Food truck owners across downtown Phoenix collectively announced Tuesday that they were planning to “look into other motor vehicle options” to create mobile sites for selling food.
“As it turned out, we had all been thinking about expanding the market,” said Valeria Hernandez, owner of Flan-tastic, a food truck that offers flan, fried ice cream and other Mexican desserts. “When we got together and talked about it, it was like, bam. This is it. Trucks are just going out of style.”
Hernandez is hoping to leave her food truck behind, opting instead for a motorcycle. This would allow her better mobility, she said, and a greater variety of places to offer food.
The motorcycle would have a rack on the back to carry cooking supplies and extended saddlebags to hold miniaturized kitchen appliances, such as a stove, small oven and cooler/freezer unit.
“When I hear the word ‘flan,’ I don’t think trucks,” Hernandez said. “I don’t think restaurants. I think something that really makes an entrance. The only right answer is a motorcycle.”
Pietre Levy, owner of the new truck Blintz Blitz, said he plans to “scrap the truck” and move on to “bigger and better” options. Blintz Blitz, which serves Russian blintzes — thin pancakes with a filling such as cheese or berries — came onto the food truck scene in November and quickly became popular at events such as Food Truck Fridays.
Levy hopes to keep with the concept of food trucks, though he’s thinking big wheels and bright colors — his dream is to convert Blintz Blitz into a monster truck.
“It was really important to me to continue the tradition of food trucks as trucks,” Levy said. “You know, blintzes are a traditional food, I want to be a traditional guy. But just like I want to throw a creative twist on my blintzes, I want to put a creative twist on my truck, too.”
He is still unsure how he will serve food from the truck, though ladders and stepping stools are definitely options, Levy said.
Other food truck owners want to think much further outside the box. Gordon Abernathy operates the truck Just Haggis, which serves pudding made from sheep heart, liver and lungs that is served in the sheep’s stomach. Abernathy has already begun saving money and taking out loans to buy a blimp, which he intends to float over different areas of downtown Phoenix.
Abernathy will serve food by lowering it in baskets from the cabin of the blimp, he said. He hopes to take customers’ orders by cellphone call from a Just Haggis employee stationed on the ground below the blimp.
“For me, it’s not about the novelty,” Abernathy said. “I’ve wanted to own a blimp ever since I was a boy. I wanted to make haggis ever since I was a boy. This has been in the works for decades.”
The downtown Phoenix community is generally excited about the prospect of new vehicles to provide them food. Marie Louise Alberta May IV, who is a devoted regular at Food Truck Fridays, said the food-truck expansion is a sign of better things to come.
“When you think about it, Phoenix is just a really creative place,” May said. “This is just the beginning of what we can do. You know, I’m thinking, why stick to food? I might just create my own mobile home devoted entirely to crocheting classes. Or knitting. Or understanding and interpreting Voodoo culture. You know, whatever.”
Other community members, however, are skeptical about the expansion. Marmon Sedgwick, who journals regularly about his food truck experiences, said the idea was “totally dumb” and could never come to fruition.
“Food trucks have a charm about them,” Sedgwick said. “You see a truck and you smell the food and you think, ‘I just belong here.’ I don’t look at a blimp and think that. I don’t look at a yacht and think that. Food trucks put you right in the middle of the action.”
Sedgwick also said that as a longtime fan of Just Haggis, he was unsure how the sheep stomachs would stay fresh in the period of time between leaving the blimp cabin and making it to the ground. Additionally, Sedgwick felt a concerted fear that the Just Haggis blimp may run into one of the downtown buildings, rip apart and fall to the ground in a flaming mass — “just like the Hindenburg,” he said sadly.
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton has also expressed a desire to bring the city into the food-vehicle game, citing ideas such as a light rail line that is devoted entirely to mobile restaurants. He was most excited, however, at the prospect of creating a food gondola lift, which would consist of cable cars containing restaurants and riding suspended on cables around the city.
“This is a great opportunity for the kind of economic innovation Phoenix is looking for, especially in terms of transportation,” Stanton said. “We are a city full of creators and innovators, and this just goes to show that. With ideas like a food hot air balloon or a food horse-and-buggy sprouting up all over the city — the possibilities are endless.”