Delicacies on wheels now roaming through streets

Jo-Anne Hui
May 15, 2012
The Age

Late-night greasy kebabs, soft-serve ice cream and meat pies were once the domain of mobile food vendors, but the recent food truck movement is giving budding entrepreneurs an opportunity to get creative and explore new culinary delicacies – all on wheels.

Simon Michelangeli is the founder of cafe Fugazza in Melbourne, which was inspired by traditional Italian sandwich shops. Customers can enjoy his delicious homemade focaccia from both the CBD-based cafe and his customised vintage food truck. This way, he is able to bring his food to people who wouldn’t normally visit his cafe and spread word of his business.

“It’s an old pizza van we found advertised in Cooma. We picked it up, brought it to Melbourne and gave it some love, adding hardwood benchtops, a new paint job in our colours and updating some of the equipment,” Michelangeli says.

“There’s a heritage to everything we do.”

One of the big business benefits of running a food truck is it offers entrepreneurs the freedom to be more experimental with their offerings, especially when it comes to launching a new concept or a new take on food, Michelangeli says.

“It’s a chance to put yourself out there a lot more and try different things and see what works. That flexibility is a real drawcard,” he says.

“It’s enabled us to test things out, without necessarily having to build a customer base in the store, where there are certain expectations of what we offer. Now, we can try new recipes and products with little risk.”

Some of the delicacies on offer by other food trucks include dumplings from Let’s Do Yum Cha, gourmet sausages from Le Sausage, vegan burritos from Burger Theory and chocolate spelt brownies from Agape Organic.

The customer experience for Michelangeli is also quite different compared to restaurants and cafes. Because the Fugazza van is usually stationed at festivals and events, the atmosphere is much more fun and relaxed, he says. Customers have more time to chat on a sunny Saturday afternoon at a music festival while their focaccia is being toasted, than on a Monday, when they’re rushing into the cafe.

“People’s expectations are different. When you walk into a nice cafe that’s fitted out well and has really nice crockery, you expect a certain level of service. We’re happy to provide that and we enjoy that,” he says.

“But it’s different when you have a fun retro van with a porchetta [traditional pork roast] on a spit on the front. People engage with you in a different way. It’s a great way to have fun with people, but to also build your brand.”

Councils around the country are slowly catching onto the trend, inspired by the food truck culture in Europe and the US and its well-known vendors, such as Roy Choi of LA’s Kogi BBQ.

A fleet of food trucks is roaming around Sydney as part of the City of Sydney’s Late Night Initiative, which kicked off last month.

According to Richard Roberts, the business development manager at the City of Sydney, the fleet offers people more diverse dining options.

One of the newest trucks to hit the streets is Eat Art Truck, founded by Mo Moubayed, Jeremy Yang and ex-Tetsuya chef Stuart McGill. Serving barbecue dishes with Korean and Japanese influences, it will act not only as a mobile eatery, but as a moving art exhibition. A canvas will be attached to the side of the truck and feature different artwork created by street artists each month, as it cruises around.

Finding the perfect truck was no easy feat for the Eat Art Truck team.

“The closest we could find was a caravan converted to a kitchen. We wanted to stick to the idea of a truck and having a full kitchen at the back, so we had to create something custom from scratch,” Moubayed says.

It was a steep learning curve, as the team needed to consider food safety regulations when it came to choosing the right truck, such as the height and width of the kitchen. They also had to come up with creative ways to maximise the use of space while considering where best to put the serving window, gas generator, cash register and exhaust fan.

Eat Art Truck will use both Facebook and Twitter to give followers daily updates about the truck’s whereabouts and Moubayed hopes social media will build relationships with customers.

“What we’re trying to do is create a culture around our food trucks. We’ve got good street food and street art, we want to create a culture where you can enjoy the art, the food and create that hype and buzz about it where people follow us and where we are on that day or night,” he says.

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