Food Trucks

by Heather Shouse

  According to the Haili girls—there are five: Rachel, Donna, Sandra, Roberta, and Lorraine, all in their sixties and seventies—their parents officially started the business in 1950, a couple of years after Peter began his nameless fish operation. The girls helped out as the business grew, forming an assembly line in the garage to wrap laulau, scampering up the coconut trees in the yard to gather supplies for pudding, but standing out of the way when their father filled the imu with hot lava rocks, the underground oven doing its job to gently smolder kalua pig. Haili’s became an institution for Hawaiian culinary traditions that fell to the wayside as time-consuming preparations were no longer a priority.

  As the fishing industry began to dry up and downtown commercialized, the look and feel of Kaka’ako changed, but Haili’s didn’t. The little store plugged on, catering backyard luaus and finding a bit of extra money from a lunch wagon Rachel ran at Kapiolani Community College in the 1970s, which she eventually sold to focus on being a grandmother. After both she and Peter passed away, the children’s commitment to the business was stronger than ever, but times had changed. Kaka’ako was now the Ward Center area, named for a sprawling development of chain stores and restaurants. The adjacent Ala Moana Center had opened in the late 1950s as an open-air marketplace for fishermen to do business, but by the late ’90s, the market stalls were long gone and small retailers had been gobbled up by designer chains like Prada and Louis Vuitton. Clearly there was money to be made in this pocket, and a little store like Haili’s just didn’t fit in anymore. In 2008 the family was told that the lease they had held for fifty-nine years would not be renewed, as the behemoth Japanese supermarket Marukai Corporation would be taking over the entire block. “Originally the Ward family owned all of this area, and they were a very humble family,” says Donna Haili, the oldest of the sisters at seventy-three. “They wanted the local people to have something of their own, but this is general growth now. So the local families get pushed out.”

  The sisters wanted to stay connected to the area, but rents were astronomical. Based on the memory of their mother’s little blue lunch wagon of the ’70s, they acquired a lunch wagon, gave it a colorful decal wrap, and in summer of 2009 they parked it just across from a megaplex movie theater, in the shadow of a Buca di Beppo. Undaunted, the Hailis turned their little strip of sod into a tranquil oasis, complete with tables and chairs, traditional music, and a few tiki torches for spirit. Most of the classics the store sold for decades are now served out of the truck, best sampled via the Big Kahuna plate lunch, an assortment of kalua pig, laulau, chicken long rice, tuna poke, lomi salmon, poi, and haupia, or coconut pudding. For its first few months the lunch wagon was the Haili’s only outlet, but eventually they also secured a small storefront in the Kapahulu neighborhood. “The lunch truck has been a transition for us, a way of letting our costumers know that we are still here,” Donna says. “We may be on a smaller scale, but we’re not going out entirely.”

  Haili’s Ahi Tuna Poke

  Serves 8

  2 pounds sashimi-grade ahi tuna, cut into bite-size cubes

  ½ cup soy sauce

  1 tablespoon sesame oil

  1 fresh chile, seeded and minced

  ½ cup minced green onions

  ½ cup slivered Maui onion

  1½ teaspoons minced fresh ginger

  Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and stir to combine. Cover and refrigerate for an hour before serving in individual bowls with spoons. The poke can be stored in the refrigerator for up to 2 days.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  There’s not very much of interest in the area just north of Honolulu airport, just a few budget hotels, generic office buildings, and the occasional fanny pack–clad tourist wandering around complaining that he should have sprung for a place on the beach. But that’s exactly why people get so excited to discover the Jawaiian lunch truck (669 Ahua St.), usually stumbled upon accidentally by visitors lured by the rhythmic reggae beats and the smoky scent of jerk chicken. Jamaican-born Cassie Simmonds is in his sixties but looks like he’s in his thirties, and the activity that keeps him young happens behind a beaded Marley curtain that separates the customers from what’s cooking: spoon-tender pork shoulder soaking up curried coconut milk, flaky snapper swimming in tart escovitch sauce of vinegared onions and peppers, and, of course, that jerk chicken, which Cassie marinates overnight and grills behind his truck on a charcoal-fired smoker. He spent nearly thirty years in Miami, cooking at a range of restaurants before finally making it to Hawaii, but he talks about Jamaica with such love that it seems he never left. Still, when he’s in the island zone, bobbing to the music, stepping out of the truck to hand off homemade lime ginger beer to customers while checking on his fiery chicken, it’s clear that he couldn’t have picked a better name for his current lot in life.

