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Five years ago, De’Mon Tyndell was working in the kitchen of a New Jersey Hilton where, on a typical night, he’d be cooking Wagyu filets and seasonal sides for high-end diners.
Half a decade later, Tyndell’s apron remains but the menu — and venue — have changed: Tyndell now hawks cajun-style meats wrapped in quesadillas or laid over macaroni from his a cart and orange tent at beaches, bars and events around Long Beach. It’s a more meager venture; Tyndell expects to pull in roughly $20,000 this year.
Tyndell started his sidewalk business when he lost his job as a chef less than a year after he moved to Long Beach. Today, he’s one of the countless food vendors that roam Long Beach and Los Angeles County.
Despite what may seem like a demotion, the East Long Beach resident is proud of his business: The Quesadilla Calling. With a backing in culinary arts, Tyndell prides himself in knowing the small things, memorizing temperatures needed to store his food and avoiding the danger zones, when bacteria can grow rapidly.
When the city’s rules legalizing sidewalk and street vending went into effect in February, he was among the first in line to apply for a business license.
Months later, his license still has not been approved. His business — including his Mac’n’Cheese Quesadilla — remains in legal flux.
Long Beach officials, tasked by state law with creating a citywide sidewalk vending ordinance, say the program is a humane way to reel in a rising number of unpermitted street merchants, from fruit bowlers to ice cream paleteros, while giving legitimate operators a navigable path out of the shadows.
Months into the program, the ordinance seems to have upset people on all sides. An influx of complaints about unlicensed vendors has overwhelmed city staff and irked business owners, while many trying to operate within the rules say the program has thrown up nothing but roadblocks.
“To me, it just seems like they’re scratching the surface,” Tyndell said. “Let’s not scratch the surface. Let’s pick up the pieces and really build this program to help people, rather than it being more of an economic basis. It’s a money grab for the city.”
Long Beach now requires that most street vendors selling food have a health permit and business license to operate, or face strict penalties.
A complex web of rules also bars vendors from doing business in certain areas — not near several parks, city-owned properties, ATMs, schools, public restrooms or bus stops — and at certain times.
In order for Tyndell to get a health permit, he needs an approved cart. Since his cart wasn’t up to code, Tyndell said he applied early for one of the 40 carts the city has offered for free to qualified street vendors.
His request was denied, after officials told him he can’t cook raw meat on-site and must reheat food instead.
By comparison, Tyndell said he was approved by L.A. county within a couple of weeks, with the same operation.
City officials say Long Beach’s ordinance is well-intentioned and generous, meant to ease vendors onto the legal path with subsidies to skirt thousands of dollars in fees.
The city has offered to waive nearly all first-year fees, including licensing, permitting and insurance up to a certain threshold. Those who don’t embrace the city’s offer can expect to pay upwards of $1,900.
While the offer extends through February 2025, Jennifer Rice Epstein, a spokesperson for the city’s health department, explained that this waiver applies a full calendar year from the moment someone is permitted.
The city also set aside $400,000 to give away pre-approved carts.
“There will be investments that business owners have to make,” Epstein said. “But I would say, as these things go, it’s a pretty exciting opportunity, because it really does give a leg up in a business that does have overhead costs.”
As of this month, the city has received 130 business license applications for street vending with 15 approved — 13 of which were merchant vendors and two were prepackaged food vendors that didn’t require a health permit. The city has also received 11 applications for its cart giveaway, with four applications in their second phase to receive the carts, which will each cost the city between $4,000 to $17,000.
Despite the city’s outreach efforts, including about a dozen public workshops on the subject, many vendors remain unaware of the new rules.
Workers at two separate fruit carts in North Long Beach, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they did not have health permits and did not know how to obtain them.
Pitched outside an Autozone, one vendor said she takes the bus from central Los Angeles, lasting about 40 minutes to an hour, to operate the fruit cart each day.
Another recently immigrated from Mexico to East Los Angeles and now commutes to a fruit stand in North Long Beach. Because neither live in city limits, they don’t qualify for the city’s officer of free carts — arguably the largest startup cost.
The intention of the state law mandating cities craft workable rules, authored by state Sen. Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach), was meant to “remove barriers” and “provide a more just” pathway for vendors.
