Pyro Pizza It’s not much to see a wood-fed oven in an artisanal pizzeria these days, but to see that kind of roaring fire from inside a food cart? Now that’s impressive. Pyro’s owners (who also run the popular downtown cart Give Apizza A Chance) somehow figured out how to build their cart around a hefty wood-fired pizza oven, and now they’re kicking out bubbly crusted, 12-inch, whole wheat pies in traditional varieties like margherita and quattro formaggi (that’s four cheese to you and me). It’s an impressive pizza, and not just because it’s made on wheels.
Potato Champion
NORTH STATION (N Killingsworth St. and N Greeley Ave.)
One of the newest “pods” to open in Portland, North Station is anchored by Pizza Depokos, a converted gas station open from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. nightly (except Sundays). Most carts open for lunch (around 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.) then again for dinner (around 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.), and very few are open on Sundays. Depokos’s liquor license means that pod patrons can enjoy a meal from their favorite cart with a beer to wash it down, plus eat under the shelter of the attached garage should that infamous Portland rain start pouring.
El Rancho The fish tacos, veggie burritos, and chilaquiles are the greatest hits.
Saucy’s BBQ Make a quick meal of a hotlink sandwich and crunchy, tart slaw.
Sila Thai Thai standards with occasional standout specials from the board.
Yogio It’s easy to fall in love with this hot-pink cart based on its adorable design and concept alone: Korean bar snacks given the names of Rock (portable bibimbap), Paper (savory pancake with sautéed veggies), and Scissors (rice cake noodles in faintly spicy red pepper paste). All are crave-worthy.
Scoop Artisan ice cream in seasonal flavors plus cider and caramel apples in fall and winter.
Kettle Kitchen Going above and beyond the usual repertoire of chicken noodle and barley beef, this soup cart offers up a rotating array of flavorful bowls, from Indian curry soup studded with pink shrimp to chunky potato soup brightened by diced pickles. Don’t miss the killer biscuits, especially the gorgonzola-black pepper.
Starchy and Husk A clever name and an unusual concept have secured this cart a spot in the hearts of the local street-food cognoscenti. Mac and cheese brings the “Starchy” while roasted corn on the cob brings the “Husk.” The ’70s TV show references continue via menu items like the Gran Torino (squash and pancetta–studded mac and cheese) and the Huggie Bites (sweet potato hush puppies).
Brother Bob’s Bakery Straight-up homestyle baked goods.
PDX 671 Taking its name from Portland’s airport code and Guam’s area code, this mash-up means you can expect interesting Chamorro food made with local ingredients. Titayas (grilled flatbread flavored with coconut milk) make for a nice breakfast snack, while crispy shrimp fritters known as bonelos uhang are delicious anytime.
Brown Chicken Brown Cow One owner is from Austin, the other from Connecticut, hence the two specialties of this oddly named cart: breakfast tacos (Austin lays claim to them) and steamed cheeseburgers (a New England thing). Both are surprisingly satisfying, although purists might miss the char-grilled flavor on the burger.
Olympic Hot Dogs Red hots with various toppings plus a Tofurkey brat for veg heads.
Chicago, Illinois
All Fired Up
Gaztro-Wagon
Happy Bodega
Hummingbird Kitchen
Kansas City, Missouri
Fresher Than Fresh Snow Cones
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streetza
Madison, Wisconsin
LIBRARY MALL MAP
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Chef Shack
Chicago, Illinois
We have the classics: Italian beef, deep-dish pizza, hot dogs galore. We have the big-name chefs: Charlie Trotter, Grant Achatz, Rick Bayless. But we don’t have food trucks. Not in the sense that every other major city does. Thanks to a tangled mess of red tape, Chicago’s mobile food scene has long been limited to a handful of operators who aren’t actually allowed to cook in their trucks. Instead, they prepare their food in traditional restaurants, load it onto a truck, then keep it warm via heat lamps while they set up camp in local parks. Not only is this far from appetizing for the city’s culinary cognoscenti, but it’s also not exactly brag-worthy for someone traveling around the country researching America’s best food trucks. Seeing how cities like Portland, Austin, and L.A. have evolved and cultivated their food truck scene, then returning to my own city to find little more than roving heat lamps loaded with greasy food has been depressing, but the last year has brought a spark of hope that there might be change a-comin’.
