Just as I turned into the parking lot, I suddenly realized I had no idea what Jae Kim, the founder of Chi’Lantro Food Trucks, looked like, and I had forgotten to ask for some mark of identification when we confirmed our meeting. But without giving it a second thought, I rushed toward the front door of Asia Café, a major Austin, Texas, landmark for delicious northern Chinese food. There stood a young man in his late twenties or maybe early thirties, wearing dark blue jeans, a stylish pullover sweater, and black sneakers. He had his face down, looking intently at his iPhone and furiously tapping his thumbs on the screen. He did not resemble the typical image of a restaurant owner, if there is such a thing. He was young, much younger than one would expect a successful food truck entrepreneur to be. Still, I suspected he was Jae Kim. I asked tentatively, “Jae?” He looked up immediately, giving me that familiar slightly surprised and confused look. I suppose I do not look like a typical university professor, either. In any case, the feeling of surprise was mutual; neither of us fit the stereotypical image of our profession. To avoid any awkward silence, I quickly introduced myself, and he noted that Asia Café was full (the rain had not kept people away) and suggested that we go somewhere quieter instead. We walked down a short way to a cupcake bakery, and with coffee and cup-cakes in hand, we sat down at one of the tables.
My meeting with Jae Kim was a result of my ongoing interest in Asian Latino food. In the late 1990s in New York City, I was introduced to the Chinese Latino restaurants1 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Having done research on diasporic Chinese in Latin America, I was fascinated with restaurants that had names like “La Caridad 78,” “Flor De Mayo,” or “Dinastia China,” which had self-consciously named their cuisine Chinese-Latin, or Spanish and Chinese, or Comida China y Criolla.2 When I moved to Austin, Texas, a few years ago, I missed the juicy and flavorful pollo Asado and the tangy sweet and succulent plátanos maduros of those Chinese Latino restaurants. Fortunately, one day during the “Cultural Politics of Food” course I was teaching at University of Texas at Austin, a student mentioned her favorite local food truck, Chi’Lantro, which serves “Korean tacos.” My eyes lit up in my excitement at the emergence of yet another “Asian Latino” food concept, this one drawing on Korean and Mexican traditions. Soon thereafter, I visited Chi’Lantro and had my first taste of bulgogi beef tacos. Think of thinly sliced beef—marinated in a sauce made of garlic, soy sauce with a hint of sugar, and sesame seeds—grilled and then wrapped in a warm corn tortilla and topped with minced onions, thinly chopped cabbage, cilantro, and hot sauce. Absolutely delicious! With those first tacos I was hooked, and since then have been eating Korean tacos and exploring the food truck phenomenon.
Food trucks seem to have exploded on the national stage in the late 2000s. While the previous generation of food trucks was quite diverse, in general they were perceived as offering cheap, “authentic” (often read as “ethnic” or “low culture”) food consumed primarily by the working class or sometimes thought to be the only option available in the area. Now, although food trucks still have a reputation for being affordable, they have been transformed into something modern, hip, cutting-edge, and mainstream. In this chapter I try to make sense of how food trucks, once situated at the margins of food culture, have become so popular and widely embraced in the past few years. I explore the reemergence and growing presence of food trucks in American society and ask, What cultural and social forces made food trucks such a popular phenomenon? What kinds of desires and impulses drive and are reflected in the proliferation of food trucks? Who are the new owners, workers, and consumers of these new food trucks? My findings are drawn from the preliminary ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2011 on the “Asian fusion” food trucks Chi’Lantro and Peached Tortilla, both based in Austin, Texas. By “Asian fusion,” I am referring to food created from at least two culinary traditions, one from Asia (Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, and the like). Whereas Chi’Lantro was inspired by Korean and Mexican food traditions, Peached Tortilla traces its roots to various parts of Asia and Southern (American) food. What follows is a collage of ethnographic vignettes that bring together some of the disparate forces that enabled the emergence of this new food truck culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I suggest that the particular constellation of changes in media technologies, food entertainment, and the national economy has played a critical role in laying the groundwork for the proliferation, as well as the explosive reception, of food trucks in the past few years.
One of the most conspicuous aspects of these Austin-based Asian fusion food truck entrepreneurs is their youth. The owner of Chi’Lantro Food Trucks, Jae Kim, is twenty-eight years old, was born in South Korea, and migrated to United States at the age of eleven. He attended a boarding school in Ojai, California, and later switched to a public school in Orange Country, California. In college, he studied business, and after graduating, he followed his girlfriend to Texas. Even though his relationship did not blossom, his business ambitions did. After working for a few years in the marketing department for a large grocery store chain in Texas, he decided to start his own business. To my surprise, though, this was not his first entrepreneurial enterprise, as he had owned and operated a coffee shop in Irvine, California, when he was only twenty-one. Building on that experience and knowledge, Jae Kim, twenty-six at the time, did three months of research before he single-handedly launched his first “mobile catering” business in February 2010. Using his own savings, he worked alongside his first employee, his cook Julia, to perfect the daily operations of the food truck business. When asked where he got his culinary inspiration for Korean tacos, he referred to his childhood growing up in ethnically diverse Los Angeles.
