The Tastemakers (34 page)

In the case of food trucks, a culinary trend has morphed into a political issue that is having profound effects on the way commerce is conducted in cities all over the world. Since Roy Choi launched his Kogi Korean BBQ truck in Los Angeles in late 2008, caravans of new food trucks have rolled out in cities and towns all over North America and, increasingly, other countries. Estimates of the number of food trucks in North America range anywhere from roughly ten thousand to over a hundred thousand. From the Swiss-style hot dogs at Swieners in San Diego to the pad Thai at the One of a Thai truck of Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories, the food truck revolution has covered thousands of miles in a short period of time and emerged into one of the most significant, fastest growing food trends of our time. Food trucks have rolled out with nearly every cuisine imaginable, capturing lunch diners by offering freshly cooked, often innovative food that is easily accessed at an affordable price point.

The politicization of the food truck trend happened almost immediately. In every city and town where trucks have established a presence they have been met with almost immediate opposition in the form of restrictive regulations, outdated bylaw enforcement, and lobbying campaigns from a collection of interests headed up by established restaurant owners and others who are threatened by the new business model food trucks present. In every case the nascent food trucks have banded together and formed coalitions and associations in order to fight for their very livelihood. They quickly learned the art of politics and leveraged the power of their food trend not only to safeguard their business but also to change the laws of commerce across the continent. And this should matter to all of us
because food trucks not only increased our lunch options; they also fostered innovation in the food business in a way that allowed new economic models to emerge where there were none before. Before the food truck trend the idea of selling quality, innovative meals on the street was something people talked about when they came back from travels abroad, and those who wanted to start a new food business had to either open up a costly restaurant or keep on dreaming. The food trucks have changed this. Roy Choi's Kogi taco has upended the way food was sold in our cities and towns and the way young cooks and chefs brought their ideas to the public. More than their individual businesses, the food trucks were fighting to save this, while the opposition was trying to keep it from spreading further.

Washington, DC, was one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the food trucks wars and, because of the city's highly political nature, one of its most interesting. The first of the current generation of food trucks (alternatively called “gourmet,” “hipster,” or “Twitter” trucks) appeared in the city in early 2009 around the time of President Obama's inauguration. One of the pioneers was the Fojol Brothers, which sold a mix of Ethiopian and Indian street food out of a carnival caravan, complete with decorative turbans and waxed mustaches. Other trucks soon followed, as the city's lunch crowd rapidly embraced new options, which were often cheaper and better quality than the takeout lunch spots in the core of the city. In mid-2009 the DC city council set up a task force to look at amending the regulations governing who could sell food on the street. For decades street food in DC was limited to roving ice cream trucks and stationary hot dog carts, which served the same menu from fixed locations around the Washington mall and other tourist sites. The rules that governed them were over four decades old, and the market was as stagnant as the water the hot dogs steamed in. The food trucks provided a direct challenge to the regulatory status quo. They served all sorts of unexpected foods, from southern barbecue to Vietnamese soups, and though they changed locations each day, most parked for hours during lunchtime in one spot instead of the quick stops ice cream trucks typically made. The task force that city council had appointed was heavily skewed with restaurant owners
and representatives of business improvement districts (BIDs), which are associations of landlords and business owners from a particular area. Only one food truck owner was invited to join the task force, and others who requested a seat were flat out told not to join because it wouldn't be a friendly environment.

In early 2010, as the number of trucks in DC grew to over a dozen, restaurants, through their trade group the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington (RAMW), and a number of BIDs intensely lobbied the city council to halt food trucks' rapid expansion. They argued that food trucks took up valuable parking spaces, obstructed the sidewalks in front of restaurants with crowds, and encouraged litter to pile up nearby. Most importantly, the trucks were perceived to be pulling away paying customers from the established, taxpaying restaurants and food stores in these areas, and in the midst of a recession, no less. In the past the BIDs and the RAMW had directly supported several city councilors' election campaigns, and their relationships were longstanding, so it wasn't a total surprise when the DC city council proposed a moratorium on new licenses for food trucks later that year. The move would have slammed the brakes on DC's emerging food truck scene. When the food truck owners heard about the moratorium, they immediately called each other and raced down to the city council's offices.

“City council was going to drop emergency legislation, and everyone would have been out of business in a matter of months,” recalled Che Ruddell-Tabisola, who co-owned the BBQ Bus with his husband, Tad. “We all ran down. Some guys wore dirty chef's coats and smelled like French fries. We were running up and down the stairs, and it was our first time lobbying, but we did it!” Through pure persuasion and a relentless last-minute effort, the food truck owners had banded together and finally got their voices heard. The city's moratorium was shelved, and the District of Columbia began a long and arduous debate over how to effectively regulate street food as well as street vending. The food trucks' first battle was won, but the war was just beginning. To continue the fight, DC's food trucks would need advice, organization, and allies to keep their trend alive. They got all three by way of California and a man named Matt Geller.