In late winter of 2010 I received an email from Troy Johnson, a native of Chicago’s South Side who was excited to learn I was working on this book. Johnson had spent the past year constructing his food truck All Fired Up, converting a former fire truck into a gleaming mobile kitchen and building a buzz by peddling his fried chicken and barbecue at nightclubs and events in the city’s African American strongholds. Somehow he had slipped through the cracks and a health inspector licensed his truck to cook as an adjunct of a restaurant he took over, but after I profiled him in Time Out Chicago to get the word out, the city cracked down pretty hard, reigning him back in by prohibiting him to cook in his truck. Johnson was undeterred, and together we went on local radio to encourage Chicagoans to contact their aldermen to voice support for bringing our food truck scene up to a national standard. With the support of Time Out Chicago, the website www.StreetFoodNow.net was launched to serve as an HQ for the movement. Around the same time, local chef Matt Maroni was ramping up his own efforts to overhaul the city’s street food regulations so that he could get his business, Gaztro-Wagon, up and running. Aldermen Scott Waguespack and Vi Daley backed a new ordinance that Maroni drew up and, at the time this book went to press, that ordinance is slowly but surely plugging its way through city council. If it passes, Chicago chefs will finally be able to join the mobile food revolution—and Chicago chowhounds will finally be able to take to their Twitters, track down the trucks, and hold their heads high that they’re no longer left out of the club.
A few Chicago food trucks are already up and running, playing by the city’s rules and preparing their food in commissary kitchens while waiting for new regulations to take hold. Technically, I aimed to only highlight trucks, carts, and trailers who actually cook on the street in this book, but hopefully by the time you read this you can add these to that list.
Chicago Start-up Guide
All Fired Up twitter.com/chgoallfrup
Troy Johnson’s roving soul food station pops up at parties and parks serving crispy catfish, deep-fried chicken, and ribs barbecued in a smoker towed on the back of the truck.
Gaztro-Wagon twitter.com/wherezthewagon
“Naan-wiches” are the creation of truck chef Matt Maroni, who stuffs the thin, Indian-inspired breads with glammed-up combinations like wild boar belly with blue cheese, caramelized onions, date jam, and romesco sauce.
Happy Bodega twitter.com/happybodega
For now Amanda Cavazos is keeping it simple with baguette sandwiches, locally made granola bars, and Crop To Cup coffee, but she hopes to add scooped-to-order gelato and an expanded savory menu once she’s legally able to.
Hummingbird Kitchen twitter.com/hummingbirdtogo
Because it operates just north of the city in the neighboring suburb of Evanston, this truck run by the restaurateurs behind Union Pizzeria and Campagnola doesn’t have to play by the same rules that city trucks do. That means the organic local-beef burgers, pork Milanese sandwiches, and almond milk smoothies are made fresh onsite.
Kansas City, Missouri
Fresher Than Fresh Snow Cones
FIND IT: Sundays at 17th and Summit Sts., or first Fridays at 110 Southwest Blvd., Kansas City, Missouri
KEEP UP WITH IT: twitter.com/FTFsnowcones
When life gives you herbs, you make simple syrups. Or at least that’s what Lindsay Laricks did, after
moving into a house in Kansas City’s West Side and discovering a backyard so overgrown that it was hard to make out the weeds from the herbs. The avid gardener went rooting around for the bad guys, plucked the life out of them, then split and replanted the good guys. Pretty soon she had herself a thriving herb garden, and after a trip to Austin, Lindsay decided she needed to reap what she sowed. “My boyfriend, Brady, and I went to Austin, and that’s where I first discovered the food trucks phenomenon. I immediately fell in love,” Lindsay says. “I thought it was the most fabulous thing. I said, ‘Why don’t we have anything like this in KC?’ and Brady said, ‘Lindsay, you could do this.’ ”
“I thought, ‘Yeah, right, working full time,’ but then I thought maybe I could if it was simple enough, and that word—simple—just kept coming up, and somehow it turned into simple syrups, something manageable I could do using what I already have plenty of, herbs.”
