Food Trucks Read online

  The Best Wurst

  FIND IT: 6th and San Jacinto Sts. or 6th and Red River Sts., Austin, Texas

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.thebestwurst.com

  If you can remember eating a brat at the Best Wurst, you weren’t doing it right. Since the cart served its first sausage in Austin’s downtown district in the early ’90s, it’s been the savior of drunkards from far and wide, offering up a little bit of sustenance to help wobbly revelers make it from the show they just saw back to their hotel or into a cab home. Live music venues have been Austin’s draw for decades, and in fact, that’s what brought Jon Notarthomas to town from Seattle almost twenty years ago. His band, Kaz Murphy & the Pony Mob, played a rowdy house show that sold Jon on Austin, and he quickly relocated, took over his friend’s coney stand Flaming Hots, and rebranded it the Best Wurst. That was “probably around 1995,” Jon says, dusting off his memory, and since then the little “New York-German-Texas-style” sausage cart has sold over 720,000 encased meats, all grilled on a tiny flattop on wheels next to deep brown, caramelized onions and steaming sauerkraut. Working at lightning speed to satisfy the line that stretches for blocks come last call, Jon and his pit crew have seen their fair share of pukers, flashers, spitters, screamers, kissers, and fighters (Jon even took a sucker punch from a Real World: Austin cast member who was promptly cuffed and hauled off by the cops).

  “There’s been hundreds of arrests here, mainly because there’s always some drunk guy who thinks he can cut in front of people and tries to push his way to the front of the line,” Jon says. “But we’re sort of like the doughnut shop of Sixth Street. The cops are always coming by to check in and they know we’re something of a community lookout. We don’t want any trouble, but when there’s a lot of drunken testosterone, sometimes trouble just happens.”

  Standing next to his 5 by 6-foot cart as he talks, Jon fields a generous mix of “Hey, Jon!” and “Woooooo, Best Wurst!” from passersby. A longtime staffer is prepping the three-foot grill for a busy weekend night, coaxing a mountain of sliced onions to caramelize and lining up locally made Smokey Denmark brats next to Italian links from Texas Sausage Company. The crew will sell around 600 sandwiches tonight, with two guys crowded into the cart working with assembly-line precision, another handling the cash, and Jon running “interference,” the position responsible for keeping some semblance of order when the bars let out and the line triples in size. “That’s when the craziness starts,” Jon says. “And it’s when we do more than half of our business, between 1:30 and 2:30 a.m. But it wasn’t always like this. To be honest, the beginning was brutal.”

  When Jon bought the cart in the mid-’90s from a fellow Syracuse native attempting to get a true coney and frank operation going, he decided he’d rather take advantage of the Texas Hill Country sausagemakers nearby and quickly switched up the menu. German-style brats, smoked pork Italians, an all-beef dog, and the jalapeño sausage synonymous with Texas became the signature roster, one that hasn’t changed to this day. “At the time there was only one guy doing a late-night cart downtown, and that was Johnny Johnson,” he recalls. “Johnny was set up in the witness protection program and he liked to brag about it. And he was extremely territorial. Early on, he kind of succeeded in pushing us out, but he pushed so hard he actually irritated cops down here and they were like, ‘We’d like to see you on Sixth Street, and don’t worry about Johnny Johnson.’ At one point, he finally disappeared, and as time went on the brats, the name, the signs … it all just caught on. But for a while there we were, borrowing money from friends just to buy product every week.”

