Two Bermudian teenagers were able set up and run a successful food stall as part of Beachfest.

Jaelen Steede and Treaz Place, both age 19, created and ran the ‘Mako Grill’ which served food at the Chewstick Foundation’s event on August 31 at Horseshoe Bay.

The two are graduates of Warwick Academy with Mr Steede currently working as a chef at the Fairmont Southampton and Mr Place attending classes at St Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

During the day, they estimate that they served between 350 and 400 party-goers.

Mr Place said: “We were kind of just looking at ways we could make money and have fun at the same time.

“We both like to cook and we’ve worked together before so we know we can work together well.

“Jaelen has great cooking abilities and I have a bit of knowledge in business so I thought we could do it, it could help put our names out there.

“I worked at the stall as well but Jaelen was mainly the one on the grill.

“I can cook if needed, but I sort of leave the cooking up to him because he’s more experienced in that area.

“We had to get food licences and pay Chewstick for space on the beach because it’s their event.

“We pretty much had to get everything ourselves from the physical stall, to the food, the coolers and the grill.

“We were just assigned this space and we had to outfit it completely on our own.

“From what I’ve heard, everyone was pretty impressed with what we had. Some said there were a few odd things but it’s just our first time so I think we did pretty good.”

Mr Steede said: “The stall was something that we both could relate to.

“We needed to get permission from the Department of Health and they have to check everything so we had to be professional.

“Everyone we dealt with really commended us for how professional we were, we didn’t play around we just went there to get the job done.

“We served wahoo kebabs, shrimp kebabs, pulled pork sandwiches, barbecue chicken, orders of wahoo, macaroni and cheese and coleslaw.

“We tried to have everything except fried food so that we could be a little truer to the name ‘Mako Grill’.

“We had two main stalls we were competing against and not even that really because every stall that was there was different.

“We were strictly grilled food. Smoking Barrel was barbecue and Brunswick was fried so it was a good mix between the stalls.

“We received an overall positive response from the community in general.

“We had a couple who were there from Hawaii and they stayed to talk to us for ten to 15 minutes about how good our food was and what they would like to see more of.

“They even asked us if we were a real restaurant, which was nice to hear.

“We both plan to do it again next year but we’re planning on doing bigger and better things.

“If given the opportunity we would do other events besides Beachfest.”

The pair gave special thanks to their parents as well as Kyle Christopher and Jordan McRonald who assisted them running the stall.