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Mobile Meals
One company will use GPS to tell customers where to find its truck
AP Photo
Tanya Catolos of Daisy Cakes works 14 to 18 hours a week at home making cupcakes before loading them to sell.
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Published: October 5, 2008
DURHAM - At Wine Authorities' 1-year birthday bash, the juicy aroma of beef on the grill drew customers around a white truck marked "Only Burger." Customers piled around the truck three- or four-people deep as workers rushed to fill orders, and the truck sold out of 200 burgers in two hours.
On that rainy recent evening, you could be forgiven if you were wondering whether this was New York, where ubiquitous food trucks loaded with nuts and shish kebabs dot the sidewalks, instead of Durham, where the one Sabrett hot-dog stand in front of the courthouse recently closed for business.
But Only Burger is not the only one getting some love from local foodies. Daisy Cakes, which sells homemade cupcakes called such delectable names as "Vanilla Dream" and "Pink Lemonade," operates out of a 1978 Airstream mobile on Foster Street every Saturday. It has been nearly selling out of its weekly stash of 300 cupcakes.
There are 14 "mobile food units" registered with the Durham County Health Department. But what's different about Only Burger and Daisy Cakes is that they signal a sudden interest in gourmet food trucks by veteran restaurateurs and chefs in the area, not to mention the enthusiastic reception from customers.
Sam Poley, the former owner of Starlu, a restaurant at Southcourt off Shannon Road that closed in December, joined with Tom Ferguson of Durham Catering Co. to start Only Burger.
Calling it the most "high-tech low-tech" burger truck around, Poley showed off the 14-foot truck's wireless credit-card reader and gleaming stainless-steel interior at a recent interview.
Only Burger is in negotiations with Duke University to operate several days a week on campus. When everything's set up, a GPS locator also will tell customers where the truck is during all times of the day on its Web site (www.onlyburger.com).
Until then, customers will be updated through Twitter.
Poley and Ferguson said they set out to create the perfect burger and tested everything from the beef used to the order in which to pile the ingredients: Shall it be the patty on the bottom and the lettuce and tomatoes on top? Or the other way around? The inspiration for the burger-mobile came when Ferguson was watching his favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys. One of the players lamented the fact that he had to lose weight, so he couldn't get a burger from his favorite truck.
A light bulb went off, and Ferguson e-mailed Poley immediately: "We needed to do this yesterday."
"At the end of the day, we just wanted it to be simple," Ferguson said. "We started off with what we thought we wanted on the burger, and we ended up with what's right on the burger."
The burgers use never-frozen meat, North Carolina-made buns buttered and toasted on flat tops and includes lettuce, ripe tomatoes and red onions. Just salt, pepper and garlic are used to season the meat.
But this was still a cakewalk compared with starting a restaurant like Starlu, which Poley opened in 2004.
"Opening Starlu was like opening a building and this is like ... well, opening a truck," Poley said matter-of-factly. Starlu took one and a half years to renovate and open. Only Burger took $67,500 for the truck and three weeks.
For that reason, Poley said, he knows some other chefs in town are considering the same thing.
"It's a trend you'll see grow," he said. "We know we're not the only people who want to do it."
The ease with which one could start a mobile-food operation was precisely why Lucas Mendez got into the business four years ago when he put $5,000 into a taco truck serving construction workers.
Now on his second food truck, Taco Cali No. 2, Mendez gets up at 4 a.m. every day to cook and then takes the food out to construction sites, said his daughter, Laura, who helped translate her father's Spanish during a phone interview.
"It's more economical to get more money with that than a restaurant. With a cart, you can move it around, and it's not just a certain place," Laura Mendez said.
The relative cheapness of starting a mobile operation was also cited by Tanya Catolos, who's keeping her day job at the Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, as a chief reason why she started Daisy Cakes.
The cupcakes mobile opened for business not far from the Durham Farmers Market on Saturday mornings.
It's a grueling "second job" for Catolos, who spends 14-18 hours every week making the cupcakes in her home before loading them up in the Airstream.
Catolos poured about $20,000 total into the Airstream, supplies and marketing. She had considered opening a restaurant, but said upfitting the space would have cost at least $100,000. So she went with a silvery Airstream instead because of the vintage-ness of it, a quality that meshed perfectly with the sweet cupcakes.
"There's practically no overhead," Catolos said. "I always wanted to have my own place, and this was a way to get started."
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