And what to do with simple syrups? Pour them onto shaved ice and make snow cones, of course. Lindsay describes the summery American classic as “lovable, but disgusting if you break it down,” referring to the artificial flavorings and colors that coat the ice, drip from the paper cone, and stain many a shirt. So she approached the snow cone from a natural, sustainable point of view, combining her homegrown herbs with fellow organics, from fruits to coffee to tea. While Lindsay was tinkering around infusing herbs into syrups and researching Hawaiian shaved ice machines, she also had her hands full as creative director for a local ad agency and with the letterpress and design company, Hammerpress, that she and Brady Vest run in Kansas City’s art-rich Crossroads District. Still, one look at an adorable 1957 Shasta trailer on eBay (the compact style known as the Canned Ham) was all it took to turn an idea into a business.
During Fresher Than Fresh’s first summer, in 2009, Lindsay split her time between her day job and the trailer, using weeknights to concoct syrups like blackberry-sage, clementine-thyme, and watermelon-basil and weekends to hawk her snow cones parked in a fitting garden setting, just across the street from the popular locavore restaurant Blue Bird Bistro. It was an instant hit, with Lindsay turning down private event requests left and right because there just weren’t enough hours in the day. After spending a winter thinking about the trailer’s popularity, she took a leap, quit the agency, and started the 2010 season full-steam, immediately booked for most of KC’s hippest happenings, from craft fairs to dance performances to art walks.
So what will she do in fall when the cold rolls in and appetites for snow cones have waned? “To be honest, I don’t really know where it’s going, but I know I’m doing the right thing … it’s just so lovely and it makes people happy, it makes me happy. The gut feeling that this is what I should be doing overpowers the fear of the unknown.”
Blackberry Lavender Ice Pops
Since most people don’t have a commercial Hawaiian shaved ice machine, this recipe has been adapted to make ice pops. Use molds or ice cube trays with standard wooden ice pop sticks, plastic spoons, swizzle sticks, or even chopsticks.
2 heaping cups blackberries
1 cup sugar
1½ cups water
2 tablespoons fresh or dried culinary lavender buds
6 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
Combine the blackberries, sugar, water, and lavender in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring the ingredients to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 8 minutes.
Mash the ingredients with a potato masher to extract as much juice as possible from the berries.
Let the mixture cool in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes. Remove from the refrigerator and add the lemon juice.
Using a fine-mesh strainer, strain the mixture into a large liquid measuring cup (or something similar with a pour spout). Discard the solids. Evenly divide the liquid among whatever pop molds you are using. Cover the molds with foil and poke sticks through the foil to secure them in place. Freeze for at least 4 hours before serving.
( SIDE DISH )
Forgive the trip down memory lane, but of all the food trucks I’ve been to, none holds a place in my heart like the battered old Jerusalem Café (Westport Rd. between Mill St. and Pennsylvania Ave.) truck in Kansas City. Since 1993 this gyro and falafel operation has come to the rescue of many tipsy locals, who stumble out of Westport bars and right up to its window to order a packed pita sandwich slathered in hummus and finished with flame-red harissa (it’s open 11:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.). Even before I was old enough to join the goons myself, I’d hang out in the parking lot where Jerusalem does business, my dorky friends and I striving to be as cool as Westport itself, the epicenter of the only late-night action in town. The truck’s owner, Fred Azzah, a native of Jerusalem, opened his brick-and-mortar café just a block away in 1990, but somehow the same crispy balls of chickpeas and shavings of greasy gyro meat just don’t taste the same sitting down. And as I learned by the mid-’90s, they taste even better when they’re all that stands between you and that massive Sunday morning hangover.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streetza
KEEP UP WITH IT: www.streetza.com or twitter.com/streetzapizza
A couple of guys roaming the streets at 2:30 in the morning, drunk enough to be roaming the streets at 2:30 in the morning, are bound to come up with a few crazy ideas. And when they’re in search of sustenance but winding up empty-handed and hungry, those ideas might turn to how to solve the problem. For Scott Baitinger and Steve Mai, the solution became giant slices of pizza, fresh from the oven, handed through the window of a tricked-out ice cream truck parked only steps from Milwaukee’s booming bar scene on Water Street. “We had a couple of taco trucks you’d run into here and there, but really no one was doing any other food out of trucks,” says Scott. “We looked into it, and for the most part there weren’t any regulations prohibiting it. It was just that no one had done it yet.”
