Food Trucks

by Heather Shouse

  ( SIDE DISH )

  The last thing you’d expect to see among the mansions and sprawling condo developments on the swank island village of Key Biscayne is a Peruvian guy dishing up ceviche out of a van. But that’s precisely why Marcelo Floríndez does such good business—he’s impossible to miss. Parked near the entrance to Calusa Park, just off the Rickenbacker Causeway, Marcelo’s Ceviche (Crandon Blvd. near the entrance to Calusa Park) is a mobile taste of the sea, dished up Peruvian style from noon to 3 p.m. daily. Locals ride up to Marcelo’s white van by bike and then fork over a few bucks for impeccably fresh ceviche de corvina, bite-size hunks of firm fish soaked in lime juice before being tossed in a Styrofoam cup along with red onion slivers, corn kernels, diced potato, and a squirt of aji amarillo, a fruity hot sauce made from Peruvian yellow chile peppers. Order it “mixto” and get just-shucked shellfish tossed in; order it “tiradito” and your fish is sliced in razor-thin strips. Marcelo assembles each ceviche to order, giving this coastal classic a custom treatment, and does nothing else out of his setup other than chicha morada, a fermented purple corn drink, spiced like Christmas and refreshing enough to send those cyclists on their way fully fueled.

  Yellow Submarine

  FIND IT: weekday lunches, at 137 Ave. and 128th St.; nights except Monday, at 147 Ave. and Kendall Dr., Miami, Florida

  KEEP UP WITH IT: twitter.com/yellowtwiter [sic]

  Flavio Alarcon wishes he got laid off a long time ago. After spending seven years as an accounts manager for a distributor of Dietz & Watson deli meats, his company merged with the cold-cut giant, essentially eliminating his position. Flavio decided to make good on a decade-old idea to launch a food truck, putting his deli meat savvy to good use with a menu of hoagies and putting his Colombian family to work as the staff. “I always wanted to do something in a truck, really since I moved to Miami from Colombia in 1998 and started seeing them around,” Flavio says. “I did look for a retail space for a sandwich shop, but in Miami it’s impossible to a get good location for a good price, so I said, ‘Okay, this is it. This is the time. Let’s do it on wheels.’ ”

  A music fanatic and guitarist for a band that bangs out ’80s covers, Flavio tapped into a Beatles vibe by dubbing his new business Yellow Submarine, painting a former postal truck happy face–yellow, and slapping it with a cartoonish logo depicting a periscope cruising through the waters. Sub sandwiches with names like Lady Madonna, Killer Queen, and New Sensation are built from classic hoagie rolls, standard toppings, and, of course, high-quality cold cuts. But it’s when Flavio’s mother Myriam dips her hands into the menu that things get interesting. Apparently, in Colombia, a burger without pineapple sauce and crushed potato chips ceases to be a burger—it’s simply a waste of time. Yellow Submarine pays homage to this tradition, adding the toppings to Myriam’s blend of ground chuck, cumin, garlic, and onions. She’s also behind the homemade mustard, the pesto, the pineapple sauce, and the salsa rosada, a salmon-colored condiment that could simply be called tomato-mayo, but that wouldn’t have quite the same ring to it.

  Flavio and his younger brother Andres work the truck, parking near their commissary warehouse by day and in a shopping mall lot by night. They take turns manning the window and grilling mom’s hand-formed burgers on the truck’s flattop, smashing the edges down with a spatula as they sizzle to lacy perfection. Like the Colombian-style hot dog the truck sells, the burger gets shredded lettuce, tomato, provolone, and that homemade mustard. But clearly it’s the marriage of tart, sweet, and crunchy that happens when the salsa rosada meets the pineapple and crushed chips that make this patty memorable. Couple the Yellow Burger with home-style desserts (like ambrosia and chocolate pudding pie) courtesy of Flavio’s sister, Angela, and you just about feel like you’re in the Alarcon dining room, eating simply, leaving satisfied. “By myself, I couldn’t do it, but with the help of my family, I know this is going to work,” Flavio says. “Before, I was getting by, doing fine in my job, and when you are okay in a job, you don’t look forward. But when you are forced to make a change, you realize anything is possible. For me, it was the best decision I ever was forced to make.”

