Cart-ography
I was five steps out of the shuttle when I saw the line. In the two minutes it took me to walk from the Red Shuttle stop to Dr. Jung’s Kimchi Corner, the 15-person line became 20. Med school students and doctors stood in the cold, lab coats bundled tightly under thick coats and scarves. But Jung Sung-ryong, the man behind the grill, wore only a thin blue sweater over his shirt. A spatula in his right hand smacked fresh pork and beef onto the blacktop griddle; his left hand pulled bright red pickled cabbage from a cooler behind him. The undergrad at the front of the line fumbled for his wallet. Jung asked, “Lunch combo? Bibimbap? You want that on rice?” Oil from the grill splattered on his thickly muscled forearms, but he didn’t even flinch. Sliding sweet potato japchae in with chilled tofu and a dollop of peppery gojuchang into a styrofoam container destined for a lucky nurse, he turned to the person ahead of me. “You want the lunch combo?”
The lunch combo came highly recommended to me by my friend, Amy Yang, BK ’19, who is perhaps Jung’s most committed fan. When I asked her about his cart, she told me that Jung enjoys making pointed commentary about the guests she brings each month. “He knows me now! Every time I go, he’s like, ‘oh what happened to your other boyfriend?’” She laughs and adds, “I always get the spicy pork bulgogi.” Coincidentally, that’s also Jung’s favorite.
When I interviewed Jung, he told me, “the best part of my job is meeting people and talking to people. It sounds a little weird, but. . . I find a lot of pleasure in people.” Jung is by no means the only food cart owner who feels this way. His neighbor on Cedar Street, John Nanneti of Swagat Cuisine, told me that it was harder to engage with his customers when he owned a brick-and-mortar restaurant. But this hasn’t been the case since 2008, when he swapped his restaurant for a food cart. “In the restaurant, I didn’t get as many chances to talk to [the customers]. Now I can, and they always talk to me — some customers always tell me they appreciate the food, and if something’s wrong they can tell me. Now I have many more customer relationships.” When I asked if he would ever consider re-opening his restaurant, he laughed and said, “I don’t really miss it.” Among the food cart vendors on Cedar Street, Nanneti knows of at least four others like him, who followed their love of food straight out of the doors of restaurants they thought they would own forever. It’s always a risk, but Nanneti said, “there aren’t many bills and you don’t have to have any employees. I can do it myself.”
Back at Dr. Jung’s Kimchi Corner, it was finally my turn in line. I ordered the pork bulgogi, and its chili-flecked aroma immediately overwhelmed my journalistic instincts. Before I asked a single question, I paid for my food, smiled, and trundled over to a nearby bench to eat my lunch. All along Cedar Street, I could see vendors selling everything from halal grilled lamb to Thai pumpkin soup. They chatted up their favorite regulars, and even strangers talked to each other in line, trying to figure out what dish to order.
Jung tried to describe the importance of this scene to me later that day. “I love my customers. They’re quite something, just like me! I like to talk, and they’ll listen to me talk. And a lot of them — in modern times, people are lonely. Too much stress. . . but they like to watch me cook,” he says with a smile.
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It’s unclear how long there have been food carts in New Haven. When I spoke to city administrators, they told me that the city doesn’t keep records of how long food cart and truck permits have been issued. But what is obvious is that interest in the mobile food vending industry has exploded in the last decade. Steve Fontana, the Deputy Economic Development Director for the city of New Haven, said that he sees mobile food vending as “a way of promoting the city, promoting opportunity, and making the city a really pleasant place to be.”
Many of New Haven’s established food cart vendors have also noticed an uptick in attention. Jamshid, the owner of two Ali Baba Fusion carts, has been in the business since 2000, and has observed a huge shift in the culinary literacy of his customers on Sachem and Cedar Street: “the new generations and youngsters — it’s amazing! They want to try everything!” He noted, “you won’t see one nationality [of customers] at one cart. They go anywhere.” When Jamshid started, there were only five or six other carts on the block, most of them serving bland American fare. But now, the foods on offer at Ingalls Rink are much more varied, and the customers’ palates have also expanded. “The people — now they’re aware of a lot of different countries’ food. . . back then I used to use a quarter of a bottle of hot sauce. Now we use two bottles of hot sauce!”
