Big weekend for the Bubble Waffle
A local restaurateur takes his hit concoction to the Super Bowl.
Restaurateur Albert Yee packed up his crew of 10, equipment and ingredients, including 2,000 pounds of flour and 60 dozen eggs, and left Friday morning for the Super Bowl in Minneapolis, where he’ll sell his “bubble waffles.”
“That’ll yield a lot of waffles — I don’t know if it will be enough,” said Yee, the only food vendor from Milwaukee at the big game.
Counting fans in seats, standingroom ticket-holders, the media and others, a crowd of 85,000 is expected at US Bank Stadium to see the Philadelphia Eagles vs. the New England Patriots on Sunday.
“It’s an experience I never imagined,” Yee said.
He operates his Bubble Waffle Shoppe at the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena, selling Hong Kong-style egg waffles. He calls them bubble waffles because the rounded surface looks like bubble wrap.
He Americanized the soft waffles, he said, by taking them over the top and filling them with ice cream and assorted toppings. They sell for $7 at the Panther Arena, but they’ll be $10 at the Super Bowl.
Yee has been a chef in Milwaukee since 1986, operating Chinese restaurants and, more recently, a Hawaiian-style restaurant called Kalua on Milwaukee’s west side, then the Burg, a burger shop in Cedarburg, both defunct.
He started selling bubble waffles after getting the concession contract at the Panther Arena. With minimal room for equipment, he first mulled selling sushi, then remembered the egg-waffle irons he’d bought in China and put in his basement, he said.
He marvels that after 30 years of cooking mainly Chinese food in restaurants and festivals, he’s finding what feels like instant success selling ice cream and waffles.
The waffles come filled with a few suggested combinations — the Golazo is vanilla frozen custard with graham cracker, lemon curd, blueberry compote and whipped cream — or customers can design their own fillings from various ice creams, toppings and sauces, including one flavored like bubble gum.
Just for the Super Bowl, he’s selling an espresso bubble waffle, vanilla frozen custard and espresso sauce.
Yee isn’t sure how it happened, exactly, but someone who saw his bubble waffles recommended him as a Super Bowl vendor. He was invited to apply in November and learned in early January that he’d been accepted.
Now he’s hoping to open a Bubble Waffle Shoppe at Mayfair mall in Wauwatosa in March and add stands at other venues. He’s not ready to give up selling Chinese food at summer festivals such as Zoo a la Carte and Bastille Days, but he plans to add a second booth for the waffles.
His newfound fame in Milwaukee has been opening doors, including the use of two vehicles from Soerens Ford of Brookfield to travel to the Super Bowl.
Being able to sell his waffles at the Super Bowl represents more than big one-day sales. Yee sees it as more exposure for his young business, launched in October — not just at the game itself, with its tens of thousands of attendees, but at two private events he’s now catering in Minneapolis during Super Bowl weekend.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Yee said.