I grew up in a mixed community where there was a large presence of Mexicans and Asians. I used to eat Mexican food all the time, and of course, I ate lots of Korean food at home. … Being in Texas, Mexican food, especially tacos, is everywhere. So, I guess it made sense for me to mix Korean and Mexican staples together.
For Jae, his personal experience of living close to both Asian and Mexican communities and having access to their foods was the inspiration for his culinary experimentation. He first tried different recipes at home, and once they passed his taste test, he served them to patrons and got feedback from them. Gradually, he perfected each dish and then the menu.
The early days were a struggle, not only because he was understaffed and quite literally was working around the clock, but also because he did not have enough customers. He recalls, “I was working twenty hours a day, six days a week for a very long time. … I remember the first day I opened my truck, I earned $9; the second day I got $4. For weeks I had to throw away buckets of food.” Korean tacos, which had made their debut in Los Angeles in 2008, were still unknown in Austin. But after the annual “South by Southwest” festival in mid-March, when his Korean BBQ Taco food truck became widely publicized through Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, he finally made a breakthrough. Still, for the next six to eight months, Jae had to work tirelessly with his cook to ensure the survival and success of his business. When his work schedule finally became unsustainable, he wisely hired another person, who became his right-hand man, and slowly but steadily he expanded his business. Today, Jae Kim runs three Chi’Lantro trucks in Austin and plans launch another in Houston in summer of 2012.
Jae’s story is one of great success. While some may find his youth surprising, being young is typical of most of the food truck entrepreneurs and workers I met in Austin. For instance, like Jae Kim, Peached Tortilla food truck owner Eric Silverstein also started his business when he was in his late twenties, after he decided to change his career from law to business. Eric, whose father is Jewish American and whose mother is Chinese American, was born and raised in Japan until the age of ten, after which his family moved to Atlanta, Georgia. Drawing on his knowledge of Asian and American Southern food, he launched Peached Tortilla, which offers an eclectic menu of items like banh mih tacos and burritos, Chinese BBQ burritos, and crab cake sliders.
When I asked about the general youthfulness of people in the food truck business, both Kim and Silverstein cited the demanding nature of the work, explaining that it is a business requiring long hours, hard work, and complete dedication. In fact, both described their employees as being under the age of thirty and male. Eric:
It’s impossible to do this with a family. For sure, my business has taken a toll on my relationship [with my girlfriend]. Working on the food truck is hard on my body. I used to go to sleep late at night (around 2 or 3 a.m.) because that’s what time it is after our night shift is over and after the truck is thoroughly cleaned, and I wake up around 9 a.m. so I can get the lunch shift ready. And it is like that day after day. It is hard work. The hours are long. You have no life when you start this business. You’ve got to do it when you are young.
In addition, I suppose financial risk also is easier to weather when one is young and without family responsibilities.
Their youth aside, something about their transnational and multicultural experience informs their culinary creations. Their choice of food experimentation indexes their familiarity and sustained contact with different ethnic cuisines, which, I assume, comes from their experience of migration and/or being part of a multicultural community.
My earliest memory of food trucks is associated with the ice-cream trucks that drove around on summer afternoons, churning out a familiar tune that remains with me today. Then, there were the trucks serving burgers or tacos that were parked outside constructions sites, hospitals, and industrial areas. Those are the old-style food trucks I remember from my childhood days in Los Angeles. Today’s food trucks could not be more different. Taking advantage of the latest food trends and culinary experiments, they exude an urban hipness that draws the young, cosmopolitan, self-proclaimed “foodies.” How did this makeover happen?
There are many factors. Since the 1990s, the number of food shows on television has exploded, like those in which Rachael Ray, Guy Fieri, and Bobby Flay teach us how to make delicious meals. Shows like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations take us around the world and allow us to vicariously experience exotic cuisines of distant countries. Cooking competitions, like Iron Chef, feature top chefs around the country and judges who offer thoughtful and articulate critiques of their food. All the while and without our realizing it, we are being introduced to a new world of food consumption. These shows give us a sense of adventure and experimentation, a taste for “refined” cuisine and food presentation, and a vocabulary to describe the myriad flavors and textures. In this way, the mass media not only activated a desire for food experimentation and a curiosity for exotic ethnic cuisines, but they also instilled a more self-conscious approach to preparing, tasting, and talking about food. In a way, the media helped create a generation of food consumers who are more willing to try new dishes, have a broader knowledge of food in general, and have more confidence in assessing taste.
