Trend: Food trucks

The Treats Truck

Manhattan and Brooklyn pedestrian snackers are accustomed to mobile eateries, but new gourmet food trucks take the street-food game to a higher level. Unlike dirty-water dog stands, which often stick to the same corner, these meals on wheels have the freedom of mobility, websites tracking their whereabouts, PR representation and specialized offerings such as restaurant-quality desserts, tacos and waffles. The increased sidewalk food choices are a culinary boon, but is the grubby charm of the ramshackle cart lost when flashy marketing is involved?

Wafels and Dinges

Midtown Lunch (midtownlunch.com) founder Zach Brooks cites Jiannetto’s Pizza Truck (917-287-7241) as the first well-known truck in the city, but notes that “things didn’t really pick up until Kim and the Treats Truck.” That’s Kim Ima, who first started feeding people street sweets from her Treats Truck (treatstruck.com) in June 2007. Others soon followed, including DessertTruck (desserttruck.com), Williamsburg’s Endless Summer Tacos (endlesssummertacos.com) and Belgian waffle purveyor Wafels and Dinges (wafelsanddinges.com), whose business includes a line of packaged waffles sold in higher-end grocery stores such as Fairway. Wafels and Dinges frontman Thomas DeGeest made the move as a way to jump-start the business. “In our first year we had a wave of press and TV coverage, and some of that novelty is now starting to wear off,” he says.

Rickshaw Dumplings

Photographs: Beth Levendis

Operating a food truck isn’t all fame and delicious fortune, something Rickshaw Dumplings (rickshawdumplings.com) owner Kenny Lao found out the hard way when he was involved in turf wars with a halal cart on his first night of weekend service. “There’s no real distinction in the way these trucks are viewed by the public,” says Brooks of the trucks and carts divide, “but from an internal standpoint, they see each other as competition.”

However, when asked, one West Village cart vendor said he didn’t feel threatened by the trucks’ increasing prominence: “I’ve been too busy working to notice.” The customers don’t seem to care either, as many of these trucks have lines that stretch halfway down the block.

These mobile meal spots have customers upgrading their street meat, but is their gourmet grub—and the crowds they bring—more trying nuisance than welcome nosh?