Eating Out
The food truck craze grows up.
By noon on a Friday, Off the Grid’s “5M” food-truck gathering on Fifth and Minna streets in downtown San Francisco resembles the scene outside an elementary school just after the morning bell rings.
Five food trucks line up, like a string of wooden toys, on a blocked-off street thronged with hungry and surprisingly patient office workers. The neighborhood skews tech, and so lines of men in rumpled chambray shirts and women in jeans and pinstripe shirts stretch out from each truck window. Thirtyyear-olds are on the downward slope of the age curve.
The quality of the food, from Fivetenburger, Kasa, Mustard & Mayo, Oui Chef and Lobsta Truck, is generally high. Yet the overall dining options tend to follow a standard pattern: Sliders. Fries. Burritos. Sandwiches. Walk back and forth, and you may have as much luck spotting a serving of vegetables as you will scoring the phone number of the person behind you in line.
So much has changed since the first Off the Grid event in 2010, including the fact that San Francisco has eased its notoriously stringent and expensive permitting rules for mobile food vendors. Off the Grid now holds 36 weekly events, with six more to come by the end of the year. Additional pods have set up in cities around the bay. Resistance from traditional restaurants has ebbed.
Street food is no longer a fad. It’s a fixture. Yet homogeneity has crept in. Some street food gatherings resemble fast-food courts on wheels.
The appeal of street food
What is the draw of street food? I asked Susan Feniger, chef-owner of Street in Los Angeles and one of food television’s “Two Hot Tamales.” For the past 30 years, Feniger’s multifaceted cooking has reflected her world travels, which are in full evidence in her cookbook “Street Food: Irresistibly Crispy, Creamy, Crunchy, Spicy, Sticky, Sweet Recipes.”
Feniger responds with anecdotes of hunting down pani puri stands in India or spying an apartment block in Shanghai where crowds gathered around a woman serving soy milk and sticky rice.
“Street food ends up being food that someone typically made in their home, and then they come out into the street and do it on a corner, making it over and over until it’s perfect,” she says.
More than the food, though, Feniger loves the impromptu encounters that happen when people gather around food stalls. That’s what also inspired Caleb Zigas, executive director of La Cocina, to found the annual San Francisco Street Food Festival, which takes place for the sixth year on Saturday.
“I think everybody enjoys the impermanence of street food,” says Zigas. “There’s something vibrant about being outside and eating surrounded by other people.”
In 2008, Zigas and his collaborators came up with the idea for the festival when they were searching for a way to showcase the participants in La Cocina’s kitchen incubator program.
“Not just one kind of entrepreneur makes San Francisco a great food city,” he says. So, at the festival, “it’s always been the case that we have women who have never cooked outside their homes cooking next to chefs with Michelin stars and food truck vendors.”
In 2008, there were few food trucks in the city. Most served a short menu of tacos, burritos and other Mexican American snacks.
Then, in 2009, the advent of Twitter sparked two critical events: In Los Angeles, a chef named Roy Choi started tweeting the location of his new Kogi Truck, in which he cooked then-unheard-of Korean tacos. Flocks of Angelenos began tracking him. Meanwhile, in recession-afflicted San Francisco, a group of renegade and mostly unemployed cooks set up makeshift carts in parks and on street corners, also using social media to advertise where they were and what they were serving.
Not long after, food writer John T. Edge began traveling around the country, researching his 2012 “Truck Food Cookbook.” Edge found three kinds of operators jumping into the business: “There were the downshifting chefs. There was the professional DIY guy or gal. There was a third sort, the trend surfer inspired by Kogi, who were seemingly aimless and latched on to street food,” Edge says. “As (the movement) evolved, another category emerged: the smart entrepreneur who saw a good business opportunity.”
One of these is Matt Cohen, the founder of Off the Grid. Four years ago, he brought new trucks together with La Cocina vendors in the parking lot at Fort Mason, escaping the city’s restrictions by setting up on federal property. Cohen, who had spent years in Japan, envisioned a night market like the ones at festivals there or outside train stations.
On June 25, 2010, close to a dozen food tents and trucks assembled. So did the crowds. An empire was born.