But Jamshid isn’t completely on board with the recent boom in food truck culture. As an owner of multiple carts, he has felt the brunt of the the city’s new regulations on the industry, approved this past June. Jamshid’s profits have decreased since the new regulations were implemented, and he holds the city accountable. Carts like Ali Baba now have to pay an annual fee of $1,000 (the fee for food trucks, which have engines of their own, is $2,400) to hold a spot in one of the city’s most popular “special vending districts,” which include downtown, Sachem Street, Cedar Street, and Long Wharf. While this fee pales in comparison to the highest paid by a food cart vendor in New York (a staggering $289,500), it is still the first New Haven vendors have had to pay. “It used to be nothing, you know?” Jamshid said.
Not all of New Haven’s vendors are as upset by the recent regulatory overhaul. Nanneti said that he didn’t mind the new regulation requiring liability insurance, since it would protect customers and vendors alike. He’s fine with the new fee, too. “At least they’re letting people make money. So I have no complaints about the city charging us $1,000 a year,” Nanneti pointed out. Jung simply said, “it’s still doable.”
Another change made this summer was a lottery system for spots in the special vending districts. A common system in larger cities with more established mobile food vending industries, the lottery in New Haven did garner complaints, especially from multiple-cart owners like Jamshid. But Fontana told me that they “grandfathered” in all of the existing single-cart owners who filled out the appropriate paperwork (multiple-cart owners were not extended the same guarantee), and then held a random draw for the remaining spots, with the leftover vendors going onto a waitlist. “What we wanted to do was try to create opportunity for people who weren’t in the business currently but wanted to get into it,” he said. Fontana also mentioned that they increased the number of available spots in each of the special vending districts in an effort to expand opportunity and let people in off the waitlist. While the increased vendor fees and the steady progress of the industry are sizeable sources of potential revenue for New Haven, the city does seem to recognize that food carts are a relatively easy way for immigrants and other newcomers to enter the food industry.
All of the vendors I spoke to appreciated the opportunities owning a food cart had given them. Jorge, the owner of La Carreta on Sachem Street, said, “in the beginning when I started, there were no Mexicans. Just an Arab guy and me and the Thai guy. In the beginning there were hot dogs, more American food. But when immigrant people want to open their own business, they want to do what they do in their own country.” Many of the vendors I interviewed, including Jorge and Nanneti, had previous restaurant experience before starting their own carts. Food carts typically cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 to set up. While $2,000 is by no means an insignificant amount of money, buying a cart involves a lot less time, effort, and financial risk than starting a brick-and-mortar restaurant does. Jung told me that owning his own food cart, while taxing, offered him creative and financial control. He said that when you own a restaurant, “once you fail big-time you cannot bounce back.” But when you own a cart, you’re in control of your own fate.
Laura Barraclough, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale, said that when she lived in Los Angeles, “people routinely walked through the neighborhood pushing small carts selling ice cream, roasted corn, fruits, and juices, after-school snacks for kids.” But she also wrote that, while food carts are a way for immigrants to engage in public space, the main reason that people turn to them — as vendors or as consumers — is economic: “food trucks have historically been, and continue to be, a very accessible form of entrepreneurship for immigrants.” Barraclough did express some hesitation about the city’s new regulatory system. She worries that the entrepreneurial accessibility, which is key to the social power of food carts, may be diluted as the city’s guidelines and zoning ordinances become stricter and more specific.
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Opinions differ as to what brought about the rise of the modern food cart. Quan Tran, a Lecturer in Yale’s Ethnicity, Race, and Migration department, believes that the 2008 recession may have contributed to the recent surge in food carts and trucks. “As some of the traditional food cart/truck businesses folded, there was a turnover in ownership as workers who had been laid off in the restaurant business and restaurant entrepreneurs look[ed] to. . . alternatives and lower risk investments in a climate of economic uncertainties,” she wrote in an email.