  The signs he refers to are a nod to the snarky East Coast sensibilities Jon has long associated with hot dog carts: one barks, “If you can read this, you’re in the wrong place! Order from the other side!” and another warns, “Courtesy Counts! … and NO bribes, EVER!” Nearly every night the cart is open (Wednesday through Sunday to catch the bar crowd), at least one impatient fool feeling loose with his money can be found wagging a hundred dollar bill in the direction of the grill guy, begging to bypass the twenty-minute line for a sizzling-hot brat right now (Jon swears they’ve never accepted a single one). The urgency, the loyalty, and the lore surrounding the Best Wurst grows each year, compounded by appearances on shows like Insomniac with Dave Attell and visits from touring celebs, including Willie Nelson, David Cross, and Guy Fieri. “It’s kinda crazy that it went from ‘Oh my God, this is what my life’s become, a hot dog salesman’ to making perfect sense,” Jon says. “I’ve always loved the food, stood behind the quality, and it became freedom for me, being my own boss, using Old World ideals—in that we try to treat people fairly and we don’t take credit cards, but if people we know don’t have cash we’ll extend credit the old way. Still, I wouldn’t say the customer is always right, because if a drunk asshole is being a drunk asshole, we don’t have to take it. After all, we are the Best Wurst.”

  Marfa, Texas

  Food Shark

  FIND IT: Highland Ave. between Marfa Book Co. and the railroad tracks under the big pavilion, Marfa, Texas

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.foodsharkmarfa.com

  If Austin’s motto is “Keep Austin Weird,” then the dusty old town of Marfa, an eight-hour drive due west, should be “Keep Marfa Weirder.” In the late 1800s, Marfa was little more than a stop for trains to take on water before chugging along to something bigger and better, but when iconic minimalist artist Donald Judd took root there in the early ’70s, Marfa started its journey toward outsider artist retreat.

  Today, the town of just over two thousand is known for a few things, including a cluster of buildings and open-air spaces known as the Chinati Foundation, conceived by Judd to showcase permanent large-scale art installations. More of a draw to the kind of believers who tune in faithfully to George Noory’s Coast to Coast radio show are the Marfa Lights, an unexplained phenomenon of glowing spheres occasionally spotted in the sky near Route 67. Perhaps celestial beings are attracted to hip art communities, the kind that span age groups and where everyone somehow resembles either a young Bob Dylan or an old Beck. And nowhere in Marfa do the masses mingle as freely with the occasional gawking tourist or just-passing-through outlaw than at Food Shark, a 1974 Ford Brothers bread delivery truck, wrapped snug in hammered aluminum and given little more than a barn-red door and matching hubcaps for glam. Inside you’ll find Adam Bork, an Austin transplant with a mess of hair and Buddy Holly frames, possibly tinkering with one of his many eight-track players taking up space on the truck’s dashboard. His girlfriend, Krista Steinhauer, also an Austinite, carved herself the position of Food Shark chef, with little more than two years as a cheese and chocolate buyer for experience. Her crispy chickpea “Marfalafels” have earned plenty of rave reviews (they’re packed with fresh herbs and tucked into a flour tortilla with hummus, harissa, tahini, and the usual vegetables), but as popular as they are, Krista gets bored with the standards, gets to tinkering, and whips up daily specials the likes of spiced chicken banh mi, carne guisada (Tex-Mex meat stew) tacos, maple-glazed ham on rye, and shrimp salad with saffron mayo—a lineup as random as, well, Marfa.

  “In Marfa, your neighborhood is your whole town, so you’re much more connected,” Krista says. “We both grew up in Austin, and the thing that really bugged me is that it’s really smug, just so pleased with itself, relentlessly hip and just not very interesting. Here the landscape is extraordinary, and it’s a better quality of life. Many … people are drawn out by that and by the art, and some of those people stay.”

  Krista and Adam are now among them, counting themselves as locals since 2004, when they followed their boss, Liz Lambert, from Austin’s uber-hip, bungalow-style Hotel San Jose to Lambert’s newer project, which was reclaiming a classic mid-century motel in Marfa and reopening it as the ultra-stylish Thunderbird. Two years in, Krista and Adam got antsy and came across the Butter-Krust bread truck, plopped down $1,900, and found themselves in business. Folks in town were looking to turn an abandoned lot near the railroa
d tracks into a community hub, so they encouraged the couple to park their newly christened Food Shark there. In the six years since, the space has evolved into the site of a weekend farmers’ market, a vintage school bus has been added as a dining car for winter months, and chunky wooden Judd-designed picnic tables and benches were added to the lot.

