Vibrant spices and bold flavors define the Indian street food at two-month-old Juhu Beach Club, by Chef Preeti Mistry, who cooked at Google and was a Top Chefcontestant. Juhu was a pop-up in San Francisco before settling into a brick-and-mortar space across the bay in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. Superfan hungree recommends the crunchy, crumbly, crispy paneer balls and praises the meticulous spice combinations.

For pavs, slider-sized sandwiches that are a cornerstone of the menu, Mistry pairs rolls from Oakland’s Starter Bakery with fillings like veggie Sloppy Joe (for the Sloppy Lil’P) and fried potato puff, pickled red onions, and ghost pepper in the Vada Pav (pictured). The tart cilantro lemonade is a winner if you’re hankering for a strong herbal flavor. Note that Mistry’s food is spicy but not atomic: Chileheads should ask for a side of hot sauce.

A tip from jaiko: The menu on the restaurant website is the dinner version; the lunch menu is more limited and doesn’t include starters, so plan an evening visit for a comprehensive taste.

Juhu Beach Club [East Bay]
5179 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland
510-652-7350

http://www.chow.com/food-news/137883/killer-indian-street-food-at-oaklands-juhu-beach-club/

Credit Bites Off Broadway

Bites Off Broadway, the popular Friday night gathering of food trucks around the corner from Oakland Technical High School, will reopen for the 2013 season on May 10, according to the Bites Off Broadway Facebook page.

It will continue every Friday through Oct. 11 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. in front of Studio One, 365 – 45th St., Oakland (just west of Broadway).

Expect a half dozen mobile food vendors, chosen from a rotating group of more than 15food trucks, offering an eclectic array of edibles. The food vendor lineup is expected to be posted mid-week on the Bites off Broadway Facebook page as it was last year.

Seating is on the Oakland Tech lawn, so bring lawn chairs and blankets.

http://rockridge.patch.com/articles/bites-off-broadway-returns-may-10

LORI EANES
The Ramen Shop makes its noodles and broth from scratch, and spends about $500 a day on pork alone.

Over the past few years, chefs of pedigree have been opening trendy East Bay restaurants that specialize in high-quality street food: Hawker Fare, Ramen Shop, and Juhu Beach Club are three of the newest and most popular places that have taken street food off the streets and given it a quality upgrade, in the form of organic produce and meat, skilled preparation, refined presentation, etc. The unfortunate reality of our food system, however, is that quality costs more, and some consumers are having a hard time swallowing higher prices for perceived “cheap food.”

In a region where many of us are self-proclaimed foodies and every foodie is a self-crowned critic, it can be hard to pick apart the tangle of perceptions, prejudices, and fetishizations that come with each plate of “ethnic food.” Negative online reviews of the three restaurants above — although always to be taken with a grain of salt, of course — tend to take umbrage with two main themes: authenticity and price. In almost equal proportion to the folks who have jumped on the sustainable bandwagon are those who are outraged by the idea of spending $15 on a bowl of ramen or curry shrimp.

Chef Preeti Mistry got a swift introduction to the backlash against high-end street-food when she opened Juhu Beach Club in Temescal on March 1. Mistry, who grew up in the United States but whose family hails from Mumbai, tapped her childhood cravings to create a concise menu that specializes in Indian street food.

The focal point of the menu is the pav, a slider-sized roll filled with vegetables, fried potatoes, chicken, or braised short rib. The pav, which could be interpreted as India’s answer to the hamburger, emerged on the streets of Mumbai over the last forty years and has been gaining popularity since. At Juhu Beach Club, each pav is $5, or $13 for any three. Mistry said some people started complaining about the prices before they had eaten at her restaurant, but the former Top Chef contestant pulls no punches about why she thinks people are so angry about the cost of her food: “I think it’s racism, plain and simple,” she said. “I mean, you can create a $16 burger using, whatever, locally grass-fed beef and your own grind, and people will pay that amount and have no problem with it. But if you try to do something with a higher level of technique or level of ingredients [in Indian food], all of a sudden it’s not authentic.”

Mistry is not alone in her frustration. The Chez Panisse alums who recently opened Ramen Shop in Rockridge — Sam White, Jerry Jaksich, and Rayneil De Guzman — have received similar feedback about their restaurant, which makes Japanese ramen from scratch. “It’s kinda sad because we do lose a lot of clientele before they even come in the door,” said Jaksich.