  Myriam’s Yellow Burger

  Serves 4

  1 teaspoon ground cumin

  1 teaspoon pepper

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 teaspoon chopped garlic

  1 onion, coarsely chopped

  4 teaspoons bread crumbs

  2 pounds chuck ground beef

  ½ tablespoon olive oil

  PINEAPPLE SAUCE

  1 cup canned pineapple

  Juice of ½ lime

  1 tablespoon sugar

  SALSA ROSADA

  2 Roma tomatoes

  2 tablespoons chopped sun-dried tomatoes

  ½ cup mayonnaise

  4 teaspoons butter

  4 hamburger buns

  4 butter lettuce leaves

  4 tomato slices

  4 onion slices

  4 handfuls potato chips (kettle style preferred), crushed

  Combine the cumin, pepper, salt, garlic, onion, and bread crumbs in a food processor until all ingredients are well chopped. Add this mixture to the ground beef and incorporate well with your hands. Form the meat into 4 round balls and flatten into patties 1-inch thick.

  Heat a griddle or skillet over medium-high heat, add the olive oil, then add the beef patties and cook for 5 minutes on each side, or as desired.

  To make the pineapple sauce, purée all of the ingredients in a blender.

  To make the salsa rosada, purée all of the ingredients in a blender.

  While the burgers are cooking, lightly butter and toast the buns on a separate griddle or pan on the stovetop. Slather the top bun with the pineapple sauce and the bottom bun with the salsa rosada. When the burgers are ready, transfer to the buns and top with lettuce, tomato, onion, and potato chips. Store any unused sauce covered in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

  Angela’s Chocolate Pudding and Cookies

  Serves 8 to 12

  2 (3.5-ounce) boxes chocolate pudding (“cook and serve”)

  4 cups cold milk

  1 can Nestlé table cream

  1 can condensed milk

  2 (3.15-ounce) packages Goya Maria cookies (Mexican butter cookies)

  Make the chocolate pudding with the milk following the package instructions. Let the pudding rest for 2 to 3 minutes, then add the table cream and condensed milk, mixing well.

  Into a large, round glass bowl, pour enough of the chocolate mixture to cover the bottom of the container. Add a layer of the Maria cookies, then top with a layer of the pudding; repeat this procedure until the cookies and chocolate mixture are used up. Let the dessert rest in the refrigerator for 2 hours, then slice into portions, spoon out onto plates, and serve.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  For the most part, the clientele frequenting strip clubs aren’t expecting much in the way of, uh, sustenance. And that’s exactly why Benjamin Nelson rigged his smoker up to his truck and brought his Fat Man’s Barbecue (333 NE 79th St.) to the parking lot of a roughneck gentlemen’s club in Miami. With hip-hop booming out of the bar and a steady stream of smoke pouring out of the Fat Man’s hickory-fired cooker, there’s a definite block party vibe at Take One Lounge come weekend nights. Benjamin sells fried chicken, burgers, a rotating lineup of grilled seafood, and moist lemon cake, but it’s the slabs of spareribs cooking low and slow that brings the fellas out of the club and into the lot, cash in hand. The pole girls normally aren’t too happy about watching clients walk out the door to spend money somewhere else, but as long as the guys return with an extra rib or two to spare, that’s the only tip they need.

  New York, New York

  NY Dosas

  The Arepa Lady

  Jamaican Dutchy

  Big Gay Ice Cream Truck

  Trini Paki Boys Cart

  ROOSEVELT AVENUE MAP

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  La Dominique

  Mr. C’s �
�Sweetmeat” Bar-B-Que

  Magic Carpet

  Irie Food

  Yue Kee

  Washington, D.C.