  Seattle, Washington

  Skillet

  Maximus/Minimus

  Halláva Falafel

  Marination Mobile

  Portland, Oregon

  Potato Champion

  Nong’s Khao Man Gai

  Tabor

  Moxie Rx

  CARTOPIA MAP

  NORTH STATION MAP

  Seattle, Washington

  When Portland is your neighbor, the food cart shadow looms large. Although at one time Seattle was almost neck and neck with Portland in mobile food vendors, the land that gave birth to grunge and coffee culture moved much of its dining and drinking indoors, safe from the weather that earned this town the nickname “Rain City.” The infamously drizzly days might have chased a few carts off the streets, but most Seattleites point to tightened regulations in the late 1990s as the noose that strangled the street food scene. Up until then, espresso carts were as much a part of Seattle as Nirvana and the Generation X slackers made famous in Cameron Crowe’s Singles. More than a dozen cart manufacturers were based in the area throughout the 1980s, fulfilling the demand from local upstarts like Seattle’s Best Coffee (an indie way back when, but now owned by Starbucks), which ran thirteen coffee carts during that turbo-charged era, only to close them one by one as the regulations on sidewalk vending shifted.

  Today, of the three hundred licensed mobile food vendors in King County, only thirty-four have permits from the Seattle Department of Transportation to operate in the city of Seattle, and the Health Department only permits them to sell coffee or hot dogs. A handful of newer food trucks and trailers, like Skillet, Marination Mobile, and Halláva Fafafel, operate by sticking to private property, just so they don’t have to secure right-of-way permits from the Department of Transportation. Larry Smith, compliance officer for the Department of Public Health, admits that “in the past, the city of Seattle did put restrictions on street use, and to accomplish a vibrant street food scene these need to be changed.”

  Luckily, there are a few people in the city government who are intent on seeing things change; they don’t just want to bring back those espresso carts synonymous with Seattle, but they’re determined to diversify beyond coffee to get the city up to speed with its progressive neighbor to the south. Gary Johnson of the city’s Department of Planning and Development is heading up a project called Vibrant Street Food, and at the time this book went to press he was preparing legislation that would do three things: lift restrictions to allow all types of food to be served from carts; eliminate the need for a vendor to get permission from business owners in the area in order to operate on the sidewalk; and designate official vending zones where food trucks can park and do business. “It’s not a done deal until our council approves, and we’re getting significant pushback as the initiative is starting to feel more real to people,” Johnson says. “But street food vending adds an element of interest and color that attracts people.” And if Johnson gets his way, Seattle will get that element back.

  Skillet

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.skilletstreetfood.com

  Friday night moviegoers at Seattle’s Thornton Place Cinema skip the popcorn and head for the parking lot
instead. There, clusters of diners gather to compare bites of hand-formed gnocchi tossed with Oregon corn and hunks of sage-perfumed pancetta, and debate a movie’s merit over swigs of minty cantaloupe lemonade. This isn’t an elevated take on tailgating; the food is being cooked to order inside a gleaming silver 1962 Airstream trailer adorned with a flying cast-iron pan and a single word: SKILLET. This roving restaurant is the starting point of the line that snakes through the movie theater parking lot this Friday night, but it’s up to chef Joshua Henderson where diners will be able to catch it tomorrow.

  Henderson’s resume is not unlike that of any hot, young chef of the week: he bounced around in kitchens while his friends went to college, figured out cooking was his calling and set out for the Culinary Institute of America. He worked his way through kitchen stations of respected restaurants, rose to head chef of the Avalon in Beverly Hills, and was lured away by a gig as a private chef, cooking meals out of an RV for photographers needing sustenance while snapping Vogue magazine covers and fancy car ads.