What people don’t understand is what it takes for street food to go high-end. On a Wednesday afternoon, about ten cooks were in the Ramen Shop kitchen, chopping, peeling, and stirring. The noodles are handmade. The broth is cooked from scratch. The cooks worked furiously on a tight one-page menu because prep and production are extensive and time-consuming. The meat is high-quality, so much so that the Ramen Shop spends about $500 a day on pork alone. All the employees are paid a living wage, and full-time employees get health care. And yet, people still make assumptions about the quality of the food.

“It’s funny, there’s a lot of people in the neighborhood that are like, ‘Do you use MSG?’ and it’s like, ‘No! No,’” said White. “People just kind of assume, ’cause it’s the type of food …. I think ramen and MSG and flavor packets are overlapping in people’s heads.”

Despite the consumer confusion over value and cost, more trained chefs with a fine-dining background are using their talents to reinterpret street food. James Syhabout is owner and chef of Commis, the only Michelin-starred restaurant in Oakland. In 2011, he opened Hawker Fare, a casual restaurant that serves Southeast Asian street food— primarily rice bowls and small plates. The menu reflects Syhabout’s Thai roots, and stays true to his high standards.

“I created Hawker Fare not because it’s a trend but because it just makes sense,” said Syhabout. “Honestly, we’re catering to ourselves and we’re just sharing it. I thought, I’d love to go to a place like this, but it never existed, so we created our own space and we’ve set our own expectations. I think that’s the beauty of it.”

Hawker Fare has a young, funky style. Framed posters and graffiti artwork stretch across the back wall, and the communal tables are packed at lunch and dinner. The restaurant is certainly not a hole-in-the-wall. Neither is Juhu Beach Club, which is decorated with old black-and-white-photographs of Indian cricket games and beautiful women in saris, and colorful wallpaper of exotic flowers and monkeys in fezzes.

The youthfulness and currentness of the new street-food restaurants is something new. These are not mom-and-pop diners, nor are they fine-dining restaurants. These are the kids’ restaurants, and the kids are reinventing the old models.

“What we’re doing is something that hasn’t been done before, therefore it’s going to take a lot of changing of people’s minds and mental outlooks on what they think of when they think of Indian food,” Mistry said. “Right now Indian food exists in basically two boxes: there’s cheap Indian food … and then there’s your high-end places like Amber India or Dosa that have tablecloths and a full bar and fancy waiters and all of that sort of pomp and circumstance of a fine-dining restaurant. And we’re sort of in this in-between place …. It’s a fun casual place and, quite honestly, our price point reflects that.”

According to Mistry, a lot of people have a fetishized concept of an “authentic greasy-spoon divey Indian place or Thai place” that is making “real” food. She said that, in reality, the food at these restaurants may not be that authentic, because the owners are often focused on the bottom line and cut corners to get by. Mistry mentioned an Indian restaurant she went to recently that had replaced the cilantro with spinach in a traditional cilantro chutney — perhaps to save money, or perhaps to cater to less adventurous taste buds. “How many of those owners actually eat the food that is coming out of their restaurants?” she questioned.

As a chef with ten years of professional experience in the kitchen — most recently as the executive chef at Google’s high-volume Bon Appetit Management Company — Mistry says that she is now cooking the food that inspires her. A few years ago she went to Mumbai with her family, “ate everything in sight,” and brought those flavors and textures back with her. She started cooking the food she loves with quality California ingredients at a pop-up in the Mission. The opening of Juhu Beach Club was the culmination of a personal goal, and for her, this type of food is the most authentic.

“James [Syhabout] is a great example as well, because it’s like, ‘so basically what you’re saying is that my experience is not authentic,’” said Mistry. “So someone who was born in another country but raised here or born in the United States but whose family is from another country … me expressing myfood, which is influenced by all of these things, is not an authentic experience, so I’m damned if I do. If I cook California cuisine, it’s like, ‘Ugh, what is that Indian girl doing cooking French food?’ or whatever’ … It’s actually really fucked up … It’s like negating the existence of people and their experience and saying that it’s not authentic, when it’s so authentic, because it’s not trying to be something it’s not.”

