Food truck life
There’s a certain romance to the idea of quitting your day job and opening a food truck in a beautiful summer spot. Siobhan Downes meets four people who did exactly that.
Serial Griller Keren and Dave Kurth run Serial Griller on Coromandel Peninsula.
Keren: My husband was in a job he wasn’t particularly happy in. When I was pregnant with our third child, he started looking into food trucks and thinking that would be an option for us.
We’re the kind of people that if we go out, we usually choose the burger from the menu. But it was always disappointing – it was never what we thought it should be.
Dave started reading about how to cook the perfect burger. The smashburger wasn’t really a thing in New Zealand at the time, so we started playing around with that and thinking, ‘‘Yeah, this is what we want to be eating when we order a burger.’’
Cooks Beach was our main spot at first. We didn’t really understand what we were doing back then. I remember every day rushing to get the truck packed, there was always stuff we were forgetting. Dave would go off in the truck, and I would race down to the beach with all the stuff he’d forgotten. One time the back door didn’t shut properly, and he had to go and collect the stuff that dropped along the road.
We started getting some more spots around the Coromandel. We were going to Tairua, Whitianga, then we started going to Whangamata¯ . We found getting around a bit was great.
As much as we could, we tried to have it so Dave and I were working together – we enjoy it, and we know how we want things to be. But we also have three boys. We tried babysitters, but we found it actually is easier to have one of us at home and have staff members.
In 2017, we opened the container at Hahei Holiday Resort. Our truck had broken down, which was a massive thing – we were told it was going to cost 10 grand to fix and we’d need to get a motor from the South Island. Then we towed it to a friend in Hamilton and it was just a valve problem. The next two summers were both fulltime, truck and container.
Hahei is a really nice place to be with the family. There are about 1500 people in the campground over summer. Everyone’s on holiday – it’s a great time. On our breaks, it’s a couple of hundred metres to go to the beach for a swim. Our kids can come and play on the playground.
December 27 is when it’s madness – all the campers have arrived. Those first two weeks are crazy busy. The last three New Year’s [Eves], Dave and I have been at the container, frying chicken or grinding meat, and we can hear the countdown.
Holy Guacamole Isaac Drought and Cathi Strebinger run Holy Guacamole in Taranaki.
Isaac: We’d been living in Bali for six years. I was a teacher and my wife, Cathi, who is Austrian, was managing a boutique surf resort. When we came back to New Zealand, I realised how hard it was to be a fulltime classroom teacher here after being in international schools.
We wanted a role in life where you could enjoy summer all year round. It was important for Cathi to be able to get back to Austria every year, but we also wanted the winters off to go and do stuff we enjoy, like surfing. So we thought, how can you make enough money in a short amount of time to be able to do that?
We’d been to a place in Australia where everyone had said, ‘‘Oh, my god – they do the best fish burritos.’’ They were appalling – unseasoned and dull. I thought: ‘‘It can’t be that hard.’’ That led to the idea of, ‘‘We’ll get a caravan and set it up in the little beach suburb of O¯ a¯ kura where we live.’’
We’d both worked in hospitality in our younger years, but we didn’t have any formal training. Before we opened, we invited a group of friends over and made as much food as possible. We gave them little feedback forms.
I taught at the local school, so most of the kids had heard about my plans. I was like, make sure you come, bring your parents. The day we opened, there was a queue.
I do the cooking, but Cathi runs the caravan. She’s very good under pressure. I’m not. It gets really hot and busy with dozens of orders and coriander flying everywhere. We’ve learned if she’s in there, things are really consistent. I make sure I hold up my end of the bargain and put lots of love and care into the fillings.
It’s a very innocuous-looking piece of grass, but when it’s on, we can have over 100 people crammed in. So much so that people have to sit across the road.
Those busy nights – the ones that stress me out but my wife loves – those are the nights that we could have never imagined happening.
This little idea we had, it’s amazing just how quickly it’s become a staple of the area.
