impossible to roll anything up in them. We tried making some bean and rice burritos with a few veggies in it and the veggies burst through the shell in 8 different places and I ended up with a taco salad. But despite these failures, I still love Mexican food so I really hoped this fancy restaurant would do me a solid and lay out some serious nachos. But, I was wrong again. Nachos here consist of someone opening up a bag of mostly broken tortilla chips (the same tortilla chips that I buy at the grocery store for 90cents)  and dumping them on a plate. And the spicy sauce was actually just a smallish bowl of not spicy tomato sauce, but sweet and sour sauce. The exact same sweet and sour sauce you get at any crappy Chinese restaurant. No tomatoes, no sour cream, no olives, no cheese, nothing remotely related to American, or Mexican as far as I know, nachos. 4 euros of Supreme Disappointment. It actually made me sad. I know I probably should have read the description more carefully, and I could have even had the waiter take it back and get something else for me, but I didn't know how to ask politely in German, and I didn't want to be "That guy" in front of new acquaintances. I'm never ordering Mexican food here again. I'm really going to miss eating it too, but it's just not worth it even trying to eat it when I'm only going to be disappointed.

BUT this has given me a new long term goal here: I want to open a Döner and Nacho shop. I know very little about operating a food business, but I think my idea is a winner. Don't get me wrong, döner here is excellent, it fills every happy receptor in both my brain and my mouth, but the one thing thats missing is the right hot sauce to go with it. Some stores offer the crushed red peppers to sprinkle in with the mix, but that never quite gets the right spice spread evenly throughout the whole thing (I forgot to mention that the dough they use can be made into a REAL tortilla like dough, or can be made into a pita bread style). I was thinking more along the lines of Sriracha or even some solid tasbasco-esque hot sauce, or even some hot shit like Blairs for the tough guys. There is usually a fair about of garlic cream sauce they add into the standard döner that it should create a really nice mix of flavors. AND on the side you can also order some serious nachos with all the good fixings, but maybe instead of ground beef or something they can use some of the same döner meat to reduce costs. There are already plenty of pizza and döner and even noodle options at all the shops I've been to, but I think my shop could seriously make some money. This is of course, my plan for after I work elsewhere and have some stable income...