  Food Shark is only open from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, but Krista and Adam still put in twelve-hour days, from prepping the specials from scratch daily to changing out the water on the truck and swapping out fuel tanks. Still, they find time to pursue their passions—her photography, his electronic media–based art—plus they put together quirky YouTube videos, including a Food Shark commercial of the truck tooling down a desert road, leading a pack of vintage cars in a Blue Angels–style V formation, set to an Asian-accented theme song just made for viral video. Only in Marfa.

  Krista’s Lamb Kebabs

  Serves 12

  4- to 5-pound boneless leg of lamb

  MARINADE

  2 tablespoons minced garlic

  1 tablespoon freshly ground cumin

  1 teaspoon paprika

  1 teaspoon ground coriander

  ½ teaspoon cayenne

  1 teaspoon dried mint

  ½ teaspoon ground ginger

  ½ teaspoon cinnamon

  Juice of 2 lemons

  2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses

  ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  1 teaspoon salt

  ¼ cup olive oil

  TOMATO-CUCUMBER SALSA

  2 tomatoes, diced

  1 cucumber, diced

  8 mint leaves, chopped

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1 tablespoon sumac

  2 bunches green onions

  12 Anaheim chiles

  Olive oil, for tossing

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  12 pieces flatbread or pita

  2 cups Greek yogurt or labne

  1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

  ½ teaspoon freshly ground cumin

  Trim the excess fat from the leg of lamb and cut into 1-inch cubes.

  To make the marinade, place all of the marinade ingredients in a bowl, whisking to combine, then pour over the lamb, massaging the marinade into the meat. Seal in a large resealable bag and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or up to 24 hours.

  To make the tomato-cucumber salsa, combine the tomatoes, cucumber, and mint in a bowl and gently stir together. Season with salt and pepper and set aside.

  Thread the lamb cubes onto metal or wooden skewers (if using wooden skewers, soak them in water for 20 minutes first). You should have 12 to 15 skewers, depending on their size.

  Toss the whole green onions and chiles with a bit of olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

  Prepare a grill for direct cooking over medium-high heat. Grill the lamb to medium-rare, turning as you grill to get a nice char. Grill the chiles and green onions until charred and blistered. Add the flatbread to the grill for just a minute, turning once, to warm through.

  In a bowl, stir together the yogurt, lemon juice, ½ teaspoon salt, and cumin. Sprinkle the sumac onto the tomato-cucumber salsa. Set out both as toppings and serve everything family-style.

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  The Que Crawl

  FIND IT: twitter.com/thepurpletruck

  You can thank young love for New Orleans’s best food truck. When Nathaniel Zimet was in his twenties, he cared about cooking, a girl, and little else. So after that girl stuck by him during culinary school in London and Sydney, he returned the favor by following her to New Orleans, where she was heading for college. But when the young chef got to Emeril’s city, he wasn’t that impressed with the cooking he was seeing: “My mentor, Shane Ingram from Four Square Restaurant in Durham, was rockin’, with a menu that changed 100 percent every month, and now I was in a place where the cuisine was very stagnant,” Nathaniel says. “I worked and staged at every place I’d ever read about that I thought would be worth anything—all of Emeril’s restaurants, Commander’s Palace, Stella, Upperline—but I always quit because I wasn’t learning anything.”

  Right around the time that Nathaniel was getting antsy, trying to figure out how to make his mark and where to make it, Hurricane Katrina hit. He and his girlfriend evacuated to North Carolina, but he returned a few weeks later to assess the damage. He didn’t expect their place to be in that bad of shape—it was a third-floor apartment in the Uptown neighborhood, an area that didn’t see the worst of it—but the building’s roof was destroyed, and so was their apartment underneath it. Nathaniel thought he was returning to New Orleans to collect what was left of his things before hightailing it back to North Carolina, but in the wake of the storm, he finally found some pride in his adopted city. “I really just came to clear everything out and figure out what was going on,” Nathaniel says. “But the storm just really renewed the community, and all of a sudden I felt a tie there.”

