Una Ragazza on Eat: Truck Me My Food!

When it comes to eating in New York, my options have traditionally been at restaurants or at home (at a friend’s or my own).

In recent years, an in-between option has taken the city by storm.

Food trucks, sometimes known as mobile kitchens, have been popping up all over the place. About the size of a small U-Haul (a popular U.S. brand of moving trucks), they pack a punch in terms of the range of food and beverages that can come out of that space.

However, it wasn’t that long ago that when New Yorkers think about street food, only three types of food typically come to mind:

1. The hot dog and pretzel stand: So iconic of the city has this become, that the flagship Toys”R”Us store in Times Square has a permanent Lego display of a mobile cart.

2. The breakfast cart: On weekdays, there is one -- sometimes two -- breakfast carts on each block in Midtown and the Financial District, and many others strewn around the city. My staple is the 75-cent sugar donut.

3. The Nuts-4-Nuts cart: The fragrance of honey-roasted peanuts, almonds and cashews almost nearly tempts me to forget my nut allergies whenever I walk by one of these fellas.

Some say the recent food truck phenomenon all began with the DessertTruck. The brainchild of a young Asian-American pastry sous chef from Le Cirque, this was the first upmarket food truck I’d heard of.

One weekend night in the fall of 2007, after my friends and I had finished our entrees, one of the guys suggested we walk up a few blocks to the East Village to find the DessertTruck.

“It’s this truck that sells amazing restaurant-quality desserts, like warm chocolate bread pudding,” explains E, a foodie who works as a restaurant consultant.

True enough, this cute little truck was churning out gourmet items minus the high price tags. Everywhere it goes (you can follow it on Twitter), a queue is in tow.

It wasn’t long before other food trucks selling mobile desserts joined the foray. Even the Cooking Channel has its own ice-cream truck! Over the course of the new year, more and more food varieties started appearing on the streets. Pot stickers (guo1 tie1, for my Mandarin-speaking friends) and Wafels and Dinges (“waffles and thingies”) are some of the popular snacks I'd next encountered emerging from these trucks.

For a recent birthday, I even celebrated the occasion by going on a food truck “hunt-and-eat” in the Meatpacking District organized by the Food Network. The evening began with a long queue to register for a coveted food map that outlines the locations of the food trucks and their specialties. To make things more interesting, a host of restaurants was also invited to participate alongside these food trucks, creating a competition for the longest line of hungry people with “food stamps” in recent New York history. Additionally, retail stores along the route also joined in the fun by offering free wine and champagne to lubricate the thirsty souls while enticing them to browse their fall/winter collection of sunglasses, shoes and bags.

The evening turned out to be a good combination of eating, drinking, and chatting about which pit stop had the best offering. For me, i had not one, but five winners -- sashimi, steak tartare, garlic fries, Belgian waffles and olive ice cream.

Since that day, I have started to believe that one can very well go on a food tour in New York without ever sitting down at a table. I found myself keeping a lookout for food trucks, paying special attention to how they’re dressed since these proprietors needed to attract so much attention and open wallets with their outer covering.

Here is a photo sampling of the colorful mobiles I snapped:

La Cense Beef, voted one of the top 25 best food trucks by New York Magazine, is typically found in Midtown East or the Wall Street area

I spotted Mexicue in Union Square as they were opening shop one Saturday morning

I frequently walk by Ah1 Puo2 de (aka Granny's potstickers), which is parked right outside the new(ish) Trader Joe's on 72nd and Broadway

Pretty, pretty cupcakes... one of my top choices for a food truck theme, if I were ever to open one.

Jumping on the bandwagon of Pinkberry and Red Mango, here comes YOGO in the Flatiron District.

Guess what I found when I paid a friend in Seattle a visit? Here's Maximus Minimus, the pulled pork sandwich food truck in Seattle's famous Pike Place. Note: it's license plate reads "SOMEPIG."

A BBQ food truck in Puerto Rico! Food trucks migrating south for the winter, or a sign that this is really more than a fad?

Perhaps the most entrepreneurial of them all is Cookies N Cream, because it is not even a food truck! It has latched onto people’s psyche that a vehicle shaped like a food truck with a delicious-sounding name must have something desirable inside it. It also has found itself a semi-permanent spot along Broadway in the high-traffic, touristy part of Soho. What does it sell? Funky-looking T-shirts and toys. Judging from the curious onlookers and interested customers, I’d say it may have caught on to something.

Could this be the start of a new trend?

What next -- Q-tips and facials on the go?