An evolving enterprise
. Cohen now has 80 full-time employees, and his company places more than 100 trucks at markets and corporate catering sites in five counties.
But, while Off the Grid has diversified, the food the trucks serve hasn’t. Most vendors still owe their inspiration to Kogi’s Asian-Mexican mashups or American fast food.
In part that’s due to city and state regulations. It’s not legal to fire up a couple of burners, one for broth and another for noodles, the way you can in Hanoi or Shanghai. To ensure food safety and sanitation, California requires mobile food vendors to rent a commissary — a commercial kitchen where they can prepare the food. The kind of equipment that foodtruck manufacturers can install is varied, as Del Popolo’s wood-fired pizza oven attests, but refrigeration space is tight, and the tiny kitchens are generally limited to a few griddles, burners and fryers.
The trucks that have thrived are the ones with a menu of dishes they can make and sell quickly. Trucks that can field 400 orders — and get hungry employees back to their desks in 30 minutes — largely prepare food in their commissary and assemble it to order. Sliders cook quickly. So do fries. Burritos move from griddle to window particularly fast.
What’s harder to store and cook properly on a truck? Salads and stir-fried vegetables. And, is that even what customers want?
Let’s talk nutrition
On a recent Wednesday night, I went to SoMa StrEat Food Park to meet Manuel Villacorta, a registered dietitian and the author of “Peruvian Power Foods,” to eat and, we hoped, eat well.
SoMa StrEat Food Park opened near the Highway 101 skyway in June 2012. Carlos Muela, inspired by Portland and Austin’s permanent street-food pods, took over a derelict lot near Costco and installed the electrical infrastructure for 12 trucks, as well as outdoor tables, shaded seating and a semipermanent bar. At lunch, the park is packed. After work, diners come by to watch sports or play trivia.
Villacorta and I circled the eight trucks open that evening, zooming in on the menus. The burgers and sandwiches that dominated our options either aim for pop-culture gluttony, like the Falkor (fried chicken sandwich with pepper jack, fried egg and bacon) or bistro sensibilities, smothered in Gorgonzola cheese sauce or aioli.
When we ordered a few relatively healthy meals — a Neapolitan-style pizza with pesto, roasted peppers and olives from Firetrail; a shrimp curry and a cabbage-heavy tea leaf salad from Lil Burma — another concern became apparent: portion size. If you want to eat
a 500-to-700 calorie lunch, Villacorta says, you should only consume half the plate, or even less.
Villacorta suggests treating the trucks as a treat, eating at them once a week. If you’re hitting the trucks for lunch, he adds, don’t plan on a restaurant dinner.
A better menu
Food obsessives like me may have hoped that San Francisco’s street-food scene could fill the longing we bring home from Oaxaca or Bangkok, where every corner, it seems, introduces a new delight. But as the trucks have proliferated, it appears that street food has filled a very different need: our craving for casual, outdoor dining. And the American love of fast food.
I’d argue that it is time for the truck operators to rethink their menus. More variety. Fewer gut bombs. Now that the trucks are a permanent part of the dining scene, they don’t act as stand-alone businesses so much as interlocking elements of a group.
At bigger Off the Grid events — the ones Cohen and company are most committed to expanding — it’s possible to encounter both 2008’s romantic vision of street food and the best of what 2014’s food-truck gatherings represent.
Take the Picnic in the Presidio. On a recent Sunday, the bay was filled with triangular white sails, and the Presidio’s plush Main Post Lawn was a Technicolor patchwork of blankets, tents and lawn chairs. Large fairy rings of young people sprouted everywhere, and more children darted about the site than at the parking lot of a Cirque du Soleil show.
A half-dozen trucks flanked the lawn, across from food stalls occupied by restaurants and independent vendors like Nopalito, Chotto and Sugarfoot Grits. Even though the crowds around the barbecue and pizza vendors were the largest, salads were numerous, and a small fruit stand was part of the mix.
To their credit, Cohen and his team have tapped into the city’s deep craving to lounge about outdoors in the company of our kind. What we’re eating at these events isn’t always as important as the fact that we’re gathering.