Others, like Dave Bishop, attribute the recent growth to a “hipster movement.” Bishop, a food truck business consultant as well as the owner of a sandwich truck in Ontario, told me that food trucks have been “sort of a fad for the decade.” He hesitated over the word “hipster,” qualifying it by saying, “there’s a lot of fusion, a lot of people experimenting with new cuisines.” Tran notes that while German hot dog carts and Mexican tamale carts have been around in the U.S. since the 1800s, the popularity of this era’s food carts and trucks must also be partially attributed to social media, on top of the changing tastes of millennial consumers.
In New Haven, there is ample evidence of newer, shinier, social-media-equipped food trucks operating alongside more traditional carts. Some, like the Caseus grilled cheese truck, are connected to brick-and-mortar establishments. Others, like the Fryborg and the Jitter Bus coffee truck, have established their own vending district at the intersection of Grove and Hillhouse.
Dan Barletta is one of the Jitter Bus’s three owners, and has lived in West Haven his entire life. While working in cafés around New Haven, Barletta and his friends saved up their paychecks and raised the rest of their capital through a Kickstarter campaign. But from a certain perspective, the owners of the Jitter Bus are more traditional than vendors you might see a couple blocks away at Ingalls Rink: Barletta and his partners hope to open up a brick-and-mortar café in New Haven. “We’ve been looking at a couple places here and there, but we haven’t found the perfect place yet,” Barletta said.
Elihu Rubin, Associate Professor at the Yale School of Architecture, senses a potential conflict between the newer, hipster trucks and the old vanguard of immigrant cart vendors. Of course, not every food truck is a marker for hipsterism or gentrification; some of the Mexican, Central, and South-American food trucks on Long Wharf have been there for decades. But Rubin worries that the old-school cart industry may eventually be appropriated by more elite forms of the same business model. This scenario seems even more likely with the city’s new attention to regulating the industry. Because of the cap on numbers and the lottery entrance system, food carts in each of the special vending districts are less mobile and more closely monitored than the Hillhouse food trucks are. Barraclough said that “one attraction of food trucks is that they can move around the city to where their customers are. . . if [food carts] lose that ability, they essentially become more like restaurants, fixed in place.”
Since food trucks are more expensive to own than food carts (the low-end of the custom food-truck market averages out to around $15,000, according to the vendors I interviewed), Rubin believes that the barrier to enter the industry may rise as the popularity of food trucks grow. Rubin, a city planner and architectural historian, has lived in New Haven on and off for 20 years. He remains optimistic that these tensions can be managed; he said that the division between immigrant and hipster vendors isn’t necessarily a destructive phenomenon. But he did add that while “food culture can express the most diverse and democratic aspects of a city. . . food culture can also be elite.” Rubin pointed out that New Haven’s food culture also struggles with a lopsided distribution of resources. “Provision and access to healthy food is something that’s spread unevenly across the city,” he said.
While locations such as Cedar Street and Long Wharf have become showpieces for the city, trumpeted as foodie destinations, other neighborhoods in New Haven still struggle with complex issues of hunger and public access to food. The Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE), is an organization based at the Yale School of Public Health. Recently, CARE released a report called “The State of Hunger in New Haven: Report on Food Insecurity & Recommendations for Action 2017–2018.” The most recent survey included in the report was conducted in the fall of 2016 and canvassed 1,189 residents from six low-income neighborhoods in New Haven (Dixwell, Fair Haven, Hill North, Newhallville, West River/Dwight, and West Rock/West Hills). The report states that in New Haven, 22 percent of the city’s residents are food insecure, “with not enough food or money to buy food,” much higher than the state rate of 12 percent and the national rate of 13 percent. In the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, food insecurity impacts one in three adults.
According to the USDA’s food access research atlas, large parts of New Haven have been officially designated as food deserts. One of the neighborhoods highlighted on the atlas is The Annex, located on the eastern shore of the New Haven Harbor across from Long Wharf, where food trucks can once again be hailed as “part of our vibrant local economy,” as Fontana put it. And he’s right that food trucks are “a real source of innovation, energy, and creativity” for New Haven. But many believe that the city’s self-promotion as a culinary capital deserves a more critical lens.
