Parked curbside, trucks offer food served quickly, not fast food

Out on the street, outside in the farmers markets, alongside parks, with no restaurant in sight, the smells of fresh food cooking waft through the air and tantalize. Tomatoes gently roast, bacon sizzles, fresh mozzarella melts and oozes, forming tiny cheesy bubbles. Mushrooms swim in warm butter. Meats simmer and spices pepper the air, stirring appetites.

In August 2012, the Kalamazoo City Commission passed an ordinance that allows food truck vendors to do business in Kalamazoo, selling food from their trucks, equipped with kitchens, as long as they are parked no less than 150 feet from a brick-and-mortar restaurant. The ordinance passed unanimously, and in the year since, food trucks and mobile food units have appeared throughout Kalamazoo, doing a brisk and delicious business.

"The ordinance hadn’t been changed in some 50 years," says Noel Corwin, chef and owner of Gorilla Gourmet, operating out of a white truck decorated with the in-your-face immense likeness of a gorilla. "I started my business about three-and-a-half years ago, at the farmers market and catering, but about two-and-a-half years ago, I started having a conversation with Kalamazoo mayor Bobby Hopewell about the food truck ordinance."

The Kalamazoo City Commission and the mayor expressed concerns about keeping a fair proximity to restaurants, Corwin says, and they wanted to know about cleanliness in a mobile kitchen. Corwin got involved in expanded conversations with the local health department to address and put to rest those concerns. Mobile food units undergo rigorous health inspections, just like any restaurant would.

"We had to dispel many myths," says Corwin. "People thought of food trucks as carnie food or festival food. They expected hot dogs and burgers, but we offer restaurant-quality food, something different and fresh. Over this year, public perception is changing."

Corwin, like many of the local food truck and mobile food unit owners, is a trained chef with many years of experience. Since the food ordinance has allowed food to be sold on the street, business has flourished.

Says Corwin: "Food trucks have limited space, so food is a constantly circulating, always fresh inventory, so in fact it is often fresher than what you might find in a brick-and-mortar kitchen."

That freshness doesn’t just apply to food. It can apply to coffee, too. Coffee Rescue delivers fair trade, locally micro-roasted beans in a converted ambulance that delivers to your place of business whenever you have a coffee emergency.

"The first year for Coffee Rescue was full of exciting challenges, the whirlwind of the public spotlight, and the support of a great community," says Jamie Brock, manager. "Food trucks have been so well received by the people and the city of Kalamazoo. It's exhilarating to know that Coffee Rescue is a pioneering member of that."

Smoothie Operator began as an idea around the kitchen table, laden with farm-fresh food, at a Berrien Springs farm, says Zuzu Bartlett. Along with Lev Pasikhov and Matteo Fabro, Bartlett owns the food truck born of that dinner conversation. Smoothie Operator delivers smoothies made from all-organic, all-locally sourced fruits and vegetables.

"Everything changed with the new ordinance," says Bartlett. "We would probably have been forced to go somewhere like Chicago. The process would have been so much less enjoyable in a huge city, because part of what we love about Kalamazoo is the amount of support we've gotten from those we've met through building the truck and our customers, even the mayor."

Bridgett Blough, owner of Organic Gypsy, moved from Benton Harbor to Kalamazoo because of the new ordinance. She sells what she calls S.O.U.L. food: seasonal, organic, unrefined, local.

"The new ordinance has been a catalyst," Blough says. "I didn’t realize the impact it would have on me and on my business, but I feel like the city has really stood behind it. Now I have a year-round business. What the food trucks are doing benefits the greater good."

No one would agree more about the quality of food on the street than Terry Baker, owner of Pizza Vera.  Unlike the food trucks, his mobile wood-fired brick oven, transported in a trailer, does not fall under the food truck ordinance.

"We don’t pull up stakes and an hour later pop up elsewhere," Baker says. His mobile pizza oven is called a "special food transitory unit," and is licensed as a complete kitchen wherever he sets up, which is usually at the Kalamazoo Farmers Market.

Baker refers to himself as a refugee of corporate America. "I was an account business director," he says. "After the economic crash of 2008, I was already burned out, and things got so ugly that I moved to Mexico."

Baker ran from his life to find his life. He spent nine months in Mexico, pondering his future. Gazing at the ocean waves, he had an epiphany. "So a door had closed, and I was in my mid-50s, thinking about what I love to do that I could leverage into a business."

He loved pizza. Baker loved messing in a kitchen, and his tastes veered to gourmet. From Mexico, he booked a flight to Boulder, Colo., to connect there with a man who made authentic Italian ovens for wood-fired cooking.

"The confluence of need and passion for food, along with the thrill of doing something that had never yet been done in Kalamazoo, brought me to start Pizza Vera," Baker says. "The word ‘vera’ is Italian for ‘true.’"

Napoletana -- or Neapolitan -- pizza captured Baker’s imagination, and he took classes to learn how to create it. Key to making the pizza is the oven in which it is baked, and the 905 degrees Fahrenheit that it is baked in.

"I use ‘00’ milled flour, organic ingredients, and San Marzano crushed tomatoes," says Baker. "People marvel at my sauce, but there are no doctored ingredients. Just crushed, fresh tomatoes. And salt."

Like the food truck chefs, Baker, too, is a believer in going back to what food was meant to be before it became industrialized. His pies are not symmetrical or uniform. Every bite, he promises, will bring a different flavor. And chances are good, he warns, that you won’t be biting into any pepperoni. Instead, expect prosciutto, arugula, balsamic reduction, Kalamata olives, or any number of untraditional pizza toppings and ingredients.

Of all of these ingredients, however, Baker values one above all others: community. His lesson came this past summer when his 26-year-old son Chris had a pulmonary embolism.  Business came to a sudden halt and the pizza oven grew cold.

"Nothing else matters when something like this happens," Baker says. "Certainly not pizza. But then I walked into the hospital and someone there called out, it’s the pizza man!"

That recognition wasn’t meaningful in that moment. Baker had much bigger concerns on his mind. His son is well on his way to recovery now, and it was when Baker had fired up his pizza oven again, serving a slice of pie to his son, who had just sat down to share a slice of his pie with John Schmitt, owner of Food Dance Cafe that Baker had a revelation.

Baker realized that over the year, he had developed community connections with his slices of pizza pie, and when the wood chips were down, community came through for him. When he fired up his oven again, community welcomed him -- and his son. "They had a phenomenal connection; both have had to cope with brain injury," Baker says of his son and Schmitt.

A year after the Kalamazoo City Commission decided to allow food trucks and mobile food units to sell food on Kalamazoo streets, the community has embraced a different kind of fast food. Direct connection between chef and client is one of the best ingredients.

Zinta Aistars is creative director for Z Word, LLC, and editor of the literary magazine, The Smoking Poet. She lives on a farm in Hopkins.