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/street-food-grows-up/Content?oid=3502112

The Liba Falafel food truck: plans are afoot to open a shop serving its signature dishes. Photo: Liba Falafel

Anyone who has had even a bite of a Fiveten Burger knows that Roland Robles, the proprietor and chef, knows more than a thing or two about slinging beef. His cheeseburgers are cooked to order and made with a signature blend of meat ground daily. There are at least three cheese options for melting over the hot patty (usually more), as well as a well-balanced array of toppings stacked together on a North Beach Baking Company bun. An overflowing basket of truffle tater tots sets the meal over-the-top — in a hot, crispy, and salty good way. But this is no fancy restaurant burger. Instead, Robles’ burgers are handed to customers through the window of a food truck.

Robles is banking on his many fans sticking with his burgers when he opens his first brick-and-mortar burger joint later this year. While launch dates and location are still up in the air, the overarching plan is not. “The vibe we intend is a comfortable spot where you can just drop in and have some grub you’ll dig and a cold beverage of your preference. … Pretty much everybody likes a cold beer and a made to order burger,” he said.

And Robles isn’t the only food truck proprietor who’s going the full-blown restaurant route. At least two others — Liba Falafel and Jon’s Street Eats — are working on opening eateries with walls some time this year.

Fiveten Burger’s Roland Robles says he’s learned how to work in a tight space,”a good lesson to learn.” Photo: Fiveten Burger

Gail Lillian has made a name for herself for the past three years doling out perfectly fried balls of chickpea batter topped with a cornucopia of vibrant salads from her lime green Liba Falafel truck. On a recent visit, toppings such as raw beets with orange zest, braised eggplant, and red cabbage with black sesame were on offer along with the more expected hummus, feta, and harissa.

“My general guide with the falafel bar is to stay with Mediterranean flavors, but sort of push what’s unconventional at the same time,” said Lillian who was inspired to launch the business after a visit to Amsterdam. “So we have things like rosemary peanuts on the bar… I’ve never seen that served as a condiment on a falafel bar, but the rosemary is a Mediterranean herb and it just complements the falafel really well. We use the adage of what grows together, goes together.”

Lillian was a regular at the north Berkeley Off The Grid (before it closed), and other street food markets, but now she plans to open a storefront shop and she hopes it will draw on a casual, street-food atmosphere: “I want to maintain the feeling of a meal you can eat sitting on the sidewalk,” she said. She also expects that the shop will still “mainly be a falafel bar,” but that she would “certainly expand around that menu.”

Jon Kosorek, owner of the former Jon’s Street Eats, hopes to open a brick and mortar restaurant soon

Jon’s Street Eats was one of the first new-school food trucks in the East Bay. After a couple years, owner Jon Kosorek moved on to an executive chef position in Napa in 2011. He now has plans to open a restaurant called Marrow in the former Looney’s BBQ spot on 19th St. in downtown Oakland. The concept, according to media reports, is a “meat-centric place” with Kosorek ordering one animal at a time and using the different parts through his entire menus.

Robles and Lillian both plan for their restaurants to be casual affairs, and both chefs say they are aware of the impending challenges and hope their experience working as mobile vendors will be an asset. “In any kind of business, but especially in the food business, there are constant problems. Things are breaking, things are going wrong, employees aren’t showing up. There are all kinds of things that go wrong. And the set of things that go wrong [on a food truck] are so uncharted that I really feel like I’m ready for anything now,” said Lillian.

And while Robles notes that he runs his truck just like any other restaurant, he’s “learned how to work in a really tight space! It’s been an exercise in that regard but a good lesson to learn.”

It is perhaps not surprising that these two highly successful trucks have taken steps to branch out. However, when they first opened a few years ago, the thought of a truck earning enough money to expand was far-fetched. When Liba opened, it was one of only four food trucks in the Bay Area. “It was really new. It was new for the customers, it was new for the legislators, it was new in every city I tried to operate,” she said. When Robles began Fiveten Burger, there were a few more trucks, but few served the kind of specialized food that pops up on everything from Instagram to food blogs.

A Liba Falafel offering: even when she opens a store, Gail Lillian wants it to have a street food atmosphere. Photo: Liba Falafel

What changed? Food market Off the Grid arrived and began providing a space for groups of trucks to come together as a community event. Bay Area food trucks were able to flourish. “It’s just exploding. … Off the Grid has been an important partner in this industry because they’ve been so successful at making food from trucks be understood and exciting and to feel safe for people,” said Lillian.

