Food Trucks Read online

  Turn off the heat and add the cilantro. Season with salt to taste. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the mixture to a bowl and set aside.

  To prepare the wraps, beat the eggs with a fork in a small mixing bowl. Season with salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes.

  Heat a griddle or a nonstick pan (preferably the same size as the tortillas) over medium heat. Pour just enough of the beaten egg mixture into the pan to create a circle about the size of the tortilla, then immediately place a tortilla on top. Using a spatula, gently lift an edge of the tortilla; once you see that the egg has solidified on the underside and stuck to the tortilla, flip the tortilla to lightly brown the opposite side.

  Transfer the tortilla to a square of wax paper, spoon about 3 tablespoons of the chicken mixture on top, sprinkle on some of the cilantro, and add a generous squeeze of lime juice. Drizzle with a bit of chutney, then roll the kathi like a burrito in the wax paper. Repeat with the remaining tortillas. Serve.

  Sam’s Chowdermobile

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.samschowdermobile.com or twitter.com/chowdermobile

  When five thousand people are clamoring to get into your restaurant every week, you might start thinking about expanding. Sam’s Chowder House in Half Moon Bay, a coastal town about twenty-five miles south of San Francisco, has been packing them in since it opened in 2006, luring diners with New England classics and ocean views worthy of a tourism brochure. It’s tough to beat clam chowder and lobster rolls on a waterfront patio, especially with an ice-cold beer in hand and the West Coast breeze a-blowin’, but not everyone can make it to Half Moon Bay. For them, Sam’s went mobile.

  “It was the brainchild of myself and Paul Shenkman, who is proprietor of Sam’s Chowder House,” says Lewis Rossman, chef and partner at Sam’s. “The volume we were doing at Sam’s was just fascinating to us, so we were contemplating opening another restaurant, but we’re relatively location-specific. There’s nothing like eating seafood on the sea. So we started researching and we started hearing about this food truck movement. We found a truck with only 1,600 miles on it on Craigslist, and we asked ourselves, ‘What are the items we’re selling most of?’ So we basically set up the truck to be able to do those items.”

  That means that since it started rolling in June 2009, the massive red truck slings New England clam chowder, crispy calamari, lobster rolls, and fish-and-chips—the Chowder House’s greatest hits. Lewis also came up with a Baja-style fish taco exclusive to the truck, beer-battered pollock tucked into a corn tortilla along with mango relish, shredded cabbage, and a chipotle crème fraîche. Still, the best seller remains the chowder, clam broth thickened with cream and studded with chunky potatoes, littleneck clams, smoked bacon, and thyme. It’s simple and it’s stellar, just like the lobster roll, nothing more than bright red hunks of lobster basted in warm butter on toasted brioche.

  The food doesn’t need the ocean-side setting to taste good, which is key considering that the Chowdermobile spends most of its time in decidedly unglamorous business parks in suburbs like Brisbane and Burlingame or San Jose. That seems to be where the truck does steady business, with lines forming at lunchtime of nine-to-fivers sick of brown-bagging it. The truck also gets plenty of requests for private events, turning birthdays and weddings into clambakes and chowder fests. They’ve even turned the San Francisco 49ers parking lot into a New England–style tailgating party—Patriots fans not allowed.

  Sam’s New England Clam Chowder

  Serves 6

  2 ounces uncooked smoked bacon, chopped

  2 tablespoons unsalted butter

  ½ onion, finely diced

  ½ stalk celery, finely diced

  2 cloves garlic, chopped

  1 tablespoon fresh thyme

  1 bay leaf

  2 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes, diced

  1 (46-ounce) can clam juice, at room temperature

  2 pounds shucked littleneck clams

  1½ cups heavy cream

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  In a large stockpot over medium heat, sauté the bacon in the butter, cooking until the bacon is browned. Add the onion, celery, garlic, and herbs to the pot and sauté until they become soft and moist but haven’t yet caramelized, about 4 to 5 minutes. Add the potatoes and clam juice. Cook until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes.

  Turn off the heat and stir in the clams and cream. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve.

