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GOURMANDS ON WHEELS

In these lean times, few have the capital to open a brick and mortar restaurant. Crafty chefs and entrepreneurs are turning trucks into kitchens and hitting the road in some American cities. Jessica Machado investigates ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Ah, the California Dream. Girls in short shorts, sunny afternoons in Venice Beach, drives down the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A cheesy truffle burger named “the cougar.”

The ladies behind Baby’s Badass Burgers in Los Angeles are living the young entrepreneurs’ fantasy: a cheap start-up (under $15,000), a hip theme (hot chicks serving meat) and a lucrative trend that’s only gaining momentum (mobile food).

“We wanted to open a burger joint, but with the economy the way it was, and rent still high in LA, a mobile truck made the most sense,” says co-owner Erica Cohen. This way the truck's “baby girls” (in matching pink tank-tops and micro shorts) can move to where the crowds are, from outside the Playboy mansion to the Michael Jackson memorial in Hollywood. Since hitting the streets in August, Baby’s has attracted 2,000-plus Twitter followers for news on the whereabouts of their hot pink truck. “Our truck absolutely lends itself to the LA crowd,” says Cohen.

Indeed, it seems Angelenos have gone mad for anything served out of a brightly coloured box-on-wheels. From lunchtime to 4am, suits, students, drunks and foodies scour the internet for the locations of these 40-plus “designer trucks”. Websites such as findlafoodtrucks are helping locals find a vegan hot dog at noon or a “slumdog” dosa after work.

“As long as this economy continues to be difficult and people want cheap food, it’s hard to tell when this bubble is going to burst,” says Josh Hiller, a partner at RoadStoves, a truck-leasing company. Together with Morris Appel, Hiller has  transformed a fleet of unused taco trucks (part of a family truck-leasing business) into a goldmine.

Credit Hiller’s company and Kogi Korean BBQ for starting LA’s mobile movement. In November of last year, Mark Manguera, then 30, had an idea to spice up the carne asada taco he’d bought from a street vendor by replacing the thin jalapeno-marinated meat with Korean short ribs. Dazzled by his own concoction, he decided to team up with Roy Choi, a chef, to start their own business. With $1,500 they approached their old friend Appel at RoadStoves for help.

Choi says RoadStoves was the only financial backer that didn’t laugh at their idea. Choi and Manguera were allowed to pay off their truck lease in small increments, often with whatever cash they could spare at the end of the night. Such financial flexibility was useful, because when they first started parking their Kogi Korean BBQ truck outside Hollywood clubs, they couldn’t give their tacos away. “It was a concept people couldn’t comprehend,” says Choi. “People thought, ‘what are these Asians doing in a taco truck?’”

Then one December day, the Kogi truck snuck into the UCLA campus and parked in the middle of the dorms. A tweet announced their location. Writers from popular local websites, LAist and Thrillist showed up. Bloggers championed them, and soon curious readers stalked their every move. The rest is not only history, but also a study in the phenomenon of web-hype marketing.

Kogi now has three trucks roaming LA’s streets, 51 employees, 1,000 daily customers, more than 48,000 followers on Twitter. Fans sometimes wait up to three hours for their $2 rib-stuffed tortillas. They’ve been the food darlings of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Food & Wine, and were recently named one of Bon Appetit's “Hot Ten” for 2009. Not bad for a year old non-restaurant that serves hot food from a truck.

“We don’t operate this business thinking about longevity,” says Choi. “What keeps us going is that we focus on the moment.”

This unconventional business mentality is attracting a flurry of Generation Y-ers, selling their own wacky cuisine at a low price point, like Cohen of Baby’s and Marked5’s pork tonkatsu burgers on rice buns. They’re embracing a craze, and with RoadStoves watching their backs, they have little to lose. For about $10,000 to $20,000, RoadStoves will get a mobile food business up and running, providing the truck, insurance, operational permits, secure parking, free upkeep and access to their licensed commissary. The business-licensing end is the entrepreneur’s responsibility. Leases are typically written for six months, after which businesses can reassess and renew.