  The next chapter in the evolution of an established chef might be to open his own restaurant, but Henderson left L.A. and moved back to his hometown of Seattle, where he found a mid-century Airstream trailer on Craigslist. He spent six months rigging it with a twenty-four-inch grill, a deep fryer, a fridge, and enough hand sinks and hot water to pass a health inspection. And after he passed, he found a place to park his Airstream and opened for business.

  Seattle’s street-use regulations say that a mobile eatery can operate on private property with no hassle. So, since launching in January 2008, Henderson has simply found businesses that want more business. It didn’t take long for word to spread that this wasn’t your average taco truck (a menu that includes a sandwich of fennel-roasted pork shoulder with lemon aioli and charred onions will do that). As Henderson puts it, “We’re not street food. We’re more like a restaurant that serves food on the street, trying to stretch the shortsighted idea that street food has to be a two-dollar taco.”

  Skillet charges around ten bucks for rotating specials, garnering grumbles from some street food fans used to those two-buck tacos, but Henderson holds himself to the same standards as any respectable chef cooking modern American food, creating seasonal dishes for a menu that changes every few weeks. The one signature customers won’t release from their death grip is his burger, scrawled on the chalkboard menu as, simply, “The Burger.” This isn’t just some simple patty on a bun. Oregon grass-fed ground beef is formed into a hefty round, grilled to a bright-pink medium-rare, then stacked on a brioche bun with arugula and Cambozola, a soft-ripened triple-cream Gorgonzola cheese. Getting the burger recipe from Henderson was no trouble, but he clammed up when asked for the burger’s pièce de résistance: bacon jam. Now, you can buy a jar of Skillet’s bacon jam from the truck or have it shipped to you via the website, or you can accept that the approximation given here is close enough and just make it yourself. In fact, the renegade in Henderson would probably respect you more if you did.

  “The Burger”

  Serves 4

  1¼ pounds ground beef (preferably organic)

  Sea salt

  ½ cup Bacon Jam (see below)

  4 brioche buns, split and toasted

  8 slices Cambozola or other soft blue cheese (about 1 ounce each)

  1 cup torn arugula leaves

  Prepare a grill for direct cooking over medium-high heat.

  Form the ground beef into 4 equal patties and season generously with the salt. Grill the burgers, turning once, for about 3 to 5 minutes per side for medium-rare.

  While the burgers are cooking, spread the bacon jam onto the toasted buns.

  Transfer the burgers to the buns and then top each with 2 slices of the Cambozola and about ¼ cup of the arugula. Serve at once.

  Bacon Jam

  Makes 1 cup

  2 pounds good-quality bacon, diced

  1 small yellow onion, diced

  2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

  2 teaspoons brown sugar

  1 teaspoon chipotle chile powder

  1 teaspoon allspice

  1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  ½ teaspoon salt

  Place the bacon pieces in a large sauté pan or cast-iron skillet over medium-low heat. (You’re cooking the bacon over lower heat than normal to render out as much lard as possible without browning it.)

  While the bacon is still rendering, spoon about 1 tablespoon of the bacon fat into a separate sauté pan and add the onion. Cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes, stirring often and deglazing the pan occasionally by adding just a bit of water while scraping the caramelized bits from the pan with a spatula or wooden spoon. Once the onions are a deep brown, add the balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, chile powder, allspice, pepper, and salt and cook for 2 minutes more.

  Add the onion mixture to the pan with the bacon, turn the heat to low, and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until most of the moisture has been absorbed (Josh says he cooks his for 6 hours).

  Remove the mixture from the heat, spoon into a jar with a tight-fitting lid, and place in the refrigerator overnight or until the mixture has set to a jamlike consistency. Store in the fridge for up to 2 or 3 weeks (longer if left unopened). Use as you would any condiment, as a topping for sandwiches, or slathered liberally on burgers.

  Maximus/Minimus

  FIND IT: 2nd Ave. and Pike St., Seattle, Washington

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.maximus-minimus.com

  You can’t miss it: it’s the giant metal pig parked on a busy corner in downtown Seattle. Even in the shadow of Pike Place, the oldest farmers’ market in America and Seattle’s number-one tourist destination, the colossal oinker that is Maximus/Minimus is impossible to overlook. And that was precisely the point when Kurt Beecher Dammeier parked it there in the spring of 2009.