  Spencer on the Go

  FIND IT: Folsom St. between 7th and Langton Sts., San Francisco, California

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.spenceronthego.com or twitter.com/chezspencergo

  Escargot drenched in garlic butter, wrapped in puff pastry, and stabbed with a skewer seems like the type of thing you’d find being passed around on silver trays at a party where more people spoke French than didn’t and owning a home on the Riviera was more common than owning all of your own teeth. But thanks to a long-running joke that finally became reality, you’ll actually find these little lollipop-like escargot puffs being sold out of a gleaming silver truck in San Francisco’s South of Market District, several blocks away from the Mission. “I was joking with a guy who has a taco truck and I said, ‘I’m going to compete with you and sell lobster right next to you,’ ” says Laurent Katgely, chef-owner of the truck Spencer on the Go. “We joked about it for a while, but the more we did and the more I talked to friends, the more they said it was a good idea. So I just stopped joking about it and did it.”

  Laurent already had a successful bistro, Chez Spencer, that had been plugging along in the Mission since 2002, but he’s never really been one to sit still. He was born in Grenoble, known as the capital of the French Alps, but his dad had a habit for picking up odd jobs, and picking up to move toward them. Laurent, his brother, and his sister all dropped out of school in their early teens, and Laurent ended up in a program for “bad kids,” a sort of vocational school where grammar and math were pretty much incidental and the real focus was on practical work experience as a hairdresser, mechanic, or baker. Laurent could handle that, but when he landed in the restaurant program, he was more impressed with cute hostesses and regular paychecks than he was by the classical French cooking techniques he was learning.

  Still, whether or not he was psyched about cooking, he was good at it; it came naturally to him. After his required year in the military, he headed back to the kitchen, this time in Paris working his way through the ranks at a Michelin-starred restaurant. He left to follow an Irish girl to Dublin, where he lasted a year before heading to Venezuela. He stayed there about a year before moving on to Guatemala, where it was two years before he took off again and eventually wound up in Los Angeles. At every stop along the way he knew he could make money cooking, and he stuck to the kitchen.

  “I was sous chef most of the places I worked,” Laurent says. “But then I got the head chef offer for Pastis in L.A., and I got more confident.” He took the job, but he soon parlayed that confidence into a move to San Francisco, where he eventually opened his own restaurant, Chez Spencer, named for his then two-year-old son. Spencer on the Go is really just an extension of the bistro, selling French classics that Laurent road tested at his sit-down restaurant first. Like those escargot puffs, the fat slabs of foie gras torchon you’ll get from the truck are the same as you’d be served at Chez Spencer, sprinkled with gray sea salt and served on a slice of baguette toast. Only at the truck, it’s handed over in a paper boat and you can munch on it from a little café table while watching a classic or foreign flick projected onto a white sheet tacked up to the fence. For the most part, the menu is doable without the fork and knife required at Chez Spencer, but that’s been something of a learning process. “In the beginning, spring 2009, I was doing everything to order. The first night was a complete disaster,” Laurent says. “We had three hundred people here in line. It was insane. I was yelling at people … it was not fun. I wanted to take off. Just leave. So we made some adjustments. Street food has to be fast. Me, I
was seasoning to order, sautéing skate cheeks to order. I decided we can’t do that in a truck on a tiny little range.”

  But what they can do is make use of the steam table for warming halibut soup with saffron aioli and use the convection oven to bake up potato gratin and warm chocolate pudding. For the most popular menu item, the lamb cheeks, the meat is seasoned with herbes de Provence and then braised for two hours with red wine, port, orange juice, and lamb stock until it could basically fall apart if you stare at it too hard. The hunks of tender meat get dressed with a mustard vinaigrette and butter lettuce before being piled onto a baguette-like roll Laurent gets from “a French guy, a typical French baker with a big beard that’s all dusted white when you see him. He sleeps in his flour. No, really. I saw him a couple times and he’s asleep in his flour bag. He’s great. He just does what he loves.”

  Braised Lamb Cheeks Sandwich

  Serves 4

  8 lamb cheeks

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1 cup herbes de Provence

  ¼ cup olive oil

  2 cups lamb stock

  4 crusty sandwich rolls (ideally baguette)

  Dijon mustard, for serving

  Season the lamb with salt and pepper and rub each cheek with the herbes de Provence.

