FOOD TRUCKS REV UP FOR BUSY SUMMER SEASON
Karla Spiller has worked in upscale restaurants and country clubs in Greenwich, Ridgefield and New York City, with an eye on having her own eatery one day.
When that day arrived this past week, her new establishment was in her hometown of Danbury — but with the mobility to be most anywhere she wants it to be.
This week, Spiller and husband Brian took over the beloved Tony’s Doghouse hotdog cart, which has been a Danbury fixture on Main Street for the past nine years.
Spiller promises the newly renamed Taste Buds of Danbury cart will have some of the familiar favorites from its Doghouse days, but will focus more on new creations from her culinary explorations.
Like other Connecticut cities, Danbury has recognized the mushrooming popularity of food trucks by creating a summer focal point for the industry, CityCenter Danbury’s “Downtown Chowdown” running midday Thursdays starting May 30 at Kennedy Square.
The new Taste Buds of Danbury will be among the participating vendors. The first week is slated to feature Trumbull’s DrewbaQ barbecue truck; Stamford’s M.O.C. “farm to table” truck (the initials stand for moo, oink and cluck); and Rice & Beans.
It is only one such Connecticut corral, the most prominent being New Haven’s daily Food Truck Paradise, sandwiched between Long Wharf Drive and the harbor, with Mexican food the dominant option among the roughly 20 trucks parked there on any given day.
New Haven licenses about 120 food trucks, ranging from the Food Truck Paradise lineup to ice-cream trucks or snack trucks that frequent construction sites.
Statewide, about 270 gourmet operators are listed on a website called CT Food Trucks, online at ctfoodtrucks.com, which also lists festivals where vendors congregate, including this weekend’s Milford Food Truck Festival and next week’s New Haven Food Truck Festival. The culmination is a New England Food Truck Festival on Labor Day weekend at Mohegan Sun casino. Any number more are drawn to the region’s summer festivals.
If there is no shortage of food trucks and carts on the streets of Connecticut’s cities, fewer are those available to purchase with permits and an existing customer base.
The Spillers had reached out to Tony’s Doghouse owner Tony Candullo three years ago to gauge any interest in a sale. Candullo only decided to step away from the business this year to deal with an ailment.
“We could buy our own truck and go anywhere,” Brian Spiller said. “But we wanted the location, we wanted the revenue.”
Kara Spiller said even with an existing business in place, it took three months to line up city and state approvals to convert Tony’s Doghouse into Taste Buds of Danbury.
She plans to have a rotating menu of both hot dogs and other lunch fare. Options from this past week included a steak sandwich with mushrooms, arugula and a demiglaze; a pulled barbecue chicken Sammie; and a turkey bacon cheddar melt with red onion and garlic.
Awaiting reciprocal licensing rules
A Hearst Connecticut Media examination of food truck licenses in Hartford, New Haven and Norwalk found little crossover between the cities. Cousins Maine Lobster and Kona Ice trucks operate in multiple locales, but under different franchise owners.
For operational, food and lifestyle considerations, food trucks stick close to their home turf, though many make the rounds of towns within an easy orbit, with the exception of old-school snack trucks that service construction sites throughout a larger region.
Under a new law pushed through last year by Republican lawmakers, the state Department of Public Health was required to develop by this past February a process to allow reciprocal licensing so that owners do not have to chase down permits in every town where they serve customers.
Food trucks would remain subject to inspections by local health boards. As of late May, the department had yet to post
any such licensing arrangement on its website.
In New York City, New Jersey and more than a dozen other regions nationally, food-truck operators have banded together in associations. They lobby regulators and policymakers to ease rules restricting their operations and overcome opposition from restaurant owners, some of whom have seen lunch seatings dwindle in part to a proliferation of gourmet food trucks.
‘Just a lot of hours’
If a less-risky proposition compared to the cost of opening a restaurant, getting a food truck operational
is an expensive endeavor.
Websites listing trucks for sale include eBay, where prices range generally from $30,000 to nearly $200,000, with school buses and Brinks armored trucks among the vehicles that have been converted to use as rolling gourmand stations.
Dozens of companies across the U.S. outfit food trucks and trailers, ranging from major truck manufacturers such as Chevrolet and Freightliner, to custom jobs by local entities such as Cart Concepts International and Creative Mobile Systems, both located in Manchester.
The crowdfunding website Kickstarter lists more than 1,400 efforts by entrepreneurs to raise capital from the masses for their food trucks, including a dozen in Connecticut. All
but one whiffed on their articulated fundraising target and failed to come into the money.
Back on Main Street in Danbury on Thursday morning, Tony Candullo mulled his own nine years in the business as he recuperates.
Asked if he would do it all again, he said he is not so sure, given the extraordinary demands of running a mobile food business.
But he was quick to add that Tony’s Doghouse had a great run, as he turns the keys over to his stand’s plum perch on Main Street.
“I loved every minute of it,” Candullo said. “It’s not hard work — it’s just a lot of hours.”