Robles agrees. “My business would probably not be half as popular as it is if not for our involvement with OTG and the continuous exposure we receive there. We came in on the tip of the wave of trucks in the bay and have watched the community grow by leaps and bounds since. There are trucks that specialize in just about every genre of food, every cuisine and practically every item. I haven’t seen a bi bim bap truck yet, but I bet there’s one getting thought about somewhere,” he said.

Fans outside of the East Bay shouldn’t worry about losing their burger or falafel fix, though. Both Lillian and Robles plan on keeping their trucks operating for the long hall. They’ve grown fond of their fans in each pocket of the bay. And, as Lillian says, after 3 1/2 years in the food truck business, “I’m finally figuring it out.”

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2013/03/04/food-trucks-swap-wheels-for-bricks-and-mortar/

The crab gumbo was delicious.

To the abundance of feathers in Oakland’s culinary cap, let’s add one more: our very own Top Chef alum, Preeti Mistry, who, as previously reported, has found a brick-and-mortar home for her popular Indian street-food pop-up, Juhu Beach Club, in Temescal, at 5179 Telegraph Avenue.

Mistry said she’d been full-speed-ahead on plans to open in San Francisco’s Mission district when she and her then-business partner parted ways. At that point, she’d been living in Oakland for about a year and had watched one amazing restaurant after another sprout up on this side of the bay. “It seemed like the obvious choice was to open here,” she said.

The fifty-seat restaurant features a six-stool bar counter, a handful of big booths that accommodate six or more diners, and — best of all — a kitchen that’s completely open. There will be full sit-down table service.

Because Mistry has been ready to open Juhu Beach Club since last fall, much of the restaurant’s menu is already set. Slider-size variations on a pav bhajisandwich with different fillings will feature prominently — Brian Wood of Starter Bakery will be custom-baking the bread (the “pav“) for those. Other snacky items will include a take on spicy chicken wings and a vegetarian mung bean soup that Mistry dubbed Mom’s Guju Chili because, in spite of it being based on her mother’s traditional recipe, diners kept telling her how much the dish reminded them of chili.

Mistry will also serve entrée-size curries at the restaurant — at least three or four different kinds, including a vegetarian chickpea-and-winter-green curry, a lamb or goat curry, and whole-chicken-leg curry. The idea is for the dishes to feel abundant: “A lot of times you order curries at Indian restaurants, and they’re great, but they’re just this bowl of sauce with four or five chunks of meat.”

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/preeti-mistrys-indian-street-food-to-take-off-in-temescal/Content?oid=3449017

OAKLAND — If Darshellia Butler’s smoky grit waffles with spicy vinegar are anything to go by, Oakland is in for a culinary treat.

The 33-year-old Oakland native — a graduate of Edna Brewer Middle School and Skyline High School — plans to open a food truck to sell soul food with recipes adapted from her Southern roots.

“The food truck would be the first farm-focused soul food truck in the country,” Butler said. “Everything I make is farm-fresh. It would be a historic thing to get this going.”

Butler, who graduated with honors from the Institute of Culinary Education’s Management Program in New York City, is currently raising money through Kickstarter to open Skillet Rose — the name of a poem she wrote for her mother..

Kickstarter is touted as “the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.” Butler has a deadline of Jan. 20 to meet her goal of $66,000 to purchase the truck and equipment she needs to launch Skillet Rose.

To donate to Skillet Rose by Jan. 20, visit www.kickstarter.com/projects/skilletrose/the-skillet-rose-project.

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_22347762/skyline-alumna-hopes-open-food-truck-selling-soul

]]> http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/2013/01/oakland-ca-skyline-alumna-hopes-to-open-food-truck-selling-soul-food/feed/ 0 http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/2013/01/oakland-ca-off-the-grid-launches-in-oakland-for-museum-nights/ http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/2013/01/oakland-ca-off-the-grid-launches-in-oakland-for-museum-nights/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:00:16 +0000 MFN Editor #1 http://www.mobilefoodnews.com/?p=38017 By Tracey Taylor | Berkeleyside.com

Food truck market Off The Grid is making its first foray into Oakland with the launch of a new weekly market outside the Oakland Museum of California. The street food gathering  is part of the museum’s new Friday Nights program which will include films, live music, dancing, as well as half-price admission for adults (under-18s go free).