  Heat the olive oil over medium-high heat in a large, deep sauté pan or a stockpot. Add the lamb cheeks, in batches if necessary to avoid crowding them, and sear, turning halfway through to brown both sides. Once the edges are golden brown, add the lamb stock, turn the heat to low, and simmer about 90 minutes, until meltingly tender.

  Once the meat is cool enough to handle, shred it into small pieces and set it aside.

  When ready to serve, slice the rolls in half and warm them slightly in a warm oven. Spread Dijon mustard to taste on each roll and pile on the warmed shredded lamb cheek.

  RoliRoti

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.roliroti.com

  Tourists hit the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf. Chowhounds make a beeline for the Ferry Building Marketplace, where the goods at Cowgirl Creamery and Boccalone Salumeria turn otherwise normal human beings into lions at a feeding frenzy and bleary-eyed locals stand forty deep for a hit of Blue Bottle’s coffee. But no line is longer than the Saturday lunch queue at RoliRoti.

  “I go as fast as I can go, but still people are sometimes in line for an hour,” says Thomas Odermatt, grinning as he furiously slices crackly skinned porchetta, piles the glistening pork onto a slice of ciabatta, slathers onion marmalade on another, and smashes a handful of peppercress into the middle before closing up the sandwich. “I can only make about 250 of these each Saturday, though, so when I run out I feel bad, but I just can’t do more.”

  The demand trumps the supply every time, and Thomas is fine with that. The porchetta was an afterthought anyway. RoliRoti trucks (there are three) were built to cook chicken. A lot of chicken. About 120 all-natural California chickens rotate on massive skewers that run almost the entire length of the trucks. Propane-fueled heat crisps the skin and coaxes out juices that fall to the griddle below, coating awaiting fingerling potatoes with fatty goodness perfumed with rosemary, thyme, and oregano. It’s a rotisserie grill on wheels and business is booming, good enough that Thomas dispatches his fleet to nearly a dozen farmers’ markets throughout the Bay Area. But RoliRoti’s success wasn’t born out of the blue: it was inherited.

  Otto Odermatt was one of thirteen kids, raised in a poor mountain town in the Swiss Alps. Otto really wanted to be a baker, but there was no apprenticeship available. There was, however, a slot at the butcher shop, and, as Thomas says, “You don’t learn a second trade. You learn one trade and become the best of the best.”

  So Otto did. Eventually he was deemed a Metzgermeister, or master butcher, and his shop in the small town of Hombrechtikon has survived more than five decades on his dedication to the craft. Still, Thomas wasn’t interested in hacking meat. He was drawn to farming, and after high school pursued an organic agriculture degree in Switzerland, which then took him to California, where he considered importing olive oil. “But then something happened,” Thomas says. “I felt that olive oil wasn’t going to work, and I knew that a mobile concept was the way to go. Growing up in the butcher shop and growing up farming, I put one and one together and decided to make simple food with top-notch ingredients from local farms.”

  The insistence on high-quality meat came from his father, but it was his mother Maria who spawned the idea that would become the business’s namesake. “We have a rotisserie grill at the butcher shop, and my mother cooked with it,” Thomas says, “but only on Saturdays.” Chickens and potatoes, both prepared to Maria’s specifications, were the only offerings when RoliRoti launched in 2002. Around 2005, those porchetta sandwiches were added to the menu. “My father came to San Francisco for my wedding and said, ‘I cannot bring anything from Switzerland, but I’ll make porchetta when I arrive,’ ” Thomas recalls. “It was so good I realized I must make this at RoliRoti, but it took me a year to perfect it.”

  Thomas says the key is to use a whole pork loin with the skin on and score the skin so that the fat “pops” while it cooks, essentially basting the meat. A rotisserie is ideal, but a regular oven will do in a pinch. Also, it probably helps to have an eighty-eight-year-old master butcher on speed dial should you have any questions, but his tried-and-true recipe is a pretty good stand-in.

