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Why do you think San Francisco wasn't ready for street food in 2008?There's two aspects at play that have not been working in street food's favor here. A city like Los Angeles had a huge amount of dark catering trucks, primarily because the movie industry had been moving production out of L.A. So there were all these commissary trucks that were no longer in use. In that way L.A. was perfectly set up to lease mobile catering trucks to entrepreneurs.
The other thing is that it's really difficult to open a mobile catering business. The combination of infrastructure that's poorly developed and the codes ― that kept San Francisco from realizing the potential that everybody thinks of us as really being on the cutting edge. We've had this very segmented, lopsided permit structure, which has existed here a long time. It took the last year and a half of carts to move the issue forward.
Are you frustrated by how hard it still is to sell on the street legally?
You could call me frustrated. There was this clear opportunity that I saw existed. And then in the spring of 2009 something starts to happen. That's when you begin seeing Magic Curry Kart, the Sexy Soup Lady, Curtis Crème Brûlée. I suddenly started getting a ton of calls from people who were interested in doing street food ― all of them, I would say were time rich and cash poor. I was getting questions all the time from people, and really wanted to offer a resource.
Last summer is when I started doing the Cart Project stuff, as a way of easing the burden of all the people who were doing general inquiry calls to me. It was basically, honestly, Here's the top 30 questions all new mobile vendors ask when they want to know how. The idea was to do this thing for free, to help people understand what they can do to sell legally.
