When Rhonda Gelinas bought a 4,000-pound mobile pizza oven last winter, she was counting on a summer jam-packed with birthday parties, anniversaries, fundraisers, and all kinds of events where she’d sell dozens of hot, fresh pies.
Gelinas, along with her mother and two daughters, could see her longtime dream of owning a family business finally come into focus. What she never saw coming was the arrival of a global pandemic and the cancellation of all those summer events, meaning almost no business for Flame Mobile Pizza this season.
“It’s been very challenging and definitely not what we expected,” Gelinas said. “We were completely booked for the summer and now we’re not.”
Flame Mobile Pizza – based in Allenstown – was supposed to be the realization of a dream that Gelinas and her family had ever since a cousin hired her, her mother and daughters as prep cooks and waitstaff for weddings and bridal showers at an Air Force base on the weekends.
“We had so much fun working together that we decided we needed to do something like this ourselves,” Gelinas said.
When she discovered a hand-built pizza oven for sale in the Lakes Region, Gelinas knew that “this was it.”
Gelinas spent all her savings purchasing the oven, which was meant to be the perfect way to share the family’s traditional Italian recipes with the world. Gelinas’ oldest daughter, Felicia, planned on working at Flame Mobile Pizza as her full-time job booking events and cooking, while Gelinas and her other daughter Tarah would keep their day jobs.
The investment, planning and excitement made it all the more disappointing when all their summer clients – including weddings, rehearsal dinners, brewery events, and town Old Home Days – canceled. Still, in the face of all that, Gelinas remains determined that the business will survive COVID-19, and holds on to the belief that whatever someone puts out into the world comes back.
“We’re very optimistic and positive and we know that it’s going to be successful eventually,” she said.
In the meantime, Gelinas and her family are keeping Flame Mobile Pizza alive on Saturdays at a stationary location in Allenstown. Gelinas’s nephew dresses up in a pizza costume to try to drum up customers, but she said business has been hit-or-miss. Some Saturdays, she said, they have sold out, and others they barely make a dent in the day’s inventory.
Ultimately, Gelinas’s dream is to turn her and her fiance’s forty-acre plot of land in Allenstown into a destination for weddings, anniversary parties, and other celebrations. She hopes to build a large barn on the land – which is adjacent to Bear Brook State Park – and open a permanent restaurant and gift shop with products made out of ingredients right from the land around them. Dandelion honey, maple syrup, and homemade crafts made by her daughters are all part of the dream for the property.
As long as the four women get to stay together while they work, Gelinas said she’ll be happy.
“Food brings people close together, so that’s something that I’ve always dreamed of doing, and then to be able to do it with my two girls and my mom was huge to me,” she said. “To keep us all together like that, and to do something we all love to do, that’s always been the dream since I was a little kid.”
Gelinas’s family agrees. “The end goal for all of us is to work for Flame, and that’s it,” Tarah Gelinas said. “It would just be all family, so there’s no way you can go wrong with that.”