One cart new this year is Fortune Cafe.
Credit:Linda Falkenstein

Say “April 15″ and most Americans think of taxes. I think food carts. That date’s the start of the season for Madison’s Mall/Concourse vendors, which means new sites for some veterans and the debut of first-timers.

The mobile food season opener used to have more impact when carts closed around Thanksgiving and reappeared with the daffodils. These days, more carts are vending through the winter. For vendors who are shuttered for deep winter but like to get an early start, it’s been a challenging spring. Let’s Eat Out Madison, the evening cart meetup on Midvale (Tuesdays) and Atwood (Wednesdays), has encountered Everests of snow, unseasonable cold and thunderstorms. Noontime on April 15 was at least sunny, but blustery enough to send wastebaskets, tip jars and napkins flying.

On Library Mall, the only new cart making an appearance was Umami, from the Williamson Street restaurant of the same name, serving five varieties of savory buns. Two buns and a side of either edamame or wonton chips is $7. The pork belly features several nice chunks of oven-roasted meat with hoisin sauce, scallions and pickled cucumber with a fresh, fluffy, slightly sweet bun.

Note that the spicy tofu bun is spicy only because it comes with spicy mayo and spicy scallion “salsa.” The tofu itself is not only not spicy, it was desperate for a marinade. Next time, I’d go for the Korean barbecued beef, which also comes with the excellent spicy mayo and spicy scallion sauces. Also available: tofu with hoisin sauce and a spicy pulled pork with miso peach chutney.

On Tuesday, Taquitos Marimar debuted, featuring what they call healthy Mexican. The cart is associated with the former Taquería Marimar on Greenway Cross, and serves tacos, gorditas, burritos, tamales and whole-wheat quesadillas. Whole wheat is also available for the burrito.

Slide, new last year, is also on Library Mall. Among four meat and four veggie sliders, the meat’s the star. The Buff Chick, a stewed version of Buffalo chicken wings topped with blue cheese, is a solid satisfier. Two sliders and a side are $7. Among the veggie options, the “Mr. Sweet Potato Head” isn’t quite a substitute for the sweet potato wrap from the recently departed Dandelion cart.

BJ’s Kolaches stakes out territory in front of Grainger Hall in the 900 block of University Avenue. These savory filled buns are Czech food by way of Texas, and they remind me most of knishes, though the dough is fluffier and sweeter. I have yet to find a filling that doesn’t work here. Among Philly cheesesteak, sausage jambalaya, spinach and artichoke, buffalo chicken, beef brisket, and spicy kielbasa, it’s hard to choose. These are a flat $3, with a good two-plus-a-drink deal for $6.50.

In front of the Geoscience building in the 1200 block of West Dayton, four carts are lined up in this up-and-coming southwest campus mini-pod: Thai’s Cuisine, In-N-Out Empanada, Blowin’ Smoke BBQ‘s second cart (the first is on the Capitol Square) and the new Fortune Cafe.

In fact, I was Fortune Cafe’s first customer. The bright green cart, run by two sisters, features mostly Indonesian food, with a foray into Italian (spaghetti with meatballs and shrimp linguine).

An entree that’s easy to like is ginger garlic chicken ($7): diced chicken marinated in a ginger sauce served with perfectly cooked white rice. I was, however, tempted by a dish called balado egg ($6), a typical Indonesian street food of hardboiled eggs in a tomato-onion sauce, served with rice. The sauce was light and sweetish, not at all spicy, which balado apparently is in Indonesia. (Ask for hot sauce to add to taste.) Both entrees come with a plain but pretty good chopped cucumber and cabbage salad, lightly dressed with what you might call a sweet vinaigrette. Added fun: wagon-wheel-shaped shrimp chips.

A real delight here is cendol, a milky Indonesian dessert that tastes of vanilla and brown sugar, with blobs of green rice flour and fresh pandan leaves. It’s probably related to bubble tea in a way, but so much better.

Also of note on Dayton: In-N-Out sells yerba mate and alfajores as well as empanadas.

No new carts were in evidence on the Capitol Square. The most recent addition there is the SoHodumpling and salad cart, new last year, which moved downtown from campus over the winter.

In other news, the all-vegan Ladonia Cafe will be coming to Library Mall soon, according to its Facebook page. The menu will be tamales, chocolate chip waffles and a “BLT” sandwich with house-made tempeh bacon. Plus scones and homemade ginger limeade. The unifying culinary theme here would seem to be “vegan.”

And vegan “burger” cart Igo Vego is planning a return. However, changes in kitchens (two times in six months last year) forced a reevaluation. Owner Tammy Markee-Mayas has found a new commercial kitchen but won’t be able to open right away. She’s aiming for May and concentrating on raising funds to restock her supplies. Markee-Mayas is also looking into the possibility of selling her vegan burger patties online and frozen at farmers’ markets.

http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=39711

The wildly popular Isthmus a la Carts, a celebration of the Madison-area street food scene, once again pulls up to Olin Park, on the shores of beautiful Lake Monona, on Friday, May 10.

Come hungry! Isthmus is lining up some of Madison’s finest food carts, including Fried & Fabulous, Blowing Smoke, Slide, Igo Vego, Mad City Fry Guy, and many more. Your ticket gets you in the gate to try sample-size portions of all these fabulous local flavors.

Leinenkugel will be pouring craft brews, and new this year, craft soda will be on tap from local start-up Wisco Pop! Isthmus is proud to partner with FEED Kitchens (Food Enterprise & Economic Development Kitchens) — a local nonprofit developing a publicly available commercial kitchen. FEED volunteers will help tend bar, and share in the proceeds from the event.