Rubin explained that New Haven represents “a lot of the confounding issues that American cities have faced and will face in the future.” Even though Rubin loves New Haven for its diversity and vibrancy, he noted that it remains a very segregated city with clear areas of vitality and neglect. “New Haven embodies this challenge — I think it’s an urban challenge anywhere — of unevenness, of how to make equitable, how to spread as evenly as possible the fruits of urban development.”
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Even though their industry has become increasingly complicated in the last few years, most vendors are still optimistic about their place in it. When I called Nanneti on the Saturday after we met, he was two hours into his five-hour prep session. “We have to put in the chicken powder. Yeah, five of them.” I could hear his voice over the bustle from the kitchen that he rents out on weekends. “Javier, can you hold on for a second? One second, Emily.” There was shuffling and a steady chopping noise. “Yeah these herbs here. Hey — don’t forget to mix that! Actually that’s still okay.”
When he came back to the phone, Nanneti told me that his perspective on cooking is different now than when he owned the restaurant. “The spices we use — now I want to improve, so I don’t control the food cost. I use a lot of very good, expensive herbs in the food.” Laughing, he said, “I don’t know how important food carts are to other people, but they’re important to me!”
Jorge at La Carreta had a similar feeling. “I’ve been here for a long time, and we see them every day. And we’re there for business and to take care of the people who buy the food from us. From Monday to Friday, we’re in that same location. And eventually you get familiar with each other,” he told me. He also said that there’s a strong sense of community among the vendors themselves, some of whom have been sidewalk neighbors for a decade. “People are immigrants, and they really help you. If you have a problem someone will help you. We’re like a family over here.”
And even though it’s easy to see the Jitter Bus as an emblem of gentrification and of the rapid turnover in the industry, Barletta still alludes to the same sense of community among vendors: “the Caseus grilled cheese truck and Chief Brody’s [Banh Mi] truck park in front of us now and then, and they’re really cool — we usually trade them coffee for sandwiches.” He added, “everyone that I’ve dealt with has been extremely nice, and I haven’t really met anyone in the food truck community that I don’t like.”
To many, the value of New Haven’s mobile food industry transcends simple revenue streams. Rubin continually referenced a “gravitational pull” and “place-making effect” that groups of food carts provide for the neighborhoods they serve. Barraclough concurs: “It’s not just the food, but also the public culture around the food — the fact that people actually hang out together in public, play music, let their kids play nearby. . . that makes me feel more at home.”
New Haven’s food cart culture also celebrates an oft-overlooked part of the city: “Food cart and truck vendors are daily reminders of the hard work of immigrants — in this case, those in the food service industry,” Tran wrote in an email. When we discussed the vendor-driven redevelopment of the once-neglected Long Wharf stretch of I-95, Tran affirmed that “their labor and presence have helped transform the New Haven landscape in tangible ways.”
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As I walked home from Sachem Street, I stopped at a food cart that I’ve passed by every day this semester. Parked by itself right outside Payne-Whitney Gym, Narvan, which serves Iranian-American fare, is a newcomer to the New Haven food cart scene. When I interviewed the owner Ramin, and his mom Nasrin, he held his arms out wide and proclaimed, “we are the first Iranian-American food in New Haven!” Thirteen years ago, they immigrated from Iran, where their family’s business was catering. They saved up for a year in order to buy and outfit the cart. So far, they’ve spent two months on a waitlist for the special vending districts, but they remain optimistic: when I asked what I should order, Nasrin insisted that “the kebab is the best.” They said they were grateful for “the smiles of the customers” and for the support of other vendors they’ve met since opening up shop.
It was then that I thought of something Jung told me earlier that week. I asked him why New Haven needed food cart vendors, and he replied with a hypothetical: “Imagine the city streets if there weren’t food carts! The streets would be un-human.” He paused, then said, “we add to the city streets a very human aspect of livelihood.” I stepped back from the Narvan countertop, promising Ramin and Nasrin to return and sample their ghormeh sabze as soon as possible. Behind me, a line was beginning to form.