The final truck line-up for Off the Grid: Lake Merritt @ OMCA has not been finalized, according to a spokesperson for the San Francisco based street food organization, but some of the East Bay trucks that used to be regulars at Berkeley’s Wednesday Gourmet Ghetto market (which was canceled last month), and at the Thursday Berkeley Telegraph Avenue market, will likely be there. So too will some of the perennial favorites that cross the Bay Bridge to attend Off The Grid markets in its two other East Bay venues, Alameda and Hayward, such as Gua Bao bun specialist The Chairman.

OMCA said the idea was to build on the success of a Summer Nights program that the museum has been running since 2010 and incorporate food trucks, music and other foodie attractions.

Off The Grid expects East Bay favorites to show up at OMCA on Fridays. Photo: Shaun Roberts/courtesy OMCA

“We are really excited to team up with Off The Grid so that people can enjoy delicious Californian cuisine,” said Cynthia Taylor, Assistant Director for Public Programming at the museum. After their meal, visitors will be welcomed into the galleries for special programs as well as the museum’s regular exhibitions, Taylor said. A ’70s funk DJ will be whipping up tunes through February for people to take dance lessons — soul trains are anticipated, said Taylor.

The museum is putting an emphasis on local food and drink in its Blue Oak café, Taylor said, serving cocktails and beers and wines from East Bay purveyors. There will also be a beer garden and a hot-chocolate bar on cooler nights. Local makers will be featured as part of the Friday evening programming, kicking off with Oakland’s Blue Chair Fruits who will be demonstrating marmelade making on Jan. 25.

The move also coincides with the winter shuttering of Off The Grid at Fort Mason in San Francisco, as well as redevelopment work in the museum’s neighborhood which will see pedestrian access to Lake Merritt made easier come the spring.

Friday Nights at OMCA will start on January 25 and run from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. Off The Grid trucks will be located in front of the museum’s 10th Street entrance.

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2013/01/09/off-the-grid-launches-in-oakland-for-museum-nights/

The year got off to such a promising start for Oakland’s seemingly limitless population of street-food enthusiasts — and for the mobile food vendors who want to feed them. A newly passed interim policy allowed food trucks, for the first time, to operate weekly at approved locations outside of the Fruitvale district, as long as they were clustered into permit-carrying “pods” of three or more trucks.

It was easy to imagine that dozens of these so-called “food pods” would spring up all over Oakland — the first shots fired in a bloodless revolution of gourmet cupcakes and Asian-fusion tacos. People would come out in droves, and, buoyed by that success, city officials would quickly move to make mobile food — beyond taco trucks in Fruitvale — a permanent fixture in Oakland’s culinary landscape.

But the fact of the matter is that Oakland’s food pod experiment saw only minor successes in 2012. Citywide, just seven group-vending locations were established. And two of the pods (the Thursday night pod in front of Splash Pad Park and the Tuesday lunchtime Clay Pod, at the intersection of Clay and 14th streets) closed down earlier than planned — despite the fact that the City of Oakland recently extended its one-year pilot program, allowing existing food pods to continue running at least through July 1, 2013. According to the organizers of those two pods, there was never enough business to justify the ongoing expense of weekly permitting fees.

Meanwhile, city officials don’t appear to be much closer to reaching an agreement on a permanent mobile food policy that would ensure that food trucks would be able to operate in Oakland beyond July.

“Here it is a year later, and we don’t even have anything to present to [city] council for a permanent policy,” said Karen Hester, the organizer of the Bites Off Broadway food pod, which is closed for the winter months. “It just seems like foot dragging, in my opinion.”

According to Hester, one of the biggest reasons the food pod program hasn’t taken off is that the barriers to entry are too high — more than $600 upfront to apply, plus a couple hundred dollars each week to cover permits, parking meters, and so forth. (When the city extended the interim program, it did reduce the basic weekly permit fee from $100 to $50 — a nice gesture, Hester said, though she wishes the price would be slashed even further.)

Gail Lillian, owner of the LIBA Falafel food truck and organizer of the now-defunct Clay Pod, stressed that city administrators have been nothing if not supportive. But she, too, has been frustrated that Oakland hasn’t moved more quickly on the legislation front.

“It was hard to run a pod this year thinking it was just going to end in January,” Lillian said.

For their part, city officials note that Oakland simply doesn’t have the resources to make mobile food vending one of its highest priorities. Alisa Shen, the city planner who has taken the lead role on mobile food, has a host of other major projects she’s coordinating — she’s only able to work on the mobile food policy when she happens to have some free time.

