Food trucks savor rebirth in city

SPECIAL DELIVERY: Customers line up for food at Grant's Block in Providence on April 3. Food Truck Tuesdays have gained popularity in recent months, featuring offerings from Hewtin's Dogs Mobile, Fancheezical and Poco Loco Tacos. / PBN PHOTO/FRANK MULLIN
SPECIAL DELIVERY: Customers line up for food at Grant's Block in Providence on April 3. Food Truck Tuesdays have gained popularity in recent months, featuring offerings from Hewtin's Dogs Mobile, Fancheezical and Poco Loco Tacos. / PBN PHOTO/FRANK MULLIN

A few minutes before 11 a.m. on a recent Tuesday, bleary-eyed students and a few sun-starved office workers were already lurking around the soon-to-open Poco Loco Tacos, Hewtin’s Dogs Mobile and Fancheezical food trucks parked off Weybosset Street in downtown Providence.
When the trucks opened their windows, orders came immediately and grill aroma filled the crisp, morning air.
Like virtually every other American city, the brightly painted trucks and their devoted followers are now fixtures in Providence, where a decade ago such on-street dining variety was unheard of. Now it seems a new food truck rolls into town almost every month claiming a new niche in the culinary spectrum.
A culinary phenomenon with a strong presence on the West Coast, food trucks have proliferated across the country in recent years, riding the popularity of foodie culture and a wave of adventurous eating habits.
In October, Rhode Island will host its first-ever food-truck festival in Newport, featuring a handful of Providence regulars.
“There definitely seem to be more and more trucks coming out,” said Matthew Gennuso, the chef at Chez Pascal restaurant in Providence and the four-year-old Hewtin’s Dogs Mobile Food Truck.
Inexpensive work-break staples may have characterized the food trucks of the past, but the recent surge in street food has skewed toward the higher-end market, with many menus derived directly from fine-dining establishments. In Providence, local food-truck menus now feature homemade curry sausages, pulled-pork grilled-cheese sandwiches, chorizo tacos and pork kimchi sliders.
Providence’s food-truck community has so far avoided some of the pitfalls of a growing market, such as internal turf wars, hostility from restaurants or battles with the city over regulations. Truck operators describe a collegial atmosphere where one truck’s menu complements another.
But whether that can continue if the number of trucks keeps growing at its current rate is less clear.
“The way I look at it, people have to be careful where they are going and parking: one bad seed affects everyone,” Gennuso said, adding that he makes sure the Hewtin’s truck doesn’t park too close to an existing restaurant or in any location that could bring unwanted attention from the authorities. Although the number of food trucks operating in Providence fluctuates, city peddlers-permit records list 29 current license-holders serving some form of prepared food, excluding ice cream or frozen lemonade, from a truck. That’s more than double the 13 food trucks with permits in 2010.
According to Ron Sarni, president of the Boston Food Truck Alliance, there are approximately 40 food trucks in the Boston metro area, giving Providence a solid presence relative to the city’s size.
All food trucks must meet health and fire-code standards like any restaurant, but Providence does not place a limit on the number of peddler’s licenses or trucks that can be approved in a year.
As the number of food trucks has grown, so have the different types of trucks and models for operating them.
Some trucks provide a platform for young chefs to break into the culinary business, while others open as offshoots of successful restaurants. Some trucks target the workday lunch crowd while others are creatures of the night, catering to special events and after-hours revelers.
While Poco Loco targets the downtown lunch crowd on Tuesdays, the rest of the week it’s mostly a dinner or late-night truck and is now working a shift outside the Scurvy Dog bar on the West Side that ends at 2 a.m.
With demand for tacos strong, Masterson is now preparing to open a brick-and-mortar taco stand this year in the Edgewood section of Cranston that will serve as a prep kitchen for the truck while crossing the brand over into the traditional restaurant market.
On the flip side, Julians Onmibus represents a novel approach to expanding an established restaurant into the special-event and catering worlds.
A 1970s English double-decker outfitted with a first-floor kitchen and upper-level seating, the Omnibus works major events and last year was hired to provide the daily catering for two movie shoots.
On the difference between working the line in a restaurant and in a food truck, Julians Catering Chef Reddick Vaughan said the bus is much more interactive and tests a cook’s ability to produce food quickly and consistently amid distractions.
“The customers are right there while you are cooking – all the windows are open – so there is more direct interaction,” Vaughan said. “You have to be quick and accurate and personal. We are lucky that people know us at the restaurant and come to us. With the bus it is different because we have to go to the customers.” This summer the bus is looking to add a towable barbecue smoker and increase its serving capacity to more than 300 people to meet the demands of large crowds in Newport.
New England may be following places like California on food trucks now, but 140 years ago, Rhode Island was on the cutting edge of mobile food service with horse-drawn food carriages that would evolve into the country’s first diners.
“Providence is the birthplace of the diner and it started out as a food truck,” said Richard Gutman, curator of the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University. “Haven Brothers [which serves weekday lunch at Kennedy Plaza] is the sole survivor of the trucks that started the diner in the 1880s and is now competing with the new generation of food trucks. It’s come full circle.”
Anne-Marie Aigner, executive producer of Food Truck Festivals of New England, a tour in its second year that features the first-ever Newport Food Truck Festival, said relatively low overhead makes food trucks attractive to chefs.
“They are proliferating because of demand, but also because they are a great entry point for someone looking to get into the culinary world,” Aigner said.
While new chefs see an opportunity to get their feet in the door, established restaurateurs are taking advantage of food trucks for advertising as well as an additional revenue stream.
“I think that restaurants are seeing this more and more as a mobile marketing opportunity,” Aigner said. “Since a lot do catering, they already had the trucks ready to go.”
Despite the fact that they typically have lower overhead than a restaurant, food-truck operators of all kinds say anyone who thinks running a truck is an easy option is in for a shock.
“I would never want to do a food truck without having the restaurant to back it up,” said Gennuso at Chez Pascal, where the hot dog truck utilizes some of the leftovers from the restaurant’s signature pork creations. “I have seen the cost of some trucks rival the cost of restaurant space.”
Masterson at Poco Loco can attest.
“It is not as easy as people think it is,” Masterson said. “There is a little less overhead, but long hours and a lot of hard work.” •

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