No matter how well the local catering goes, I think the food van is something I won’t be able to give up. The interaction, the crowds and being able to give someone something so dastardly fresh that it is almost nuclear in the middle has got to be the best thing about this whole enterprise.
Assuming then, that we will continue to serve street food for at least as long as the Beast lives, it is important that we can make money out of the process, and here there have been some recent important developments in the field of street food.
The Great British Toastie, as served by ourselves, has proven very successful and, thankfully, has made us some money. Not only that but I can cook them without burning them, and the overall prep time can be measured in hours. It’s also nice and simple to explain. Q: What do you sell? A: Toasties.
Comparing that to street food to go: It takes several days to prepare before a festival, people don’t seem anywhere like as keen to buy it, the portions look smaller and it is very hard to explain in less that 50 words. Q: What do you sell? A: We sell restaurant food to go: restaurant-inspired dishes that you can eat while out and about. Things like mini pies and peas, savoury profiteroles and brownie with warm chocolate sauce.
Oh dear. You would struggle to squeeze that explanation into a tweet. My problem being that you can’t explain street food to go without examples, because otherwise the next question is “So what sort of things do you sell?”. The canny choice is to look at the pros and cons, and then just serve toasties. One could even pause briefly for dramatic effect before the announcement, as if considering carefully, and then choose toasties. It wouldn’t be quite right though.
Food is one of those magnificent things that is so frighteningly varied that you can do almost anything with it. We are lucky enough to have a chef cooking it who knows his eggs from his bacon. It follows then that there must be some magic sweet spot between taste and ingredient cost, between prep time and how it sounds on a menu, that will work. We just need to find a familiar, interesting, cheap, quality, simple and intricate dish that we can make a living off. Which can be served from a big green van in the middle of a field in under 3 minutes. The cynic in me would also like to point out that no, it can’t be toasties.
The next event were catering for is Barefoot Festival at the end of the month. We are serving restaurant food to go there and have come up with a much revised menu which will hopefully see us surprising the patrons with the perfect dish, or at any rate converting slightly more of the pleasing comments about how awesome our van is into pleased customers who have purchased our food.
Mainly though, we’re just hoping it doesn’t rain any more than absolutely necessary.
Oh, sorry I thought you were talking about me. My bad.