In New York, the mobile food scene is harder to crack. This August, after two years of creating a stir in the East Village, one of the first and most popular gourmet trucks in Manhattan, the Dessert Truck, drove off of their St Mark’s Place lot downtown for good. Jerome Chang, the truck's co-owner with Chris Chen, says they had trouble renewing their permit, despite their critical acclaim. With the appeals process taking up to a year, they’ve decided to forego the truck. Instead they will concentrate on a storefront, which should open in the Lower East Side by year’s end.

“It’s a counter-intuitive business,” says Chang, a French Culinary Institute graduate. “It looks simple. People think low overhead, lower start-up, but you’re not able to sell at brick-and-mortar space prices. I’d tell people to think long and hard before they jump in.”

While New York is synonymous with street food, Chang says the city doesn’t make it easy for mobile food entrepreneurs to start and sustain business. The city lacks the equivalent of a RoadStoves, making it difficult for start-ups to lease trucks. A brand new kitchen on wheels can cost more than $100,000. And then there's the matter of licensing. In New York every person on a food truck needs a mobile-vending license from the Department of Health, not just a food-handling certificate. This personal application process can take up to two months, making it hard to find employees willing to jump such hurdles.

The biggest headache of all is securing a food-vending permit from the city. This piece of paper can take up to 15 years to acquire. Manhattan caps the number of food-vending permits at 3,000. A few lapse every year, but with a $200 annual renewal rate, holders rarely given them up. Many are sold on a black market for tens of thousands of dollars. Police officers in the city often make life difficult for police vendors, issuing $1,000 tickets for minor violations, according to the Street Vendor Project, affiliated with the Urban Justice Centre. The fact that over 80% of the estimated 10,000 city vendors are foreign born seems to make them more of a target.

Lev Ekster was months away from graduating from law school and without a job when he decided to look into the mobile food business. At 25, he didn’t have a culinary background and didn’t know what to sell. He settled on cupcakes (with guidance from his girlfriend) and found a barely used truck from a defunct pizza vendor, who became a silent partner. While studying for finals, Ekster was also looking for a chef and filling out legal paperwork for the CupcakeStop.

Despite his relatively smooth roll on to the scene in May, Ekster contends that operating a restaurant-on-wheels is a lot more work than he imagined. All of Manhattan’s mobile businesses have restricted areas and times they can travel, a list that runs four pages long. “You just don’t move into a location,” Ekster says, having learned this the hard way. He found his tires slashed one morning, presumably by local vendors who saw his truck as unwelcome competition.

In LA there’s no limit to the number of permits issued. But with new trucks taking to the streets weekly—totals doubled this summer—turf scuffles are emerging there too. A number of trucks often shadow each other, arriving in packs at lucrative lunchtime spots in Santa Monica and the Miracle Mile, a stretch of mid-city office buildings. This growing swarm of colourful vehicles—not to mention the drove of office workers it draws for quirky $5 meals—has upset nearby restaurants. Though there is nothing illegal about selling food from a metered parking space, police officers have begun citing trucks for minimal violations, such as parking too far from the curb.

RoadStoves is currently looking for a hub in LA for a “mobile food court”, where trucks can stay parked for scheduled hours and special events. Stationary carts have worked in smaller, progressive cities such as Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, where customers are apt to ride their bikes to downtown parking lots for ethnic food stands. In Austin a “trailer park” of Airstreams sells deep-fried avocado tacos and gourmet campfire s’mores. 

Regardless of the city, it no longer seems silly to purchase a toothsome meal from a truck. And the gamble seems worth it to these new entrepreneurs, at least for now. As Choi says about Kogi, “We thought, ‘if this doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out.’”
   

Picture Credit: Baby's Badass Burgers, jasonlam, bpbailey (both via Flickr)

(Jessica Machado is a writer and editor based in New York and Portland, Oregon, and is a regular contributor to the Oregonian. Her last story for More Intelligent Life was about the inked citizens of Portland.)