The dinner bell rings at 4 p.m., rain or shine, and the music and refreshments run until 8. Leave work early! This is a delicious way to kick off a great spring weekend and taste all that Madison awesome food carts have to offer.

Tickets are $17 in advance. They are available at online or at Isthmus offices, located at 101 King Street, at the corner of Pinckney and Main on the Capitol Square. Last year this food fest sold out early, so don’t wait!

Check isthmusalacarts.com for updates, including the growing list of participating carts!

http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=39427

The Fried and Fabulous Food Cart at 400 N. Broom St. offers deep-fried delicacies to the late-night weekend crowd.

A flap over late-night food carts along congested Broom Street might be heading for a compromise solution.

City officials are proposing rules that would prevent vendors from parking on the street within 25 feet of a restaurant, while also stepping up enforcement of trash and cleanup ordinances.

The moves are aimed at cooling a dispute between food cart vendors and several fast-food restaurants competing for the bar-time business of a largely student crowd in the State Street area.

The issue has garnered coverage in the campus media in addition to a social media campaign launched by Fried & Fabulous food cart owner Steve Lawrence, who has been running an online petition to garner support for the vendors.

Lawrence and a couple of other vendors with late-night permits have been setting up mainly along Broom Street, sparking complaints from nearby restaurants such as Pita Pit and Silver Mine Subs. The restaurants took their concerns to Madison’s Central Business Improvement District, which represents downtown landlords.

The issue was later discussed at several meetings of the city Vending Oversight Committee, leading Lawrence to fear the committee might try to limit the number of late-night vendors or ban them entirely from the area. Three years ago, the city banned late-night vending carts on Frances Street following a dispute with cart vendor Jin’s Chicken.

“If you kick me off Broom Street and say ‘Go to the Library Mall,’ I go out of business,” says Lawrence, who opened his operation in April 2012.

But campus-area Ald. Scott Resnick is optimistic the dispute can be settled with some new rules and better enforcement.

“To me, it’s a parking issue as much as anything,” says Resnick, noting the competition for on-street spots off State Street is fierce among vendors, residents and visitors on the weekends.

Resnick also acknowledged that restaurants don’t like it when patrons of the food vendors try to use the eateries’ restrooms but says there is little the city can do about that.

“That’s an issue for all the restaurants downtown,” he says.

Mary Carbine, executive director of the Business Improvement District, says she is “somewhat baffled” about the entire discussion. She says no one with any authority has ever proposed reducing the number of late-night vendors or removing them from Broom Street.

“We understand that the street vending is part of a vibrant downtown,” she says. “But we also need to make sure our inline businesses can thrive, too.”

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/writers/mike_ivey/broom-street-food-fight-goes-viral-but-compromise-pending/article_4575111e-8773-11e2-8131-001a4bcf887a.html

By Linda Falkenstein | isthmus.com

Madison street-vending coordinator Warren Hansen reports that the Mad City’s food-cart culture is about to get its day in the sun. Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels by Heather Shouse (Ten Speed Press) will be published in April; the book contains a couple of pages on our local carts. Shouse hopes to have some special promotional events in Madison combining a bookstore and a food cart or two.

And food historian John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, will publish Truck Food Nation (Workman Press) in the fall. Hansen toured downtown Madison with Edge’s photographer, Angie Mosier, and Edge visited town for research twice as well.

At Edge’s urging, Hansen attended what was apparently the country’s first conference on street food. Held last August in San Francisco, the aptly named First National Street Food Conference was hosted by the nonprofit incubator kitchen La Cocina. Hansen gave a PowerPoint presentation, on a panel with representatives from Atlanta, Toronto, Oakland and Portland, Ore. “I discovered that Portland and Madison are much respected in the street-food world,” he reports. Other presenters included Edge, cookbook author Molly O’Neill, and Doug Quint and Bryan Petroff of Big Gay Ice Cream Truck in Manhattan.

Session topics included “Open-Air Markets, Hawker Stalls and the Art of Making One Great Thing,” “A Cart on Every Corner? Urban Public Space, City Policy and the Informal/Formal Business Model,” and “Mobile Vendor Economic Policy.”

Hansen’s been invited back for the 2011 conference, and hopes to lure the conference to Monona Terrace in the future.

Food-cart updates

Winter is not prime time for Madison’s food carts, but this winter three have been braving it most days on the Capitol Square: Blowin’ Smoke BBQ and Wei’s Food to Go are at the corner of East Main and South Pinckney, and FIB’s is usually at Main and Martin Luther King. And now with the February thaw, El Burrito Loco and Curt’s Gourmet Popcorn cart have shown up again, taking advantage of the warmer weather…and the influx of those protesting Gov. Walker’s budget bill.

Fans of the Spice Yatra Indian food cart (which until July of 2010 could be found at the intersection of Main and Martin Luther King) should make a mental note that chef and proprietor Sunil Gopal will be serving at the free International Festival 2011 at the Overture Center on March 5. Gopal writes that he’ll be cooking four of his greatest hits: kadai chicken, spinach chicken, vegetable curry and chana masala, all served over basmati rice.

Other vendors at International Fest will include Cafe Costa Rica, the Italian Workmen’s Club, Fresco, the Italian Women’s Group, Jamerica, Ruby Restaurant, Paciugo Gelato, Fuzzy’s Taco Shop and Fair Trade Coffee House. The International Café will run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. with entrees priced $1-$8.

http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=32324

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