food trucks

You like bagels. You like burgers. Now imagine combining the two. Genius! That’s what you’ll find at the Round the Way food truck: toasted bagels with a range of delicious fillings. It’s breakfast, it’s lunch, it’s any meal you darn well want.

We cruised on over to Round the Way at the farmers’ market on the banks of the beautiful Lake Wendouree on the weekend, on our way to visit Sovereign Hill. I was in a brunch mood and was dreaming about a classic toasted sesame-seed bagel with cream cheese (my go-to breakfast from the Thompson Cafe downstairs in my building when I lived in SoHo).

Unfortunately the friendly Round the Way fellas were way too sophisticated for that so, instead, I ‘settled’ for a slightly sweet filling of orange and chia-seed cream cheese. Let the person who didn‘t get so stuck into her bagel that she forgot to photograph it until half way through the meal complain about that!

Other options on the menu for the day were mixed berry cream cheese; smoked salmon with capers, red onion, fresh dill, rocket and cream cheese; a good old BLAT; grilled sheep-cheese with rocket, tomato and beetroot pesto; and a grilled chicken bagel with spiced Cuban rum, lettuce, tomato and lime mayonnaise.

Oh and freshly squeezed orange juice, to perfect the breakfast experience. We took our juices and bagels down to a bridge by the lake so Madeleine could watch the swans, and I promise I didn’t throw anything to the ducks. Not even a crumb.

I’m eating my way through the wares of all the food trucks in Melbourne. Here’s where I’m up to so far. The things I do for you guys.

Once upon a time a little family was driving along a drab and dreary section of Lygon Street on their way to buy groceries. Suddenly, amid the gloom of traffic and medium-rise building construction and set against the backdrop of a new and used tyre warehouse, they caught a glimpse of the shiny new Trailer Made food truck.

So we parked the car and decamped for a mid-afternoon lunch.

One of Melbourne’s newest food trucks, Trailer Made doesn’t stick to just one style of food or any particular region, instead serving up food inspired by the owners’ travels throughout Europe, China and Korea, visiting street vendors and hawkers’ markets.

Case in point: on the menu today were latkes (a kind of potato cake normally enjoyed during Hanukkah) served up with smoked salt and slaw; spiced chickpeas with Turkish yoghurt and cucumber salad; Israeli chicken skewers with corn sauce and cous cous; and a beef bun that had sold out by the time we got there.

We found a grubby little park not far away, complete with a teeny-tiny playground that made my little girl very happy indeed, and turned the afternoon into a last-minute picnic.

I invite you to admire Mr B’s order of Israeli chicken, smothered in a homemade chilli sauce and definitely admired by Madeleine (who later helped herself to fistfuls of corn and giant couscous). The salad was amazing too.

My potato cakes were full of crispy goodness and I had to share more than I would have liked to with a hungry and adventurous little toddler. Thanks to Baby B2 growing happily in my belly I skipped the aioli, but I’m thinking the bed of slaw under the latkes may have been even better without it. Have you ever had salty slaw? Holy moly!

And also, this was THE BEST iced tea I’ve ever tasted. Even including all those iced teas I downed on my road-trip through the southern states of the USA. Rose water and pomegranate were in there, I don’t know what else. I’m going to start experimenting at home because I can’t wait for Trailer Made to roll back my way before I have more.

Trailer Made is all about being responsible and inclusive. “Amy and I have put our heads together to come up with ideas for what we think is important for a business today,” Chef Casey Norman says on the Trailer Made website.

“Biodegradable packaging, locally-sourced menu and catering for vegans, vegos, meat eaters, coeliacs and the diversity of food lovers.”

And the sprinkles on top of our impromptu foodie afternoon? My old friend the Brûlée Cart was parked right next to Trailer Made! Behold, once again, the perfect toffee-crack (and behold, one greedy baby trying to steal ALL THE BRÛLÉE from her father).

I love living in the “food truck heartland” of the Inner North. Food trucks make me so happy. Here are some more I’ve been sampling, if you’re interested.

ps. Sorry about the slightly dodgy iPhone photography. I hadn’t thought to bring my camera with me on what was meant to be a quick shopping trip to Safeway.

It’s a food truck. That sells crème brûlée. Honestly I could stop right there.

But I won’t.

Only a couple of weeks old, the Brûlée Cart debuted amid the patio lights, floating flamingos and historic buildings of Trailer Park, a weekend gathering of food trucks in the Village Melbourne precinct.

Village Melbourne is the relatively-new kid on the old Belgian Beer Cafe block, on St Kilda Road. There’s food and wine, music, theatre, comedy and special events a-plenty. And on weekends throughout August and September, there’s a curated gathering of food trucks! I took myself and my taste buds down to Trailer Park on the weekend and joined the line for a takeout tub of burnt cream of my very own. The flavour choices were classic French vanilla, nutella and strawberry, and salted caramel. Apparently they change regularly. After not a little internal debate, I chose the salted caramel.

