Page 2 of 2
Until now. Maybe, thanks to a willingness by Supervisor Bevan Dufty to at least re-examine the permitting tangle that can string up aspiring mobile food vendors. And thanks also to just how broke San Francisco's Rec and Park Department is. This year, in a bid to raise cash, it's allowed some vendors contracts to sell in city parks. And it gave Matt Cohen the green light to operate weekly Off the Grid street-food happenings in three parks. Even Whole Foods is making a play for street-food glamour.And the summer of 2010 has become what Jonathan Kauffman dubbed the Summer of Truck in San Francisco. It seemed like the beginning of the summer saw a new truck launch each week: Hapa SF, Chairman Bao, Southern Sandwich, Senor Sisig, TaKorea, 51st State, SF Crispy Tacos, the Taco Guys, IZ-IT, Ebbet's Good To Go.
What's remarkable, besides the sheer number of new vendors, is how San Francisco street food is carrying the latest wave of fusion cooking. Back in the '80s and '90s fusion was essentially French cuisine, tricked out with Asian ingredients, something mostly white chefs created. Today, in San Francisco, some of the most vibrant cooking is from young Asian American chefs ― some inspired by Roy Choi's rainbow fleet of Kogi Korean BBQ trucks in L.A. ― tweaking the food they grew up with, framing it in tacos, sandwiches, or burritos. It's food, frankly, that brick and mortar restaurants aren't serving, a need they're not serving, a movement sprouting like weeds in sidewalk cracks.
Take the city's extraordinary nuevo Filipino food movement we've been documenting here at SFoodie. A year ago, Adobo Hobo and Lumpia Cart began feeding a hunger for more accessible Filipino food unhampered by restaurant infrastructure. Now there's MaliNumNum, Mr. Arroz Caldo, Senor Sisig. Today, Hapa SF's William Pilz is serving food that's among the city's most vibrant. Until a year ago, Pilz was chef of Citizen Cake. He launched a food truck, digging down into his Filipino roots to create a contemporary take on his mom's cooking that takes the farm-to-table ethos for granted. Same with Richie Nakano of Hapa Ramen, a former Nopa sous chef. He's interpreting ramen in a style that feels distinctly California, but that speaks to the desire for authenticity that's electrifying everything from what we raise in our gardens to what we're putting up in jars.
And while the street-food scene of summer 2010 is more and more being driven by chefs, and there's a risk that it could calcify into something precious and too expensive, the new wave of San Francisco street food has created a remarkable moment, serving inevitably from the people who live and eat here.
Is it all delicious? No. Will businesses fail? Of course they will. But much the way the taco trucks of Fruitvale serve up a neighborhood's needs and desires on a disposable plate, the new vendors of San Francisco ― unconsciously ― are steeped in the populism expressed in that myth of Slow Food's founding potluck in Rome. What does democracy taste like? Can't say I know ― except I'm pretty sure it's served up in a taco.
Follow us on Twitter: @sfoodie. Contact me at John.Birdsall@SFWeekly.com