  Otto Odermatt’s Porchetta

  Serves 10 to 12

  For the porchetta at the RoliRoti truck, Thomas uses a deboned pork middle, cutting out about half of the belly fat and leaving about ½ inch of fat on the loin. If you’re unable to find pork middle (a special request item, for sure), he suggests using a skin-on pork belly and wrapping the loin inside of it. Thomas also uses his signature rotisserie. Using a home version would be ideal, but this recipe has been adjusted so that it can be made in a standard oven.

  2 tablespoons finely chopped lemon zest

  2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

  2 tablespoons minced garlic

  2 tablespoons pinot grigio or other dry white wine

  1½ tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary

  1½ tablespoons chopped fresh sage

  1 tablespoon chopped fresh marjoram

  2 tablespoons fennel seeds, toasted and lightly crushed

  4 bay leaves, toasted and ground

  3 tablespoons kosher salt

  2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper

  3- to 4-pound pork belly

  2-pound pork loin

  Thomas’s Balsamic Onion Marmalade (recipe follows), for serving

  Preheat the oven to 425°F.

  In a small bowl, combine the lemon zest, 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice, the garlic, pinot grigio, all of the herbs, 2 tablespoons of the salt, and the pepper to make a marinade.

  Lay the pork belly out on a clean surface, skin side down, and rub the marinade all over the meat. Place the loin at one edge of the belly, coat it thoroughly with the marinade as well, then roll to completely encase the loin with the belly. Tie with butcher’s twine, using one loop on each end and one in the middle so that it keeps its shape. Score the skin in a crosshatch pattern, being careful to pierce the meat only about ⅛ inch deep so that the loin won’t dry out.

  Make a paste out of the remaining 1 tablespoon lemon juice and 1 tablespoon salt. Rub the mixture on the outside of the porchetta and place it on a rack in a roasting pan. Transfer to the oven.

  Roast the porchetta, watching it carefully, just until the skin takes on some color and starts to crisp, about 10 minutes. At that point turn the oven down to 300°F and cook, checking the internal temperature every 20 minutes, until the center reaches 135°F, about 2 hours. Remove the porchetta from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes before slicing and serving. Top with the Balsamic Onion Marmalade

  Thomas’s Balsamic Onion Marmalade

  Makes about 2 cups

  1 tablespoon vegetable or canola oil


  4 yellow onions, thinly sliced

  ½ teaspoon ground cloves

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  3 tablespoons brown sugar

  Zest from ½ orange

  ⅔ cup balsamic vinegar

  Heat the oil over medium heat in a large skillet. Add the onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and caramelized, about 20 minutes. Add the cloves, salt, and pepper, stirring to coat.

  Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the brown sugar and orange zest. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions start to shrivel. Add the vinegar, reduce the heat to low, and cook for 1½ hours, stirring occasionally. Adjust the seasoning to taste and serve warm. Leftovers can be stored in the refrigerator, tightly sealed, for about a week.

  Tanguito

  FIND IT: 2850 Jones St., San Francisco, California

  At Fisherman’s Wharf, you can fulfill your wildest dreams of perusing the racks of “I Escaped from Alcatraz” T’s at Crazy Shirts, check out a cable car made of matchsticks at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum, and settle in for a plate of fried shrimp at Bubba Gump. And if there’s still time, don’t forget the wax museum, Hooters, and Hard Rock Café, oh my! Okay, so it’s no news flash that the wharf is a giant tourist trap, but that only means that finding a reason to go there is that much more important. Somewhat hidden (although in plain sight from the F Line streetcar station on Jones Street) amid this massive display of chain consumerism is a slightly ramshackle truck called Tanguito. There’s a handwritten sign advertising Argentinean specialties, photos of those dishes that look like they were taken with a disposable camera, a few picnic tables under an awning that extends from the truck’s windshield, and a brightly painted mural on the back of the truck that you can really only see if you wedge yourself between Tanguito and the six-foot fence that it’s parked in front of. None of that is important. What is important are the flaky empanadas, the chimichurri-drenched sausage choripan sandwich, the massive grilled beef ribs, and the juicy Argentinean beef burger.