“Street food vendors are woven into the culturally diverse and culinary fabric of California,” Gonzales said of her bill in 2022. “These workers, however, lack access to the permitting they need to be able to work and provide for their families.”
But it was also meant to safeguard public health. Vendors eek out a modest living but sometimes at the expense of the public’s health, with their method of preparing the food becoming more than just a passing controversy across the state.
In 2019, the city reported 49 complaints about unpermitted vendors; in 2023, there were nearly 600, with this year’s count on track to meet or surpass those numbers.
This workload is added onto the 17 complaints the city’s nine inspectors typically receive each month from the city’s 2,377 permitted food facilities. A typical inspection takes three to six hours while an investigation can take weeks or months to complete.
At their Sept. 3 meeting, Long Beach Public Health Director Alison King warned City Council members her department is seeing an influx of unpermitted vendors, leaving inspectors overburdened at the risk of public health.
“While we’re excited to support micro businesses and increase the number of dining options in our city, the new program taxes an already overworked team,” King said.
In response, Long Beach City Manager Tom Modica told the council the city included in its 2025 budget two new inspectors and a truck specifically allocated for the street vendor program — the first staffing increase in memory, Modica said.
“If you were worried about having my attention before, now you really have it,” said Councilmember Daryl Supernaw. “I’m very concerned whether we have the workforce to address all of these food facilities.”
Customers may relish a freshly grilled dollar taco or an intricately carved fruit spread, but health inspectors fear contamination and the spread of disease.
These concerns are highest around hot- or grilled-food vendors. Food is already difficult to keep sanitary in commercial kitchens, so maintaining those standards around refrigeration, shielding, storage and water heating with vendors who wander the city is a challenge.
“So it’s concerning, and the risk that you’re taking, from the food source to equipment to preparation to the health of the employees — any of those can be the factor for foodborne illness,” said Mozhgan Mofidi, a city health inspector of 34 years. “They don’t have the means of keeping it cold, under temperature. Ice is not sanitary. It melts. By touching it, you introduce different microorganisms. I mean I could go for hours about this.”
Those who are not permitted are also not ‘in the system,’ meaning that if someone gets sick and complains, there’s generally no way to find the vendor.
“If they’re permitted, we can find them,” Mofidi said. “Whether they’re operating two days in our city and then three days in L.A. County or Orange County, or any other place, our agencies talk. I know my co-workers and my colleagues in other other jurisdictions. That’s no problem. We can investigate.”
But there’s only so much that can be done for the unpermitted, who can pack up and move when an inspector comes cracking down.
Whether it’s out of distrust or ignorance of local law, Mofidi estimates there will always be vendors who operate outside the rules — rebuffing what she sees as the city’s generous incentives to become legal.
“We are opening our arms and welcoming them…,” Mofidi said. “We have offered every kind of hope that we could from giving them time to come to us, to making it as easy as possible, to the point that we are giving carts away now (for free).”
But even when the city turns to deterrents, seizing food and carts from unlicensed vendors, the solution is short-lived, Mofidi added.
“We can take their stuff away, … but they will come right back,” she said.
Among the city’s biggest constituents calling for a harsher crackdown are brick-and-mortar businesses, who largely see illegal sidewalk vendors as the symbols of blight, unfair business competition and a public health hazard.
“I think the city’s heart is in the right place, the challenge is matching policy goals with the reality on the ground,” said Alex Cherin a consultant for the Long Beach Restaurant Association, an advocacy group for the industry.
The group’s members see the deck as stacked in favor of vendors, who can escape health inspectors’ watchful eyes while dodging costs like rent and utilities that beset traditional brick-and-mortars already struggling with food prices and inflation.
“You’re dealing with all of these financial headwinds and at the same time you have somebody able to roll out their food cart right in front of your business and undercut the prices that you would have on your menu because they didn’t have all the costs of entry,” said Ciaran Gough, president of the Long Beach Restaurant Association.
But Tyndell, unlicensed and still grilling, has a different story. Over the next five years, he’ll set up outside bars, businesses and museums, catering to bar crowds, families and tourists.
It’s a slow march to legitimacy, of early mornings and late nights, wondering how many quesadillas he has to roll until he can afford a permanent place of his own.