Ted's Hot Dogs · Chandler & Tempe

The Window

A coffee & dessert concept, built and run start to finish — then carried to Tempe

Prepared for
Evan Ortolani
September 2026

The walk-up window at Chandler is real revenue sitting unused. This is the plan to turn it into its own concept — not a bolt-on menu item, a second occasion for a second kind of guest — owned end to end by one person from day one, and built as the template for the same work at Tempe.

What gets built

Concept & Menu

Soft serve, shakes, floats, dips and toppings, affogato, and coffee — built with its own pricing and portioning logic, not adapted from the core kitchen's. Recipe costing and pour standards locked before anything goes in the window.

Look & Feel

Old-school diner and luncheonette direction carried through consistently: physical signage, cup and container packaging, menu-board language, and how the window gets talked about — one system, not a logo plus loose parts.

Standards & Training

Prep and pour standards, opening/closing checklists, waste and inventory targets, and a training arc the team can actually absorb on shift — built to run clean without me in the window.

Phase Two

A breakfast sandwich program once the window's rhythm is proven — equipment and vendor decisions, a menu that shares prep with what's already running, and its own launch standards.

Tempe & the System Behind It

The same concept, standards, and training built to travel, not rebuilt from scratch — Chandler proves it, Tempe runs it next. Alongside that, the GM/ops layer that makes it stick: working directly with Brittany at Chandler and Mandy across both markets so the standard holds after I've moved on to the next thing.

Where this sits

This doesn't touch how Brittany runs Chandler or Mandy runs day-to-day ops. It's a new piece nobody currently owns — built alongside their teams, not on top of them, at Chandler first and handed off clean before the same thing happens at Tempe.

Timeline

Phase 1

First Pour

Concept, menu, branding, and standards ready — targeting two weeks from kickoff.

Investment

This is a working partnership, not a line item — and it's structured in two parts, not one flat number. A fair, ongoing base for the ownership this role carries, plus a real share in the new revenue the stand itself generates, Chandler first and Tempe as it follows. My upside tracks the window's, not a separate line from it.

No number on this page on purpose — let's work out what's fair together, in the room, once you've seen the whole plan.