It was a warm summer night and the three of us — my wife, my brother-in-law, and me — drove up to New Haven to see Bleachers at the Yale tennis stadium. We wanted to grab something to eat before the show, and when you're in New Haven, that pretty much means Frank Pepe's. It's one of the oldest and most famous pizza places around, the kind of spot that's basically an institution. You either wait in the line out front or order online for pickup, so we ordered ahead and swung by to grab our pizza and some drinks.

Then we walked back to my car, which was parked in the lot right next to the restaurant, and ran into the only real problem of the night. We had this incredible pizza and absolutely nowhere to sit and eat it. So I opened the tailgate of my SUV, slid the pizza box inside, and we made do. My wife climbed up and sat in the back because there wasn't room for the rest of us, and my brother-in-law and I just stood there in the parking lot eating, setting our paper plates down on the edge of the tailgate between bites.

It worked, but barely. It was awkward, and it was by no means a real solution. And standing there balancing a plate on the bumper, the idea just hit me. There had to be a better way to do this. What if the back of the car could give you an actual table and a couple of seats — something that unfolded easily and was ready to go in seconds?

That night I went home and drew it. I sketched the whole thing in a notebook, this pull-out table and seating that lives in your SUV and sets up whenever you need it. And then, like a lot of ideas, life got in the way and I forgot about it. The notebook sat on a shelf for two years.

Then one day in September 2025, I was cleaning out a stack of old papers and found the notebook with the drawing still tucked inside. I've had plenty of good ideas over the years and never done a single thing with any of them. But looking at that sketch again, I decided this one was going to be different. This is the one I'm actually going to build.

That's where TailgateTable started. A pizza box, a parking lot, and nowhere to sit.