  Fojol Bros. of Merlindia

  Food Chain

  Sâuçá

  Portsmouth, New Hampshire

  Fresh Local

  New York, New York

  Hot dog carts are as firmly associated with New York City as the Empire State Building (just try and watch a Law & Order episode without seeing a cop ordering at one). The city can’t claim the frankfurter as its own, but there are accounts of hot dogs showing up at Coney Island as far back as the 1860s, cooked over coal and sold from a cart. Soon after, these pushcarts made their way to Manhattan, becoming a staple in areas thick with pubs. By the 1920s, mobile hot dog businesses were popping up around the country, but New York owned the game, with pushcarts, wagons, and even horse-drawn carts hawking hot dogs throughout the state. The affordable, portable snack continued to dominate New York’s street food options through the 1970s, a decade that saw the city’s color palette change considerably, thanks to a 1965 immigration law that did away with quotas. Those quotas had meant the majority of immigrants hitting New York City from about the 1920s on hailed from different parts of Europe. Most of the street food businesses up until that point were run by Greek immigrants, who jumped on the hot dog (band)wagon and were considered flashy if they added souvlaki to their lineup. But by 1970, Jamaicans, Cubans, and the Dominicans got in on the game, although they largely catered to their own communities, meaning unless you were a part of it, you were not a part of it. Village Voice food critic Robert Sietsema recalls the street food scene in 1977—the scene accessible to the average American-born New Yorker, anyway—as “dismal.” He recounts: “When I first came to New York, 90 percent of the street food I saw was hot dog carts, which people had derisory names for like ‘floaters’ and ‘dirty water dogs.’ And you ate those out of both love and hatred. Love because it was so New York, but hatred because it was all you could get. You just knew there was more.”

  “By 1990 there were illegal carts in Chinatown and carts in Astoria nobody ever bothered to chase down,” Sietsema recalls. “Around that time, the halal carts in Midtown arose out of necessity for Muslim taxi drivers, traders, and delivery drivers from the Middle East, Malaysia, and Africa. It turned into this cart-specific pan-Muslim world of food, from kebabs to curries to biryani.”

  As the immigrant population continued to swell through the end of the last century, so did New York’s street food options. According to the Population Division at New York’s Department of City Planning, 18.2 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born in 1970. By 2000, the number had doubled to 36.6 percent. A food cart is much easier to start than a restaurant, especially for someone new to this country, its laws, and its language. On the other side of New York’s street food coin is the gourmand with social media savvy and a flush audience of followers at his or her fingertips. The range could lazily be defined as low-end to high-end, but it’s more than that. On one end of the spectrum it’s cooks catering to their community by creating a menu of what they know, and selling it from a cart that’s generally parked in one place. At the other end, it’s cooks coming up with a concept, developing a brand, and investing a good amount of money on a truck, giving themselves the mobility to chase the crowds.

  When it comes to the latter, just about every big-name chef in New York has likely tossed around the idea of taking his or her food to the streets. The only problem? The city has a cap on permits, and no amount of pressure has been able to raise it. There are 2,800 permits available for citywide operation, and an additional 50 per borough (Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island). In a city of eight million, there’s a permit waiting list that’s longer than the Brooklyn Bridge. Cruising Craigslist on any given day will deliver “turnkey” (ready to roll) mobile kitchens sans permits in the neighborhood of $20,000 to $30,000. A truck with a two-year citywide permit? Try $80,000. In the cart community, it’s not uncommon for family members to swap permits from one cart to another, and there’s definitely a black market for fake permits. But as Sietsema says, “I don’t even care about legalities. The city just wants to stick their fat fingers in so they can collect money … I say, the more the merrier.”

  ( SIDE DISH )

  Muhammad Rahman is the kind of character who makes the Midtown halal cart scene more enticing than any soap opera. The Bangladeshi chef and entrepreneur has taken his Russian Tea Room pedigree (plus his chef’s coat and toque) and combined it with his mother’s tutelage at Kwik Meal (W 45th St. at 6th Ave.; www.kwikmeal.net). Devotees include Ruth Reichl and Jane and Michael Stern, and everyone raves about the lamb. In a genre where “lamb on rice” usually means “gyro meat on rice,” Muhammad stands out for using actual leg of lamb, which he marinates in a mashup of cumin, ginger, garlic, coriander, and green papaya before sizzling it to order on the tiny cart’s white-hot flattop. (Interestingly enough, the tiny globes of bright green falafel are even better, the sleeper hit indeed.) But more interesting is keeping up with Muhammad: in the ten years since opening his original cart, he has built an empire of four carts, branched out with an Italian cart called Kwik Pasta, and taken over a Harlem pizzeria called Presidential Pizza. After Obama took office, Muhammad unveiled a cart by the name of “Meal O’Bama,” whose sign he later changed to “Kwik Meal IV” after enough people asked him 1) Why the Irish-ish apostrophe? and 2) Wasn’t he worried about legalities? Shortly after that, his disgruntled brother Fahima opened a cart only a few feet from the original Kwik Meal, posting a sign that read, “Why pay more money? FahimaHalal food much better than Kwik Meal.” Fahima alleged his brother hadn’t been paying him for his work, so he decided to retaliate with some, uh, healthy competition. Eventually, Fahima moved his cart a few blocks away, but the family feud went down in the books among the many in the street food world.