Short staffing aside, one of the biggest holdups has been the issue of enforcement. If the interim mobile food policy has failed, it’s in large part because the city has lacked the wherewithal, or the political willpower, to actively enforce that policy — that is, to discourage renegade trucks who flout the law and hawk their wares guerilla-style, part of no pod and having pulled no permit.

And why should these solo operators trouble themselves to join a food pod when there’s little consequence to breaking the law? Arturo Sanchez, the deputy city administrator, said that, in theory, violators should be charged with a misdemeanor for selling without a permit. But he acknowledged that the reality is that in a city with as much crime as Oakland, the police just aren’t going to respond to those kinds of complaints — complaints that are infrequent anyway.

Edward Manasse, Oakland’s strategic planning manager, conceded that at present there almost certainly are more trucks operating in the city illegally than legally. He and Sanchez both believe the new mobile food policy needs to include some mechanism that wouldn’t put the burden of enforcement on the police but perhaps on a person or group of people who would, as a portion of their job, make sure that food trucks abide by the law.

Despite the skepticism from some food pod organizers, Manasse said the city is committed to getting a permanent mobile food policy drawn up before the pilot program expires — ideally by April or May, he said. That new policy would likely include some way for individual food trucks to operate legally, outside of the pod format. Also on the table: the reduction in fees that Hester would love to see, perhaps by means of changing the framework so that pod organizers and individual food trucks could pay an annual, rather than per-event, fee.

According to Shen, the next steps include an online survey (asking, among other things, where in the city people would like to see more food trucks) and a meeting with a group of stakeholders (food truck owners, the restaurant association, etc.) that will probably take place in early 2013.

“I think that we’re making baby steps,” Shen said, adding that, in spite of how it may appear, “We are really excited and committed to having a program in place.”

credit: Lou Bustamante

Our weekly bite explores the city’s food trucks, one at a time, highlighting our favorite mobile dishes and snacks.

The Truck: Vesta Flatbread
The Cuisine: Cal-Mediterranean
Specialty Items: In-house (in the truck–really!) flatbread sandwiches
Worth the Wait in Line? At peak lunch time, a total 10 minutes from the end of the line to food in hand.

Blame it on the numerous quick-service joints and that regrettable “everything-in-a-wrap” era that ruined the image of flatbread. Serving as little more than a mere container for more substantial items, the flatbread goes unnoticed at best. Leave it to a couple of Arizmendi bakers and a chef to breathe new life into the sandwich and make the bread the star of the show.

See Also:
- New Vesta Flatbread Truck Hits the Streets
- Tiramisu Cupcake at Cupkates
- Hot to Tot at Little Green Cyclo

Made in the truck’s brick oven, the bread has the perfect level of chewiness, with just enough of a blistered crust to give it strength, but yet not fight with the fillings (is there anything worse than bread that ejects the sandwich’s components with each bite?). In thePork Flatbread Sandwich ($9, Spit-roast citrus pork, red onion pickle, cabbage fennel slaw, urfa pepper aioli), the juicy pork gets nestled in the split half-round, with flavors that meld into something that tastes vaguely Mexican, like having carnitas with shawarma seasonings. It manages to keep from being heavy, with the pickled veggies and slaw balancing the richness and the Berber pepper spiking the heat levels just enough.

The small menu of rotating dishes source their ingredients from organic and sustainable sources (like Strauss, Mary’s, and Central Milling for the flour and grains), offers vegan options, and makes everything in-house, it is a bakery café on wheels worth seeking out.

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2012/12/food_truck_bite_of_the_week_fl_1.php

Bites Off Broadway, before it closed for the winter.

The year got off to such a promising start for Oakland’s seemingly limitless population of street-food enthusiasts — and for the mobile food vendors who want to feed them. A newly passed interim policy allowed food trucks, for the first time, to operate weekly at approved locations outside of the Fruitvale, as long as they were clustered into permit-carrying “pods” of three or more trucks.

It was easy to imagine that dozens of these so-called “food pods” would spring up all over Oakland — the first shots fired in a bloodless revolution of gourmet cupcakes and Asian-fusion tacos. People would come out in droves, and, buoyed by that success, city officials would quickly move to make mobile food — beyond taco trucks in Fruitvale — a permanent fixture in Oakland’s culinary landscape.

