Edit: The Woman Who Fed a City — And Built a Business Doing It

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Yolanda Price was 41 years old, recently divorced, and $3,000 away from losing her apartment when she backed her cousin's borrowed SUV up to a hospital loading dock at 6 a.m. and started selling red beans and rice out of a portable steam table.

That was April 2020. The city of New Orleans had just shut down. Yolanda's catering business — built over a decade of church suppers and Mardi Gras parties — had collapsed overnight. Every booking for the next four months canceled in a single weekend.

"I had two choices," she says, standing in the kitchen of her restaurant, Yolie's, in the Tremé neighborhood. "Lay down and let it beat me. Or feed people."

She chose the second one.

## The Beginning

Yolanda didn't grow up wanting to own a restaurant. She grew up wanting to cook. There's a difference, she'll tell you. The first is a business ambition. The second is a calling.

Her grandmother, Miss Irene, kept a kitchen that ran like a church service — purposeful, communal, never rushed. Yolanda was peeling garlic by age seven and making a proper roux by twelve. When she moved to New Orleans after college, cooking wasn't a career plan. It was just what she did.

The catering business came about sideways. A coworker tasted her smothered chicken at an office potluck. Asked her to do a dinner party. Then another. Then a wedding. By 2015, she had left her administrative job at a community college and gone full-time.

It was a good life. Not lavish, but stable. Then 2020 arrived.

## The Pivot

The food truck idea came from necessity, not strategy. Yolanda needed cash. The hospitals were still open. Healthcare workers were exhausted, underpaid, and eating vending machine food twelve hours into their shifts.

She spent two weeks cooking in her apartment kitchen, packing food into coolers, and driving to three different hospitals on a rotating schedule. No truck yet — just a folding table, a card reader taped to a phone, and a handwritten menu.

> "I wasn't thinking about building something. I was thinking about making rent."

The response surprised her. Nurses texted friends. Doctors pre-ordered. A hospital administrator asked if she could come twice a week instead of once. Within three weeks, she was pulling in more cash than her catering business had generated in a typical month.

The problem was scale. She couldn't keep cooking out of an apartment. She needed a real truck.

## The Grind

Getting a food truck in New Orleans takes money, permits, patience, and a high tolerance for bureaucratic disappointment. Yolanda had one of the four.

She applied for a small business loan and was denied. Applied again — denied again. A third institution offered a rate she describes as "criminal." She turned it down.

Instead, she sold jewelry, furniture, and her grandmother's china. She took a second job doing overnight grocery stocking. Her daughter, then 16, helped with deliveries on weekends. She kept the folding-table operation going wherever she could — backyard birthday parties, small funerals, anything that paid.

Seven months after that first hospital run, she had enough for a used truck. She named it Miss Irene.

"First thing I put on that truck was her gumbo recipe," Yolanda says. "Still is."

## The Breakthrough

In the summer of 2021, a travel nurse from Ohio posted a short video of her lunch break: a bowl of Yolanda's gumbo, a piece of cornbread, the warm afternoon light of a New Orleans street. The caption said: *"Best meal I've had in three states. Find this woman."*

The video got two million views in four days.

Yolanda's phone became unusable. Catering requests, interview requests, wholesale inquiries, a call from a food magazine. She handled none of it particularly well. She missed calls. She responded to emails weeks late. She kept showing up to the hospitals because that felt manageable.

But the attention stuck. A local journalist wrote a profile. A New Orleans food blogger named Miss Irene his essential stop. She started appearing on best-of lists.

> "I didn't go viral because I was trying to build a brand. I went viral because someone recognized something real."

The second truck came a year later. The third came eight months after that.

## Where She Is Now

Today, Yolanda runs a fleet of three trucks and a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the Tremé that seats 48 and has a waitlist for weekend reservations. She employs 22 people, most of them from the neighborhood.

The restaurant's Sunday supper — seven courses, all family-style, all Miss Irene's recipes — is booked six weeks out.

She launched a community program last year called Full Table, which provides free meals to elderly residents three days a week. It's funded by 1% of every catering contract.

"Miss Irene used to say that a table isn't full until everyone has a seat," Yolanda explains. "You can't have a successful food business in this city and not take care of the people who made the food culture you're selling."

She's been approached about franchising. A TV show. A cookbook deal. She's considering all of them slowly, which is not how most people advise you to handle opportunity.

"Everyone wants you to move fast," she says. "I watched my catering business collapse in a weekend because I hadn't built it to last. Miss Irene's is built to last. That means some things take longer."

She pours two cups of coffee, sets one in front of a visitor, and checks on the kitchen before sitting back down. Outside, the morning line at the truck is already starting to form.

"I still show up," she says. "That's the whole thing, really. I just kept showing up."

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