Patti’s & Cream Olive Tabor runs Patti’s & Cream in Dunedin.
Olive: I was the general manager of a big restaurant in the Octagon. It gave me loads of confidence in terms of ideas. I was like, if I was going to do my own business, what would it be? I went over to the [United] States with a group of friends. I was actually going over to look at burgers, but then I got sidetracked looking at icecream. I was like, we’ll do icecream and burgers.
I was trying to find a bricks and mortar [store] to do it, but I couldn’t get over the money involved. So I did a desperate search on Trade Me.
I found this icecream truck in Oamaru, a Bedford. I literally had never made icecream, but I thought, ‘‘It can’t be that hard.’’ I got a basic formula down, started with six flavours, and that was it.
We completely missed summer. We did the Ed Sheeran concert in town – that was March 2018. Then I was into the grim depths of Dunedin winter for my first time trading, wondering what I’d done.
I couldn’t work out where to put the truck to start with – I was all over the show. About seven months in, I realised I should go to St Clair on the weekends and park down by the beach. Then we got a nice wee article in the Otago Daily Times covering the business. The week after, there was a line of people.
I liked the idea the truck could be a tester. If it all went wrong, I could just sell it and not go bankrupt. But I was always like, if there was demand, it would be amazing to transition into a site as well.
A little site came up in Mornington before Covid. I signed the lease after Covid, got the fitout done, and got the scoop shop open in September.
Nothing’s got quieter. The truck’s still the same, and the shop’s really busy, which is awesome. The two just complement each other.
I still love the truck. You can put me in there blindfolded. I had no idea when I fitted that truck out how many hundreds and hundreds of hours I’d be in it. My back isn’t very thankful to it – I’m like 6 feet tall, so I’m at the roof of the truck.
But it’s so nice being there. We’re right on the edge of the Esplanade. You’re looking out the window and you’ve got the swell – you see all the surfers. You can look all the way down to St Kilda. It’s pretty good work views, eh.
Bao Now Ryan Murray runs Bao Now in Te A¯ nau.
Ryan: I left school at 16. My teacher caught me kitchenhanding when I was meant to be in school. They said: ‘‘You obviously like this better so you might as well go for it.’’ That was the start of my kitchen career. I did a stint in Australia and came back to Te A¯ nau and worked in another restaurant with a really good head chef who broadened my horizons.
Then I moved to Redcliff Cafe, a semi-fine-dining restaurant. I became head chef, and then a partner in the business. In 2014, I had my first child. Seeing the stress of the restaurant and the late nights on my family life, at the end of that summer I decided to sell my shares and do something new.
I made up my mind I was going to do a food truck. I’d been watching a YouTube channel called Munchies, which highlights chefs around the world. I’d watched an episode that had a guy called Eddie Huang who started a restaurant in New York called Baohaus.
I was really interested in these bao. I’d never had them before, but I started making them and testing them on my staff at the Redcliff.
My father found a horse float builder in Ashburton. He’d never done a food trailer before. Six months’ planning went into it – drawing out on my garage floor how the kitchen layout would be. I wanted everything right before we kicked the doors open.
I knew I wanted to do more of a Kiwiana twist on the bao. We had wild venison, confit hare – products I used to use in the restaurant that I could showcase in more of a street food style.
Every local came to try us out and gave us feedback. Ninety-nine per cent of it was positive. Anything that wasn’t was quickly taken on board. It was nice to get that immediate feedback. People were eating the food, then coming back and saying: ‘‘Hey, mate – that was amazing. We’re going to tell all our friends.’’
We could be doing upwards of a bao a minute when we’re really under the pump. Te A¯ nau does die down in winter, but we’ve got a great local following.
We’ve had customers from all over the world. The surprised ones are from Taiwan and China where bao is a big thing. They’re like, ‘‘It’s different to what we’re used to at home, but you’ve nailed it with the flavours.’’