Home cooking and food truck rant
Ok, let’s bring the old Danny back. To ask someone relishes in attention to check himself at the door all the while posting three times a week and talking about oneself in the third person is just asking for too much. Danny is gonna let danny be danny so danny can take his talents to the Internets. Wow. I’m having identity issues right now. Even with that, I still must show you some pictures of my lunch this past Sunday. See, I went home for a weekend to Detroit and these pictures were of the lunch I had before coming home. This time, I was actually able to spend a few days at my parents house without gaining any weight. It’s quite an accomplishment. Why? Well because Halloween candy go on deep sales starting next Monday and I can never help myself to cheap kit kat bars. That stuff is chocolate meth. But what else is as addictive as cold medicine formulated as a drug? Mom’s cooking is the winner!
For lunch we actually ate an almost vegetarian meal, with the only meat coming as oysters in a soup. Yea I said it. We cooked the oysters. And it was in a soup. No it wasn’t freshly shucked oysters so don’t get it all twisted in a knot. Keep your underpants neat please. Anyway… we had some noodles along with this dry tofu skin that was rolled with some nori, and then fried, and then quickly braised. And we had some mushrooms too. I think the key to eating vegetarian is soy sauce and deep frying. That shit about eating a lot of fiber and eating lots of color? Just fry it (which incidentally is the slogan if Nike ever sponsor the Wisconsin State Fair. Needless to say I enjoyed the meal a lot for the simplicity and also because I have no idea how to cook mushrooms.
So there’s a WSJ article getting a lot of play today. It’s about how food chains are getting into the food truck business. This seems like a natural development if you think about it. There’s no rent involved and in cities where parking is not as regulated as NY, your food truck can park anywhere. Most folks probably learn by now that low barrier to entry means that competition will be stiff. That’s why right now we have seemingly a hundred different deal sites offering discount restaurants or city tours or classes or whatever you might want to do in New York. But you know, opening a restaurant is not that easy. You got rent, staff, food costs… and folks like the Babbo and Baohus guys have said to the public that your food costs should be 30%, which means you’re doing 30% on rent and 30% on staff. So, if you open a food truck and you don’t pay rent, well that’s a no brainer!
I’m ok with big companies taking over some food trucks, even if it’s in New York. See, right now we’ve mostly seen small time proprietors set up food trucks mysteriously. I say mysteriously because the waiting list is “at least 10 years,” according to Sean Basinski, director of the Street Vendor Project. But yet all these new food trucks pop up with these folks saying, “Oh one day I just decided to quit my job as whatever and open a slushy truck!” Seriously, some shit is going on here. The way I see it, it’s like this. These folks who opened a truck figured out the game to get a license, and now it’s not fair because a big entity also wanted to get in on the game. Well tough luck, little guys. What you guys should have been doing was to say, “I got mine this way, and it’s terrible and we ought to change it.” But they don’t say that. Even the Dessert Truck guys wanna say it was a paper snafu that was why they didn’t “renew” Yea fucking right.
The gist of what I feel like is the folks who got into the food truck game should have been at the forefront of a food truck revolution. But they weren’t. So now I am kind of annoyed if people wanna say they don’t wanna see big chains get in the game. Well, there was plenty of time to try and change the game while it was still good. But no one changes it while the going is good. I still think a city could fix something like this fairly easily. Just be open about the licensing situation. Talk about the waiting list. Make the waiting list open. Make the current license owners a open list too. And if a city really wants to promote entrepreneurs, the city should do something like reduce corporate income tax for first year food/restaurant entities that pay rent. This way, you put competition against opening food trucks and this way we’ll get truly good and ideal type of businesses in food trucks, not just some generic chain. So this is me not just complaining about about the reality but actually talking about what people should try to do for a change.
Posted by Danny on October 28, 2010 at 8:46 pm
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