Painful Food Van Problems
I have always been an advocate of food vans. The Beast is nothing less than the third member of the Jabberwocky, and he's an important part of the business. I've always been very open about how much food vans can - and do - break down, but most conversations seem to...
The Toasted Sandwich Burger AKA The Juggernaut
Fun Fact: The toasted sandwich burger actually exists in the US, although it is not traditionally this big. It's known as a "Patty Melt". While happily adequate for the normal appetite, it doesn't really address the fact that a burger is filled with delicious foods...
The Behavior of Street Food Trucks at Festivals
Little is known about these beasts, which migrate across our land in a mysterious flow of events, markets and festivals. Today we will observe the street food truck when taken out of it's natural habitat and allowed to nest within a musical gathering. First, we see...
Strange Requests
We never really encourage it, but strange requests are one of the nice things about working in street food. It means, I think, that people feel able to trust you as much as they would a restaurant to improvise with food. Mostly this means solving problems with...
Interesting Toasties
We have covered all the standard toastie combinations these days, so our quest is now to find better, more interesting toasties to beguile the Midlands with. On Saturday night we had our most recent tasting. Here are the results. Green and Black Olives, Creamed Feta...
Vans are Better than Gazebos
In street food there are two main types of setup, the kind with wheels and engines and the kind without. Vans give you space and time, gazebos are cheaper and more reliable. My humble and totally unbiased opinion: Vans are better than gazebos. It's not all toasties,...
Is Street Food Safe?
I've been writing a lot about the process of setting up a street food business, and people seem to like that. I've not really provided much help for the customers though, and you make up a great deal of the historical readership. It seems unbalanced, so let me rectify...
The Future of Food Trucks
Currently, as those of you kind enough to follow us on other social channels will know, the van is once more in the garage. He failed his MOT in two-sheets-of-refusal-notice style. Luckily most of the problems are to do with his wiring, and consequently we expect him...
Deciding Which Festival to Trade at
It's festival application season again. This special time of year is when street food vendors all across the country sit around the computer and write letters to their favourite venues, in the hope that perhaps, if they are very lucky, they will be offered a pitch....
What Makes A Street Food Vendor?
For the last few weeks I have been working through applications to join our collective, Scoff. One of he questions we ask in the application form is "Why did you get into street food?". There isn't a right answer, but we were curious to see what motivation people have...
Back to Business
We've been away from the Beast for so long now I've forgotten what it's like to get up before 9 and go earn a living. Despite constantly telling ourselves that at some stage we will get up really early and crack on with the poster sized to-do list on the lounge wall,...
Scoff at the Cask and Bottle, Leamington Spa
Not that we want to overload everyone with exciting news, but seeing as we are now launched it makes sense to keep the momentum going. This time we have let Scoff break the news, but that doesn't mean I can't get excited about it and tell you how all this came about....