Goods Feature

Big Wheels
Flying Food connects local businesses and customers via bike freaks
Interview by Jason Gargano

Dan Vogel-Essex turned a love for biking into a business delivering Northside food and stuff. Photo By: Ashley Duban

Dan Vogel-Essex loves to ride his bike. In fact, he likes it so much he found a way to make money while doing it: Vogel-Essex created Flying Food, a bike-delivery service that’s grown exponentially over its brief existence.

It’s an overcast Saturday evening in Northside as I enter Sidewinder Coffee & Tea, one of the many independently owned businesses that’s sprouted up in the eclectic neighborhood in recent years. Old-school Rilo Kiley (i.e., pre-major-label makeover) emanates from the PA system as Vogel-Essex joins me at a table in the cozy, shotgun-style space’s back room.

He takes off his biker helmet, which has molded his closely cropped black hair in its shape. He immediately offers me some of his dinner, which he hopes to take in before his pager whisks him away on another delivery. The gesture is just the first sign of Vogel-Essex’s communal spirit.

For the uninitiated, Flying Food delivers goods from a variety of Northside businesses: Blue Jay Restaurant, Blue Rock Tavern, Boswell Alley, Bughouse Video, The Comet, The Hideaway, Honey, Melt, Portifino and Shake It Records. All you have to do is call the establishment in question, tell them that you want Flying Food to deliver it and, as its Web site (www.flyingfoodnorthside.com) touts, “From ten in the morning ’till ten at night, we slave away to deliver anything you want right to your doorstep.” You can also call their Flying Food hotline directly at 513-591-FOOD.

The delivery area includes all of Northside as well as parts of Clifton, Camp Washington and other nearby nooks and crannies. The delivery fee ranges from $2 to $4 (and sometimes more) depending on location and complexity of load (for instance, pizzas are tougher to transport than the latest disc from Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks). Flying Food also gets 5 percent of each delivery order.

Vogel-Essex is a compact guy who talks in a clear, rapid-fire voice.

“I’ve been riding since 1998 just to get around,” he says. “I was a split-family kid. My dad lived in Northside, and my mom lived in Mount Washington.”

He went to high school at the School for Creative and Performing Arts and often rode his bike between downtown and his parents’ houses.

“There’s no chance in hell I could buy a car when I was in high school,” Vogel-Essex says when asked why he just didn’t drive or ride the bus. “I could barely eat lunch.”

A rambunctious teen, riding his bike to school in the morning gave him time to clear his head and wore him down enough to where he could actually concentrate.

“I might not have graduated high school if I hadn’t ridden a bike,” he says without any hint of sarcasm.

He’s owned a car only once, and it wasn’t long before he got rid of it due to lack of use. His aversion to cars often draws incredulous responses.

“People say, ‘I can’t believe you ride your bike every day for an hour in the rain — that must be horrible?’ And I say, ‘It’s the best part of my day.’ ”

After enrolling at UC’s College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning (DAAP), Vogel-Essex was looking for a way to make some extra cash. Enter Jimmy John’s, a Clifton Heights sandwich chain that allowed him to make deliveries on his bike.

“The feeling you get when you make money to ride your bike is really awesome,” he says.

It wasn’t long before he noticed a burgeoning bike scene in the Northside/Clifton area.

“All of the sudden there was this mini bike culture going on,” he says. “If I wrote out a list of names it would probably be 25 people who ride around on bikes. They get together on Monday nights, and then the bike co-op opened. Riding a bike was getting popular. I guess it was about 10 years after being a bike courier was popular in the rest of the world.”

Around the same time Northside began its business renaissance, a turn that piqued Vogel-Essex’s entrepreneurial spirit.

“I’ve been living in Northside since before there were no restaurants except for Park Chili and The Blue Jay,” he says. “It was pretty desolate here, but then a phenomena of restaurants appeared like Boca and Taste of the World Cafe. Then The Hideaway, Northside Tavern and Melt opened. I thought, ‘Why couldn’t I deliver for all three of those places?’ That was the impetus, the inspiration — seeing those three all right next to each other.”

Given its close-knit, community-oriented nature, Vogel-Essex says Northside was ripe for something like Flying Food.

“I wanted to look at the restaurants, the people who order from the restaurants and the kids who wanted to make money by riding their bikes and see if it makes sense to connect the three,” he says.

It seems to have made sense. Begun on Halloween Day 2007, Flying Food has expanded to include the majority of Northside’s many independently owned businesses and a handful of likeminded bike freaks.

“I’ve got two other partners,” he says. “We own the business, and we’ve got about 10 other people we pull from as far as bikers. We’re not profitable quite yet, but we’re really close, and we’re only our fifth month of business.”

There’s a hint of resignation in his voice, which is when he admits that his own delivery days are coming to an end: This summer he leaves for an internship in Berlin, the last thing he needs to do to finish his DAAP degree.

“There’s still room for error, but I believe that I did it: I started a food delivery organization in Northside,” he says. “I was able to connect the bikers with the restaurants to the customers, and I created a system which is hopefully simple enough to replicate itself.”

Our hour-long conversation now over, Vogel-Essex unlocks his bike from a light-pole on Hamilton Avenue and pedals away into the night, satisfied with the knowledge that Flying Food has established itself as another unique entity in Northside’s continuing evolution. ©