They pulled out a blowtorch and set the toffee then and there while I watched, and followed it up with a generous grind of black rock-salt to finish things off. That added nice little bit of theatre to the usual food truck experience, I thought.

Oh and the dessert itself was sublime. The custard was sweet and sloppy (just the way I like it) and full of flavour.

And the best part? The toffee crust was thin, beautifully set, and cracked exactly the way it was supposed to. See for yourself.

ps. The Brûlée Cart was put on the road through crowdfunding. It’s such a clever world we live in these days, don’t you think?

ps2. More food trucks!

Folks, I put it to you that Babes on Grill are the actual Spice Girls of Melbourne: young, good looking gals who also happen to have some serious skills behind the BBQ grill.

The babes have been popping up with their smoky menus at venues indoors and out all over the city for the past year and a bit so, when Madeleine and I heard they’d be at the Queen Victoria Market, we rugged up and marched on over for a fresh and flavoursome lunch.

However, we discovered a little more than we had bargained for, arriving at the tail end of a heated (literally) competition between the babes and TV chef Miguel Maestre to outsell one another on chicken rolls, for charity.

We joined the line for the girls. Gotta support the sistas.

Babes on Grill were serving up chipotle chicken hot rolls with barbequed free-range chicken, crispy slaw, guacamole, tomato and pepper salsa, and Kewpie mayonnaise. Sisters or not, who could bypass that?

But while the girls were busy grilling up my chipotle chicken, that wily Miguel turned on all his charm to win Madeleine over to his side. He was all over her with the “Aw what a cutie,” and “Come on! You want me to win this challenge, don’t you!”

Madeleine was fascinated. And in the end, a crazy Spaniard in a bow-tie was too much personality for one baby to resist: she gave him her seal of approval in the form of a high five. So much for sisterly solidarity, Little Miss.

I won’t tell you who won the competition, you’ll need to watch out for upcoming episodes of The Living Room on Channel 10 to find out.

Although this photo may give you a hint as to the outcome.

But I will tell you my hot chicken roll was ah-may-zing. I wolfed it down in approximately one minute. With or without the TV cameras, I’ll be first in line the next time these girls pop up again in my ‘hood.

Just before I left the market, I spotted another food truck, one that had been around for more than 60 years. So I figured I should try out the wares on sale, in the name of good reporting and all that. The things I do for you guys.

ps. Have you sampled the Gumbo Kitchen wares? Tried a burger from THE Mr Burger? Want still more Meals on Wheels?

When a food truck rolls into your ‘hood on the weekend, the best thing you can do is tuck a blanket (ideally made of excessively vibrant granny-squares) under your arm, call your friends, and make a picnic of it.

The Dos Diablos food truck is both cheap and cheerful. Tacos and fries, that’s it. Or at least, that was it the afternoon we visited the little food devils, along with our good friend Tonia. It was the perfect combo.

There were three choices of taco fillings, including a vegetarian option, and it’s good to note that the whole menu is gluten-free, if that is important to you.

Miss Madeleine had been perfectly happy with her little lunch of steamed carrots and beans until she saw the fries. All of a sudden, half-chewed pieces of carrot were tossed unceremoniously onto the blanket and she positively lunged for the fries. Geez they start young these days, don’t they.

ps. More of Melbourne’s food trucks

Maybe you know, or maybe you don’t, that I’ve been following food trucks and vans around the streets of Melbourne for the past few months to sample their delicious wares. It’s probably one of the best assignments I’ve ever set myself. These are the trucks I’ve visited so far (loads more to come!).

A few people have asked me how I know where the trucks are at any given time, since there are a LOT of food trucks in Melbourne and even if you followed them all on Twitter or Facebook, the odds of finding the one near you in your social media stream at right time aren’t great. So today I’m going to reveal my secret: wherethetruck.at.

Created by three Melbourne blokes (Jack, Tom and Xavier) who love meals on wheels, wherethetruck.at is a website that tracks food trucks’ whereabouts in real time on a map, so you just select your city of choice and voila! Trucks R Us! Recently Tom was good enough to spill the goss on how this website came to be and what the trio is planning next.

ME: Food trucks: what do you love about them? What should WE love about them?

TOM: I love that it’s all about quality food, done quickly and cheaply, all the while embracing our beautiful Australian landscape as the dining room. What should you love? That it’s happening! It’s so grass roots, no pretentious maître d’, no bill shock, no need to dress up. It’s all about fun, food and friends.

ME: What inspired you to start wherethetruck.at? How did you come up with the idea?

TOM: It was actually Xavier’s idea, he saw something similar being done in the States, was pretty keen on the food trucks here, and so thought that we could put something together that was the best location service for food trucks and food truck enthusiasts.