  NY Dosas

  FIND IT: West 4th St. at Sullivan St., New York, New York

  KEEP UP WITH IT: twitter.com/nydosas

  “I’m listed in forty-two countries in tour guidebooks as a landmark. People wear my T-shirts. I have fan clubs in Japan, Canada, and San Francisco. I have a Facebook page under ‘The Dosa Man’ that someone started for me.

  I won the Vendy Award in 2007 and New York Magazine’s ‘Best Cart’ in 2003. I have a following so big now I can’t stop even if I wanted to.”

  Thiru Kumar isn’t bragging; he’s just proud. And he has every right to be. In the mid-1990s he came to New York from Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Twenty-seven years old, he had nothing to call his own but a wife and young daughter. He started out in construction and wound up in the New York Times. What happened in between is not that different from the stories of many immigrant food vendors: get a job in a fellow countryman’s restaurant, gain experience, scrape together some money, buy or build a tiny cart, get a green card (if you’re lucky) and a vending permit (if you’re even luckier), and open for business. Except Thiru didn’t want to blend in with the hot dog and halal carts cluttering New York’s city streets. His own personal eating habits and those of his friends inspired him to plaster “PURELY VEGETARIAN” along his tiny grill on wheels, and he set about bringing dosas to the masses. In Sri Lanka, a stone’s skip across the water from Southern Indian, these lacy lentil and rice crepes are common. But, as Thiru is quick to point out, “Ours are different. You won’t get the Jaffna dosa in India, and you won’t get my dosa, my grandmother’s recipe, anywhere else. Nowhere.”

  The NYU students he knows by name seem to agree; they’ve been forming lines that resemble concert queues since the day NY Dosas opened on the edge of Washington Square Park in 2002. Grinning through his thick moustache while calling out to regulars—“Kristen, Pondicherry dosa today, yeah? Michael, samosa, green chutney, and Jaffna dosa, yeah?”—Thiru works the scorching griddle like he could do this blindfolded, drunk, with one hand tied behind his back. A mountain of potatoes the color of sunflowers, dotted with tiny black mu
stard seeds and peas, stays warm in a corner of the griddle. Dunking his ladle into one of three fat containers of batter, Thiru comes out with the perfect amount for one dosa, pouring it onto the grill in one continuous circle that grows bigger from the center until the pancake is almost two feet across. “I make three different batters: the uttapam is real rice and lentils, and the dosa batter is rice and lentil flour, plus wheat flour. And the Jaffna dosa also has a lot of natural herbs, like methi, and onions in the batter. Plus I don’t use any yeast,” Thiru says proudly. “It ferments naturally. The rice soaks for six hours, then sits for another six hours outside to ferment, to give it that flavor, that tang.”

  After spooning some of the curried potatoes onto a nearly finished Pondicherry dosa, Thiru scatters a tricolor mix of raw julienned bell peppers and carrots, slides his spatula under a crispy edge, and folds the dosa over onto itself. He starts in on an order of uttapam, forming tiny white pancakes the size of silver dollars, then turns his attention back to the dosa, gently transferring it to a Styrofoam cradle and crowning it with shavings of toasted coconut and a dollop of ginger-coconut chutney, faintly orange-red from chili powder. He hands the order over to the salivating customer, a fresh-faced Indian-American kid sporting an NYU backpack and gripping a Gatorade, then turns back to his orders sizzling away on the grill. He never needs to handle money, and he likes it that way. A guy in his early twenties wearing a “NY Dosa” T-shirt dips in and out of his fanny pack making transactions; his female counterpart sports a shirt that reads “Team Vegan,” and her primary task is keeping the line moving while checking in with Thiru to make sure the orders are on track. “They are my friends, volunteers, they do this for me because they have been coming here to eat and they like me, so they want to help out,” Thiru says. “They are vegan like me because it’s the more peaceful way. In my life, at my cart, I’m not hurting animals, I feel very healthy, and I can go to sleep at night. I’m free.”