All in the Brand: The Food Truck That the Media Built

Decisions about what to air during sweeps season say a lot about what the media thinks of the state of our nation. So when Good Morning America asked viewers to nominate their favorite street vendors as part of its national “Best Food Cart Challenge,” just in time for November sweeps, it was clear that, at least in the eyes of the media, America is food-cart crazy.

Not since Carrie and Miranda first turned the country on to the joys of the cupcake has a food trend garnered such a flurry of attention, and in New York, it’s a veritable media frenzy. From the New York Times (which has awarded the subject of street food with its own Times Topic) to the city’s most popular food blogs to the Tyra Banks Show to BlackBook’s own contribution to the hysteria by coining the term “vendrification”, there seems to be an endless fascination with the ways of the cart.

So how did the new generation of vendors become media darlings?

It started organically enough. Jerome Chang, a Le Cirque-trained pastry chef, launched his DessertTruck in 2007 selling high-end desserts like crème brulée and milk chocolate and peanut butter mousse, and the press responded quickly. In a city always looking for the next big thing, especially when it comes to food, this new gambit (which actually followed on the heels of the earlier Treats Truck) warranted attention. However, it wasn’t just that Chang and other early entrants into the nouveau street cart scene were doing something new—it was that they were also changing up something old. In the Times, Florence Fabricant wondered how the humble ice cream truck would respond to Chang and his partners’ mission to “elevate street food.” Part of the story was about how these new carts were taking something very familiar—eating food from a street cart—and transforming it into something new and fancier.

With a focus on the differences between the new carts and the older ones, a slightly uncomfortable quandary arose: what to call these new vendors. The press tried a variety of descriptors, from “high-end” to “upscale” to “gourmet” to “yuppie, each carrying with it vaguely uncomfortable class distinctions. According to Kenny Lao, whose Rickshaw Dumpling Bar truck was among the first new-school trucks to offer savory fare, this categorization created a false tension among food carts. He would prefer that the new trucks be referred to as “branded.” In other words, “Trucks with an actual name versus a chicken and rice truck with no name on it,” he explains. “I think it’s much more indicative of what we’re trying to do. Less discriminatory on the part of the press.”