Arrive Magazine - May/June, 2010

street food scene. People were going
crazy for these carts. That created the
perfect storm that has now led to this
ridiculous explosion.”
And don’t forget the public relations
factor. Once Twitter was invented, the
light bulbs went off, says Brooks, and
it was an easy way to market not only
the location of a moving target, but also
its menu and specials, such as free top-
pings (or dinges, if you will) with a secret
password. More than one truck operator
hired PR firms, just like real restaurants.

Still, Twitter feels grass roots. It was how I found that chicken and Thai basil dumpling, which was cooked in the Rickshaw Dumpling Truck, chef Anita Lo’s mobile outpost of her Rickshaw Dumpling Bar. It’s how I tracked down that cupcake, from the Cupcake Stop truck, which Lev Ekster started while attending New York Law School, and decided to stick with instead of taking the bar exam. And it’s how I found myself dipping my hands in the Seagram Building’s fountain after chowing down on Taiwanese fried chicken from NYC Cravings.

I now follow a dozen or so food trucks on Twitter, but I needn’t, really, and neither do you. Midtown Lunch, Brooks’ blog, has grown into a full-fledged website and has its own Twitter Tracker. You can log on anytime and check out the tweets of all the trucks it follows.

There are other cities with big street food scenes. Here in the Northeast, Philadelphia’s scene is huge; Boston’s is small; D.C.’s is somewhere in the middle. In New York, my street-food journey is nowhere near over.

During the winter, plenty more food vendors drove onto the scene. Among the most promising is Milk Truck, an old 1950s milk delivery truck, selling artisanal grilled cheese sandwiches such as the All Day Breakfast Sandwich, with aged Wisconsin gruyere, farm fresh fried egg and caramelized onions on rye.

And in February, NBCNew York.com launched its new food website, Feast, with a contest. The winners got golden tickets to a free lunch prepared—yes, in a truck—by chefs Alain Ducasse, Paul Liebrandt, Michael White and—guess who? That’s right: Daniel Boulud.