Truck-Side Dining
The how, why, and where of high-end food trucks
At lunchtime in Seattle, hungry office workers are bypassing the usual fast-food spots to line up outside a silver trailer and order Kobe beef burgers with bacon jam, Cambozola cheese, and arugula. In South Los Angeles, a solar-powered lunch truck is hawking sesame tofu wraps and yerba mate tea. Across the country in Manhattan, dinner crowds are leaving restaurants early to try the new crème brûlée at DessertTruck. When did street food get so fancy?
Most cities offer an array of mobile eateries, usually dominated by quick, easy options: tacos, sandwiches, falafel, gyros. But in the last year, food trucks have gone high-end, with some of the country’s most exciting new eateries operating out of makeshift kitchens in Airstream trailers and delivery trucks. Lured by the low overhead, the freedom to design their own menus, and even the possibility of building a sizable business, both experienced chefs and industry newcomers are bypassing the notoriously grueling lower rungs of the culinary world and starting their own truck-restaurants.
Josh Henderson, the chef at Skillet in Seattle, spent several years catering photo shoots before he and business partner Danny Sizemore found an Airstream trailer on Craigslist and retrofitted it with propane tanks, a four-compartment sink, refrigeration units, a stovetop, and a commercial hood. Getting the trailer in serving shape cost about $60,000—far less than the hundreds of thousands it takes to open a new restaurant.
Henderson’s bistro-style street food attracts lines stretching 40 deep for farm-fresh eggs and maple-braised pork belly at breakfast, and toasted walnut, sage, and Reggiano gnocchi for lunch. The operation has drawn such a following that the partners are expanding with additional trailers in Seattle, with an eye toward launching 15 to 20 trailers in cities up and down the West Coast.
THE MOBILE STOREFRONT
DessertTruck
Jerome Chang left his job as a pastry sous-chef at famed Manhattan eatery Le Cirque to open DessertTruck with his roommate Chris Chen, a graduate business student at Columbia University looking for a way to break into the culinary industry.
“We had this idea of starting a high-end dessert business together, but neither of us really had a reputation in the industry or the resources to open a restaurant,” says Chen. “So we decided on a mobile storefront. Honestly, we had no idea how people would react to it.”
The idea has taken off, with local media and food blogs fawning over DessertTruck and passersby lining up for Chang’s upscale offerings, which range from rosemary-caramel goat cheese cheesecake to chocolate bread pudding topped with bacon crème anglaise. The pair operate the truck seven nights a week, opening at 6 p.m. and serving until the desserts are sold out.
BREAKING IN AS A PRO COOK
Other entrepreneurs, such as Kim Ima, the owner-baker-driver of New York’s Treats Truck, are making their first forays into professional cooking. Ima, a theater artist and lifelong baker, bought a used delivery truck on eBay, outfitted it with an oven and a serving window, and spent several months adapting her recipes for large-batch production before launching in May 2007.
Treats Truck
“There’s something fun and appealing about the whole experience of buying homemade treats from a truck,” says Ima. “And people love supporting small businesses. They give me words of encouragement, and I get a lot of regulars.”
Starting an environmentally friendly food business was an added enticement for Ima—the Treats Truck runs on compressed natural gas—and other proprietors say that selling just a few items out of a small kitchen on wheels allows them to conserve energy and produce less waste than a traditional kitchen.
Kam Miceli and Mitchell Collier started Green Truck in Los Angeles out of a desire to promote organic and sustainable eating. The duo hired Beth Creasey, a former chef at LA hot spot AOC, to design a menu of gourmet salads, sandwiches, and wraps that includes vegetarian, vegan, and raw options. All utensils and packaging are recyclable, and the truck runs on a combination of solar power and the kitchen’s used cooking oil. The business now includes two Green Trucks traveling from South LA to Beverly Hills, with two more being custom built and future plans to expand to other cities.
Previous « 1 2 3 » Next
Truck-Side Dining (cont.)
Despite some of these burgeoning minichains, all of the chefs and owners are quick to point out that opening a truck-restaurant is far from a get-rich-quick scheme. The arduous process of securing permits, long days of driving and cooking, and hostility from other businesses present significant hurdles to turning a profit.
Most local regulations require that truck-restaurants operate out of a separate (no-wheels) commercial kitchen, so even a business such as Skillet, where all dishes are cooked on-site, must maintain a permanent kitchen to store and prepare the food.
RoliRoti
“It’s not like a bunch of kids get together, buy a truck, and then spend 24 hours a day on it,” says Thomas Odermatt, the so-called grandfather of high-end food trucks, who opened the first of his San Francisco–based RoliRoti mobile rotisseries in 2002.
Odermatt, who comes from a family of Swiss butchers, spent two years operating a chicken rotisserie truck in Hungary before bringing the business to the Bay Area. Despite his confidence in his tender grilled chicken and his mother’s secret spice rub, getting RoliRoti off the ground was trying because he had to persuade a maze of local authorities that a mobile rotisserie kitchen would be sanitary.
“Nobody believed I could do a rotisserie truck,” says Odermatt. “So I had to demonstrate to the local authorities that I watch each piece of food and conduct quality control on each one, and I had to do this in seven different counties. I set up a hazard plan, a critical control plan, and did everything I could to show that the business would be clean.”
Once the appropriate permits are secured, there is still the issue of finding a place to park for the day. “It’s not like a movie set where you roll up and the cones are set up, and there’s a space reserved for you,” says Kim Ima of the Treats Truck. “There are days when I have to circle and circle before I can park, and that can delay me and cut into the time I can sell.”
RULES OF THE STREET
Despite the runaway success of some of these outfits, many localities are making it even harder for truck-restaurants to operate. Responding to complaints that LA’s many taco trucks are drawing customers away from local restaurants, the city recently passed a law limiting the amount of time a food truck can stay parked in one place to an hour. Similar limits on truck operations have been passed in New Orleans, Sacramento, and several smaller California towns.
Wafels & Dinges
While the local ordinances are mostly aimed at taco trucks, some business owners are not happy to see the high-end food trucks, either. Thomas DeGeest, who serves imported Belgian waffles topped with dulce de leche and Nutella from his Wafels & Dinges truck in Manhattan, was surprised when the management of an upscale hotel asked him to move. They felt his truck tarnished the image of the block.
“There’s a whole other set of rules on the street,” says DeGeest. “Some local businesses want you and some don’t. Every time you go to a new spot you don’t know whether people will welcome you.”
Despite the obstacles, none of the chef-owners CHOW spoke to will admit to a desire to retire their trucks and open a 300-seat restaurant. For them, nothing beats the delight on new customers’ faces when those customers see the fresh, gourmet fare being served.
“We call it the ‘Skillet face,’” says Josh Henderson, “when people come up to the truck, look in the food box, and see what we’re offering.”
After running RoliRoti for six years, Odermatt has expanded his business to include three rotisserie trucks and a small restaurant, but he still goes out in the truck twice a week. “I cannot be in the restaurant all the time, every day,” says Odermatt. “That’s just not me. I need the fresh air and the farmers’ markets. I’m used to the outside now.”
]]>