  The fact that this swine-shaped food truck exists at all is thanks to an adversion to golf. Born into a wealthy family whose successful printing business was worth $85 million when he sold his stake in 1998, Kurt Beecher Dammeier could easily have retired at thirty-eight. “I couldn’t play golf the rest of my life. I was just not at all ready to be done,” he says. “So I got to go out to a second career where making money wasn’t the main objective, where I didn’t fall into it but I had to pick it.”

  And so he picked food. Soon after he got out of the family business, he set up his own company, Sugar Mountain Capital LLC (yes, named for the Neil Young song), became the largest shareholder in Pyramid Breweries, and snatched up a Seattle mini chain of gourmet takeout shops called Pasta & Co. In 2003, he opened Beecher’s Handmade Cheese in Pike Place Market, an artisan cheese company that produces half a million pounds of cheese a year and has scored awards from just about every association that gives them. (The heat-and-eat mac and cheese is so popular that Kurt was asked to prepare it with the Grand Dame herself on The Martha Stewart Show in 2008.)

  And in the midst of the breweries, the gourmet takeout, and the cheese, Kurt managed to open a restaurant, Bennett’s Pure Food Bistro in Washington’s wealthiest town of Mercer Island. A cookbook followed, which the self-described “creative director and I guess chef” worked on from the test kitchen at Sugar Mountain’s downtown office. It’s an impressive command center, a company of 150 jeans-clad employees who greet Kurt with reverence reserved for Mad Men’s Don Draper. When Kurt’s not popping into marketing meetings or fielding calls on new shipping options for cheese, he’s tinkering around in the gleaming test kitchen. “Oftentimes if I’m bored or have something I want to work on, I’ll cook lunch for my staff,” he says. “So I did this braised pork topped with braised onions and this sauce I was making for Bennett’s, kinda spicy with beer, peppers, fruit juices. One day someone said, ‘Man I wish there was a place close by that sold this because I’d like to eat this three times a week.’ I said, ‘So would I,’ and I got to thinking, ‘Wait a minute, we’re a restaurant company. We could do that.’ ”

  The idea cam
e right around the time the recession hit, so to keep prices low and suit the casual nature of a pulled-pork sandwich, Kurt, in an “aha!” moment, decided that a mobile eatery, with its low overhead, was the way to go. And since he’s never been one for moderation, the brazen businessman enlisted a local industrial designer, Colin Reedy, to turn an Alaskan hot dog truck into a giant pig. Using fiberglass and aluminum, Colin concocted a 34 by 14-foot gleaming porker with a windshield for eyes, wheels for hooves, and an awning that pops up off the right side of its belly to serve as the order window. Internally, the pig houses a kitchen much like you’d see in a small restaurant, with a double fryer, a couple of heat lamps, a griddle, a four-burner stove, a fridge/freezer combo, a long prep counter, and a three-compartment sink. It’s manned by a couple of fresh-faced kids executing Kurt’s vision, slapping together pulled pork sandwiches for downtown workers grabbing a quick lunch. The name, Maximus/Minimus, was the jumping-off point for a menu Kurt describes as “yin and yang,” in which the basic braised and pulled pork comes spicy, i.e., “Maximus,” or somewhat sweet, with a Minimus sauce tamed by tamarind, molasses, and honey. The theme continues: pulled pork’s best partner, vinegary slaw, is also offered two ways, the Maximus, with the bite of radish and the smoky heat of chipotle, and the Minimus, sweetened by honey mustard, dried cranberries, and fresh mint. Bracingly sharp ginger lemonade is dubbed the Maximus of drinks, while the sweetly tart hibiscus punch bears the title of Minimus. Chips, however, are equal opportunity, and perhaps the best thing on the menu: a crispy medley of sliced beets, potatoes, thin rounds of carrot, fresh green beans, and whole jalapeños, gutted of their seeds. Pulled hot from the fryer’s rice bran oil, the veggie chips are sprinkled liberally with a Maximus/Minimus spice blend that is, of course, on its way to being packaged and sold at a store near you.