So they did. Scott was, and still is, working as the creative director at an ad agency while Steve was managing a pizzeria with about ten years of restaurant experience under his belt. The two got their hands on an old ice cream truck and decided to convert it into a pizza truck themselves, “making every single mistake possible,” Scott says. Electric pizza ovens and electric appliances meant they needed a massive generator, one that the Department of Transportation vetoed just by looking at it. They had no choice but to dismantle the entire truck, sell the parts on Craigslist, and start from scratch. They learned their lesson, moving on to propane-fueled ovens with slate decks, and after finally getting the truck street legal, they started partying. Friends and family came by Scott’s house, where the truck was parked, to sample pie after pie, commenting on cheese blends, tomato sauce sweetness, topping ratios, crust crispness, and just about every other element that goes into making the perfect pizza. In the end, Scott and Steve settled on what they call “something in between New York and Chicago style, with doughiness on the inside, a bit like deep-dish, but with a crispy crust like New York.” Through trial and error they developed a multistep dough method in which they halt the proofing process by sticking the dough in the fridge, accelerate it on the proofing rack for a bit, stop it again to transfer it from the commissary kitchen to the truck, and then proof it a bit more on the truck just before it’s stretched and slid into the oven, where 10 minutes at 650°F puffs it up to a nice golden brown.
Streetza rolled out for business in May of 2009 with a menu that’s partly standard pizzeria (pepperoni, sausage, veggie, plain cheese) and partly gourmet. The latter includes special slices of the day inspired by world travels (a trip to Romania turned into a combo of smoked ham, fresh corn, and sun-dried tomatoes); suggestions from Twitter followers (the “Tweetupgirls Heartbreaker Slice” gets artichoke hearts, grilled chicken, and basil); and odes to local legends (a 1989 Wisconsin State Fair champion chili appears on a pizza instead of tomato sauce and gets topped with Cheddar, sour cream, and red onions). Wisconsin cheeses are pretty much required around these parts unless you want to get chased out
of town by an angry mob, and Streetza goes even further by supporting local crops with a seasonal Farmers’ Market slice. Hometown pride gets broken down block by block via eight different Neighborhood Slices, including the Brewer’s Hill, topped with hunks of brats simmered in Blatz beer, and a nod to the tony North Shore with smoked salmon, crème fraîche, fresh dill, and a dollop of black caviar.
Since the mobile pizza kitchen has hit Milwaukee’s streets, only a couple of other food trucks have followed suit, meaning that Streetza gets prime pickings when it comes to spots in front of those same bars Scott and Steve stumbled out of before their “aha moment” really took root. That’s not to say that feeding the drunks means you can’t occasionally still be one, but when investors are knocking on your door and you just inked a deal to put forty-eight trucks in the Midwest within two years, priorities tend to shift.
The Bay-View Pizza
Makes four 16-inch pizzas
Unless you want to be prepping all day, you should purchase prepared pizza crust. Boboli crusts work for this, as do Tiseo’s and Baker’s Quality frozen pizza dough.
SAUCE
6 cups crushed tomatoes
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil
2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano
Food Trucks Page 11