But the fact of the matter is that Oakland’s food pod experiment saw only small successes in 2012. Citywide, only seven different group-vending locations were ever established, mostly in and around Downtown. And two of the pods (the Thursday night pod in front of Splash Pad Park and the Tuesday Clay Pod, at the intersection of Clay and 14th Streets) already closed down for good earlier than planned — this despite the fact that the City of Oakland recently extended the one-year pilot program, allowing existing food pods to continue running at least through July 1, 2013. According to the organizers of those two pods, there was never enough business to justify the ongoing expense of weekly permitting fees.

Meanwhile, city officials don’t appear to be much closer to reaching an agreement on a permanent mobile food policy that would ensure that food trucks would be able to operate in Oakland beyond this upcoming July.

“Here it is a year later, and we don’t even have anything to present to [City] Council for a permanent policy,” said Karen Hester, the organizer of the Bites Off Broadway food pod, which is closed for the winter months. “It just seems like foot dragging, in my opinion.”

According to Hester, one of the biggest reasons the food pod program hasn’t taken off is that the barriers to entry are too high — more than $600 up front to apply, plus a couple hundred dollars on top of that each week to cover permits, parking meters, and so forth. (When the city extended the interim program, it did reduce the basic weekly permit fee from $100 to $50 — a nice gesture, Hester said, though of course she wishes they’d slash it even further.)

Gail Lillian, owner of the LIBA Falafel food truck and organizer of the now-defunct Clay Pod, stressed that the city administrators that she came in contact with have been nothing if not supportive. That said, she too has been frustrated that Oakland hasn’t moved more quickly on the legislation front.

“It was hard to run a pod this year thinking it was just going to end in January,” Lillian said. “[The city] set up parameters that made it hard to invest into these pods moving forward.”

Lillian’s three-truck Clay Pod had its last day of service earlier this week, on December 18.

For their part, city officials note that Oakland simply doesn’t have the resources, or sufficient staffing, to make mobile food vending one of its highest priorities. Alisa Shen, the city planner who has taken the lead role, has a host of other major projects she’s coordinating — mobile food appears to be the thing she works on when she’s able to cobble together some free time.

And as Arturo Sanchez, the deputy city administrator, put it, “The difficulty here is that as a city we have to deal with multiple constituencies” — in other words, not just the food-truck and pushcart operators, but also the owners of brick-and-mortar businesses (who may not appreciate what they perceive to be unfair competition), local residents, and the police department.

Sanchez’s reference to the police points to what may be the biggest holdup: the issue of enforcement. If the interim mobile food policy has failed, it’s in large part because the city has lacked the wherewithal, or the political willpower, to actively enforce that policy — that is, to discourage renegade trucks who flout the law and hawk their wares, guerilla-style, part of no pod and having pulled no permit.

And why should those vendors saddle themselves with the expense, and the restricted parameters, of joining a food pod when there’s no real consequence for breaking the law? Sanchez said that, in theory, violators should be charged with a misdemeanor every time they sell without a permit. But the reality is that in a city with as much crime as Oakland, the police just aren’t going to respond to those kinds of complaints — and the complaints are infrequent anyway.

It’s no surprise, then, that Edward Manasse, Oakland’s strategic planning manager, concedes that at present there are almost certainly more trucks operating in the city illegally than legally. He and Sanchez both believe the new mobile food policy needs to include some mechanism that won’t put the burden of enforcement on the police — perhaps a person or group of people who would, as a portion of their job, make sure that food trucks and pushcarts abide by the law.

Whatever form that new enforcement mechanism takes, it likely won’t be inexpensive. As Manasse pointed out, “We don’t have anybody right now, except the police, who works nights and weekends.”

But, despite the skepticism from some of the pod organizers, Manasse said the city is committed to getting a permanent mobile food policy drawn up well before the pilot program expires — ideally by April or May, he said.

That new policy would likely include some way for individual food trucks to operate legally. Also on the table: the reduction in fees that Hester and others would love to see, perhaps by means of changing the framework so that pod organizers or individual food trucks would pay an annual, rather than per-event, fee.

According to Shen, the next steps include data collection through a briefonline survey (asking, among other things, where in the city people would like to see more food trucks) and a meeting with a group of stakeholders (food truck owners, the restaurant association, etc.) that will probably take place early in 2013.

“I think that we’re making baby steps,” Shen concluded, adding that, in spite of how it may appear on the outside, “We are really excited and committed to having a program in place.”

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/WhatTheFork/archives/2012/12/21/for-oaklands-food-truck-movement-only-small-successes-in-2012

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