  As New Orleans started to get back on its feet, Nathaniel was still weighing his cooking options, not exactly excited about the opportunities around him. So he went to Florida for a few weeks to help out at his dad’s roofing company, and as the pale redhead was getting scorched in the summer sun, talking over his issues with his dad up on the roofs, he confessed that what he really wanted to do was open a Carolina barbecue joint in New Orleans and use that as a moneymaker to finance his fine dining dream. “My dad said, ‘Well, why not do it in a truck?’ and that was pretty much that. I was like, ‘Uh, yeah, why didn’t I think of that?’ ” With a bit of start-up help from Dad, Nathaniel ordered up a custom mobile kitchen from a manufacturing company, requesting a purple exterior, mainly because “all the white ones I had seen looked dingy to me, and, coming from fine dining, cleanliness is not an option, it’s mandatory.” The color of a grape juice stain, the Que Crawl was up and running almost one year to the day after Katrina rolled through town. The hefty box truck has a standard kitchen setup, but no barbecue joint, mobile or not, is complete without a smoker the pit master feels at one with. Nathaniel looked at plenty of options, but in the end he and a friend decided to Dr. Frankenstein it and turn a refrigerator into a giant smoker, pulling out all the rubber gaskets and installing a smoke box on one side to hold the fire and a chimney that sticks out through the top like a straw on a juice box. “It’s frickin’ awesome,” Nathaniel says, his Southern drawl deepening as he gets excited. “In about a year I’m gonna start entering barbecue competitions where they have all their high-tech smokers, and I’ll pull up and roll out this fridge on casters and just frickin’ destroy ’Em all.”

  He’s confident because his barbecue can back it up. It’s Low Country know-how with highbrow ingredients: his slow-smoked brisket is made from Wagyu beef, he knows the name of the pig farmer behind his Carolina-style pulled pork, his signature “Boudin Balls” combine Cajun dirty rice with smoked pork and duck liver, and his collard greens get cooked down overnight with a rich duck stock potlikker before they’re teamed up with thick fries made from cheesy grits.

  The Que Crawl’s reception was huge from its inception, with local and national press jumping all over this talented young chef on wheels and catering requests flying in daily. Soon Nathaniel was rolling his purple truck onto movie sets to cater for the day, and he was turning down jobs because he could only be in one place at one time. The success came at a price—the girl got tired of playing second fiddle to that refrigerator smoker, and the restaurant the truck was supposed to finance just couldn’t get going because there weren’t enough hours in the day. “At one point I said to my dad, ‘I’m gonna either sell everything and go run away somewhere or I’m gonna open a restaurant,’ and he said, ‘You gotta do what you gotta do, boy,’ and I knew what I had to do was open the restaurant.”

  And so the truck took a bit of a back seat for a while until Nathaniel was able to realize his dream. In 2008 he opened Boucherie, a forty-one-seat contemporar
y Southern spot in a charming Creole cottage. There are tablecloths, but they’re topped with brown butcher paper; there are scallops and duck on the menu, but they’re priced around $15. Nathaniel calls it “fine dining for the people.” It’s critically acclaimed, and it’s packed. And, luckily, since it has opened Nathaniel has built up a good support team, strong enough that he can turn some of his attention back to the truck that started it all. “I have a retirement plan in mind, a family plan, a three-pronged attack involving the restaurant, the truck, and the next project, which I’m hoping to get off the ground by 2012 at the latest.” And as for getting the girl back? “I’m an optimist,” Nathaniel says. “Anything’s possible.”

  Que Crawl’s Boudin Balls

  Makes about 40 meatballs

  2 pounds pork butt or shoulder

  Salt

  Spice rub (purchased or made from chili powder, paprika, cumin, coriander, mustard seed, garlic powder, onion powder, and black pepper, to taste)

  5 cloves garlic, 1 minced

  ½ sweet onion, such as Walla Walla or Vidalia

  1 stalk celery, coarsely chopped

  3 green bell peppers, coarsely chopped

  2 tablespoons unsalted butter

  2½ cups chicken stock

  1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

  2 bay leaves

  ½ bunch fresh thyme

  1 sprig fresh sage

  1 cup Louisiana popcorn rice or long-grain white rice