Food truck: Hella Vegan punks things up
Hella Vegan Eats wants to change how you think about vegan food. The creation of Sylvee and Tiff Esquivel, the food truck offers up bold and brash plant-based takes on American and Latin American cuisine. “In the ’80s and ’90s, it was healthy tofu everything. We’re trying to be the alternative to what it was in the past,” says co-owner Sylvee Esquivel. Forget alternative. With a rotating menu of dishes like the doughnut burger — a house-made beet patty sandwiched between vegan doughnuts and served with all the fixings — this is vegan food that’s downright punk. The most popular item is the potsticker burrito, which Esquivel says was created one morning when there wasn’t much in the kitchen besides potstickers and tortillas. Despite its humble origins, “It’s paid our rent many times over,” jokes Esquivel. The Esquivels started Hella Vegan Eats in 2009 shortly after moving to the Bay Area from Southern California. To make money, they began selling art and vegan tamales at Oakland Art Murmur and Forage SF’s Underground Market. In 2011, they joined La Cocina’s kitchen incubator program. Since then, business has taken off. In addition to appearances at local farmers’ markets, Hella Vegan tests out new recipes at weekly pop-ups at Oakland’s Analog, and now has a commercial kitchen space in West Oakland, which the Esquivels rent out to other small vegan businesses to help them grow. They’ve also partnered with Classic Cars West, Uptown Oakland’s classic car dealership/art gallery, to open a vegan foodfocused beer garden later this summer.
Hella Vegan Eats: Visit www.hellaveganeats.com for the truck’s schedule, or follow on Twitter @HellaVeganEats.