I
n the politicization of the food truck trend, Matt Geller is the central figure who has linked disparate truck owners across the nation, organized their ranks into formidable forces, and taught them to fight for their rights. He is the Cesar Chavez of food trucks, and he lives to make sure that food trucks everywhere can sell their meals without undue restriction or constraint. Geller was no stranger to the food business. He managed restaurants in his twenties but later received a law degree from UCLA and had some experience in local politics. Just after Christmas 2009, Dominic Lau, a friend of his who owned the new Don Chau Taco truck in Los Angeles, called Geller with a problem. “ ‘Matt, I don't know what to do,' ” Geller recalled Lau telling him. “ ‘My truck got shut down for three weeks because I didn't have access to a restroom for one night.' My immediate concern was that my friend is being harassed,” Geller said. “I grew up in Venice, California, and I have a problem with authority. Don was getting harassed by other municipal forces—in any given day he would get harassed by the county health department or the LAPD, which is run by the city. What did I have to do to make sure my friend didn't get harassed? The food truck thing was just a passion project for him. He said, ‘Matt, I don't know what to do. I just lost $25,000. I don't know what to do.' When I heard that, I thought
Hell no!
”

On January 4, 2010, Geller convened a meeting with seventeen of the city's gourmet food trucks in a vacant lot in Santa Monica, where he was planning on creating the city's first vending lot on private property. Every food truck owner there, whether it was Dosa, Barbies Q, Slice Truck, King Cone, Sweets Truck, Nom Nom, or Baby's Bad Ass Burgers, faced the same problems. Their trucks were getting towed and ticketed repeatedly—even seized—for violations that included being within a hundred feet of a restaurant or selling in one spot for longer than thirty minutes. Truck workers were routinely harassed by police, meter maids, and health department officials, with each citing different and often contradictory regulations. Geller looked up these laws and quickly realized that some of them were in violation of California's own constitution, whereas judges
had actually struck down others over thirty years before. At that meeting the truck owners decided to form an association in order to pool their resources and speak with a common voice, led by Geller. They called themselves the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association (SCMFVA).

The SCMFVA launched their food truck lot the next day, with four trucks, tons of customers, and three TV stations coming to cover the event. Two days after that the city of Santa Monica showed up and shut down the lot for an apparent zoning violation, kicking off Geller's first battle. He quickly researched the applicable laws and saw there was no substance to the zoning claims. Then, in what would prove to be a core strategy of the food truck battles in years to come, Geller got all the trucks in the association to send out Twitter and Facebook messages to their followers, already numbering in the thousands, urging them to write the Santa Monica city council to rectify this injustice and posting the e-mail addresses of councilors. “Suddenly these five part-time councilors are getting hammered with e-mails,” Geller said. “They were getting pissed. Santa Monica put us on the very next agenda meeting. In that meeting, two weeks later, they tasked their planning department to come up with a mechanism to allow street truck vending.” The harassment stopped, and within a few months the planning department agreed to offer the food trucks temporary vending permits in the areas they wanted. However, they still enforced an old rule that vending could only happen for thirty minutes at a time in one spot, an impossible situation for a food truck needing to capture a steady lunch business. “It had no connection with public safety,” Geller said. “We asked Santa Monica, ‘Why's it there?' ‘Because we said so,' ” the city said. “But it contradicts California state vehicle code 22455, which allows the regulation of food trucks only for public safety.” So Geller and the SCMFVA took Santa Monica to court, where the judge ruled in their favor and revoked the time limit. It would be the first legal victory of many for Geller and a precedent for how he would use the courts to fight for food trucks everywhere.

In the years since he founded the SCMFVA, the organization has grown to include over 130 trucks, each paying dues that fund
Geller's legal challenges to antitruck legislation across Southern California. He and his lawyers have filed over two dozen lawsuits against cities, towns, and counties and brought significant public pressure on lawmakers at every level of government. When a state representative proposed a law restricting food trucks from selling within fifteen hundred feet of any school in California, Geller went to Sacramento, had 180,000 Twitter followers send messages to the lawmaker who proposed the bill, and rallied the press until the legislation was scrapped. He is aggressive and unflinching in his advocacy—a bulldog for food trucks.

“I'm not going to make deals,” Geller said. “I'm not going to get involved with sitting in a room with restaurant owners, splitting consumer dollars. Not going to do that. I'm going to take that hard line approach because the public's been so supportive. I don't look at lawsuits as aggressive. The only mechanism you have in that case is the court system. If a city says no, and we sue them and they back off, we'll still go in and help them write regulations. What I'm saying is that you [the city] doesn't have ultimate say.”

Geller's goal is to establish a legislative standard for food trucks that takes care of the necessary health and safety requirements for serving food and operating trucks while also prohibiting regulations that exist purely to curb competition or impose some arbitrary aesthetic standard. “In a perfect world there's no associations,” said Geller. “Trucks do what they want to do, cook food for their customers, and just run their business. Why would you want to form an association and spend another five to ten hours a month fighting for the right to do what you're doing? In an ideal world I'd be doing something else.”

That seems unlikely, given the reality on the ground. In nearly every territory where food trucks have emerged, which is pretty much most cities on the continent, legislation has been tabled or selectively enforced that has curbed food trucks' ability to work. New York requires truck owners to have valid licenses and permits but has capped the number of permits it issues, as did New Orleans so that they are only available on the black market. Toronto has prohibited food trucks selling on its streets and, depending on
the location, private property as well. Rochester only allowed food trucks to sell from two locations, selected by lottery, and Cincinnati restricted trucks from parking in certain areas of downtown. Trucks in some cities were required to rent space in stationary commissary kitchens, whereas other cities only let their trucks serve reheated food, with nothing being cooked fresh. Some districts have levied proximity restrictions, which prohibit food trucks from parking within a certain distance—anywhere from two hundred to one thousand feet—of a restaurant or any other business selling food. In cities like Chicago this has basically banished trucks from the city center, which is rife with restaurants. Chicago also instituted a GPS tracking system so it can monitor food trucks by satellite and automatically fine them if they stray outside that boundary. One article compared their use to the tracking bracelets people under house arrest wear, but an infraction of these rules would saddle Chicago food truck operators with a $2,000 fine, which, the same article noted, is more than the city issued for possessing certain drugs.