The long way home

There was nothing inevitable about Caron ending up behind a fryer in Charlottetown.

She left Prince Edward Island at 19 and spent the next two decades moving around the world. She backpacked and worked in Australia, lived in Whistler in the early 90s, spent several years in Dawson City and travelled through Southeast Asia. There were stops in Victoria, Vancouver, Kelowna and eventually the Cayman Islands. Along the way she had plenty of jobs, including being a professional actor, a singer and performer, as well as a bartender and server.

By 2011, she found herself facing a tough period: her marriage was ending and opportunities in her career were lessening. Caron, who puts considerable faith in signs, called her sister.

“You know exactly what it means, Caron,” her sister told her. It was time to leave.

So she came home to PEI.

At first, Prince Edward Island felt too small after so many years away. But Caron joined a rock-and-roll band, started having fun and found herself confronting a familiar problem: she needed to make a living and was tired of working for other people who tried to dim her outgoing personality.

Then she woke from a dream with an idea: The Chip Shack.

She went on Kijiji, bought a food truck sight unseen in Cape Breton, maxed out her credit card and hauled it home.

“The thought of working for myself and singing and dancing as loud as I wanted to thrilled me so much that I went for it,” she said.

There were a few problems.

Caron didn't have a location from which to operate it. She didn't even know how to turn on the propane fryers. And, most critically, she didn't know how to make French fries.

“I usually do things backwards,” she says. “I bought my motorcycle before I learned how to drive it. Same thing with my Chip Shack.”

Learning to make a fry

Caron found a place to park in Borden and opened that June.

On her first day, she locked herself inside the truck and began experimenting. Four hours later, she carried her first order of fries over to neighbouring staff and proudly handed them out.

They were terrible.

Caron remembers standing inside the shack crying, convinced she had made a catastrophic mistake. Then her potato suppliers arrived.

The Dawson brothers found her in tears and offered a solution: their brother-in-law had once done this kind of work. Buy him some beer, they told her, and they would send him over the next morning.

At 10 a.m., Caron had a six-pack waiting.

Her impromptu teacher showed her how to double-blanch a potato, the technique she still uses today. Only afterward did she learn that he had himself learned from Bud the Spud, Halifax's famous chip-truck business.

“I am an apprentice of the apprentice of Bud the Spud,” she says with glee.

The Queen of Fries was on her way.

Even though Caron now employs a staff, she still spends hours prepping food during the busy summer months. Potatoes are sourced locally, along with ingredients such as lobster, haddock and buns. She makes her own tartar sauces and aiolis, as well as the batter (all gluten free) for her fish and chips, chili and pulled pork.

And the fries remain at the centre of it all.

For six months of the year, Caron's life revolves around the shack. Then she shuts off the electricity, has the water drained and walks away for the winter, usually to travel . In spring, once the utilities are reconnected, she says she can have the whole operation running again in about four hours.

Fifteen years after she bought a french fry truck without knowing how to make its signature dish, Caron has become inseparable from it.

She refers to The Chip Shack as “she.” In the morning, Caron greets her: “We’re going to have a great day today, girl. Oh my gosh, we’re going to make so many people happy.”

At the end of the day, she says goodnight.

“She is an entity,” Caron says. “She definitely got bigger than me."

And while the food has made The Chip Shack famous, Caron says it isn't ultimately what has kept her there.

It's the people.

“Anybody can make a french fry,” she says. What matters to her is that everyone walks away feeling a little better than they did when they arrived.

She even made up a word for it: achacha, her shorthand for all the feel-good things in the world. A sign at the shack wishes customers an “achacha day.”

It would be easy to dismiss all that talk of love and good energy as part of Caron's colourful Queen of Fries persona. Except that, beneath the jokes, the stories, the hugs and the joyful quest for 'fry domination', is the little girl standing in her nanny's kitchen outside Charlottetown learning the secret to the best meal: good-quality local ingredients and a generous amount of love.

"I just love uplifting people," she say. "That's what it's all about."