ME: How long did it take for you go from idea to launch? Talk me through the process.

TOM: From inception to our public launch (March, Food Trucks United for Melbourne Food & Wine Festival) it took about a week. A LOT of coding, a LOT of late nights, a LOT of help from good girlfriends and from there it’s been a very interesting ride. We basically screen printed our own t-shirts, got some stickers made up and then walked around for two days at Food Trucks Unite talking to people, giving them stickers, telling them about the site – from there we haven’t looked back. Since March we’ve had over 100,000 people use our website to find themselves lunch or dinner from one of Australia’s gourmet food trucks, and that’s totally awesome.

ME: How do you guys know each other?

TOM: Xavier and I worked together at a market research company many moons ago (two-ish years ago?), we’ve been talking about ideas and things we could get going as a cool project for ages and this is the one that we made stick. Jack came on board as our Code Monkey on the day we launched V1 of the site and has been pushing the limits of WordPress ever since. I met him at my place, he’s a friend of my housemate, it was very serendipitous… He was around having a drink with my housemate and we were all shooting the shit, he came on board the next day – after a quick little dev task we gave him.

ME: How do you work together on this project? Who does what and how do you all keep in touch?

TOM: Email, Skype, face to face, SMS, phone…it’s probably fair to say that around all of our day jobs, Jack’s and my girlfriends and then Xavier’s wife… it can be difficult to do exactly that. Keeping lines of communication open between the three of us is certainly our biggest challenge. We somehow mash the thing together though, things always work out in the end.

ME: What’s next for this project?

TOM: Well first up it’s our app*, we NEED to get this going SOON and so any support you and your readers can throw our way would be so greatly appreciated. From here, once we’ve got Australia’s scene sorted out we’ll be taking it to the States as the food trucking scene over there is just enormous. Bit of work to do here first though…

* At the time of this interview, the guys were crowd-sourcing funding to develop a smartphone app for wherethetruck.at. They reached their target, so look out for this app soon!

ME: If you could pick a cuisine that’s not yet supplied on wheels here in Melbourne, what would it be?

TOM: Vietnamese!!!!! We need a Banh Mi van like nothing else, imagine tucking in to a beautiful French baguette stuffed full of Vietnamese grilled pork, coriander, pâté etc on a warm summer’s evening… YUM!!!!

ME: Tell me a funny food-truck-related experience.

TOM: The FUN(iest) experience to date has been trying to get people who don’t quite understand the concept of a “gourmet food truck” to understand that you won’t get food poisoning from a dirty kebab here!!! Australians have been so conditioned to expecting that anything served out the side of a truck is bad news: dirty kebabs, soggy burgers…yuk. So taking friends and family along to a gourmet food truck for the first time is always a lot of fun, they’re skeptical until the first mouthful, then their faces light up,
and most of them are hooked from then on.

ME: Anything else you want to say?

TOM: We do this for the love of it, it can be tough sometimes as we don’t make any money from the site however there is an expectation of quality from both a user’s and the trucks’ perspective. We love that people love our site, what makes it all worthwhile is when somebody has something nice to say about us and what we’re doing. That’s the fun bit for us, when we get feedback from our users saying that they love using our service.

If you live in Australia, go to wherethetruck.at and select your city to find your nearest food truck. For photos and a bit of a story about the trucks, click on my Meals on Wheels tag at any time as I eat my way through the streets of Melbourne.

ps. Last chance to win some beautiful handmade gifts by Sparkling Flora

The day was grey. The car park alongside and empty strip of Lygon Street was desolate. On the side of the road, a man sat with his arm around his teenaged son beside a parked truck, and that truck was the one bright place for miles around.

The truck was the Beatbox Kitchen, one of Melbourne’s many food trucks, and it assaulted the senses with happiness on that lonely strip. Splashes of red and yellow, painted onto the side of the truck, lit up the sidewalk, while a cheerful row of orange lights warmed an awning over the truck’s side window. An 80s beat-box renovated into an iPod dock sent Otis Redding’s rhythm and blues out into the street, and the burgers sizzling on the grill made tummies grumble from blocks away.

I was buying for three, so I ordered a couple of Raph Burgers for Mr B and Em, and a Shroom Burger for me, as well as some crispy shoe-string fries to share. We took them home and had a picnic on our lounge-room floor, with Madeleine rolling around on the rug and trying to put her feet in the spicy tomato dipping-sauce.

Both kinds of burgers were delicious, and my marinated and grilled portobello mushroom replacement for a meat patty was as juicy as they come. All we needed was some Otis Redding on my iPod to make it perfect.

ps. Curious about more of Melbourne’s food trucks? I’m slowly eating my way through them, one by one. Here’s what I’ve tried so far.