When modernized food trucks are reintroduced in this new context, their “newness” is attributed to more than their innovative menus. What sets them apart from their restaurant counterparts is their mobility. It is this style of food service and consumption, in addition to their food, that attracts people to food trucks. The adoption of seemingly more trendy and experimental dishes separates them from the earlier generation of food trucks, which we tend to associate with traditionally conceived menus: burgers and fries or Mexican tacos and burritos. The new trucks also are extremely eager to brand themselves with clever names and bold designs. But the mobility of food trucks offers a different commensality from conventional restaurants. Food trucks go to where their consumers are likely to be found. They park near bars, malls, and special events. They also park together and form clusters to attract more people; tables and chairs are set beside these trucks in an informal eating area. Mainstream audiences suddenly rediscovered a “new” food phenomenon, which actually is no more than a modernized version of the old with a few twists. Food magazines that once favored elite restaurants now feature articles on specific food trucks, thus affirming their acceptance into the foodie world. Websites and social media continue to showcase, follow, and facilitate conversation about food trucks. The Food Network even televised a national competition to find the most successful food truck operators. By 2010, food trucks had achieved mainstream status and managed to obtain an approving nod from the foodie world for their culinary and entrepreneurial innovation.
The intensified use of social media also helps spread the word about restaurants and foods. Food blogs and web reviews play a critical role in sharing information and allowing ordinary people to give “honest” and unfiltered opinions about their food experience. This democratization of information sharing has shifted the power of food critique and the ability to influence “taste” from the mouths of “experts” to those of ordinary consumers (or at least users of social media). Websites like Yelp offer a platform for people to post their comments and to influence consumption practices. Today, the Internet is a key site for people to learn about and shape particular food trends, to evaluate and to choose which restaurants to visit and foods to eat, and to help bring business to certain institutions or to kill it. In short, social media have become a crucial site of advertisement for all restaurants, not just food trucks. I suggest, however, that food trucks are much more dependent on social media than their brick-and-mortar counterparts are, precisely because they are mobile and need to steer customers to their site, which continually changes. Sustained and consistent communication with customers via websites and social media, then, is crucial to the survival of these food trucks.
The Internet and social media have facilitated the reemergence of food trucks in many ways. Because food trucks lack a permanent physical address, they rely heavily on the Internet to communicate with their consumers and to inform them of their precise location at a particular time. For instance, if people discover a food truck they like by chance, social media enable them to find out exactly when and where to find that food truck again. Indeed, their permanent address is not necessarily a site that is represented by a number on a particular street; it is their web page.
Food trucks usually move around within a circuit of designated sites in a city. Some trucks have one rented location or a set of locations where they regularly park. Others drive around, depending on what parking areas are available. Of course, for any food-related business, having a website today is like being listed in the Yellow Pages in the pre-Internet world. It is a common, even expected, method of establishing a presence. For the food trucks in Austin, having a web presence is further necessitated by the fact that they lack a permanent location. Food truck owners, therefore, rely heavily on the Internet to post information about where they are, where they will be and upcoming special events, and also respond to their clients’ positive and negative comments. Because food trucks rely so heavily on their web presence to attract customers, they are highly sensitive and responsive to web postings about their business. During one of our interviews, food truck owner Eric Silverstein scanned his smart phone and read to me a Twitter posting: “My three favorite food trucks/trailers are now Chi’Lantro, East Side King, and Peached Tortilla.” He explained, “This tells me how my food truck is doing. I am being grouped with Chi’Lantro and East Side King, two of the top performers. This is how I know how my business is doing.” At the Yelp website, I also noticed his active presence in responding to negative reviews. In one instance, he offered the Yelp commenter to come by for a free lunch in order to make up for an earlier bad experience.
Because of the food trucks’ heavy reliance on the Internet, it is not surprising that the majority of food truck consumers are part of the Internet generation, those people who are technology, Internet, and social media savvy, people for whom being wired or online is second nature and whose experiences are usually mediated by the web. The main determinant here is not necessarily age but familiarity with and reliance on the Internet. In many ways, the instant popularity, spread, and success of food trucks in the twenty-first century reflect the lifestyle shift for one large segment of U.S. society, exemplifying the mobility that relies on intensive connectivity.
According to Jae Kim, the social media are what helped catapult Chi’Lantro into Austin’s food scene (and beyond), which in turn generated both visits to the truck and hard capital. For him, the sales and media attention he received during the South by Southwest (SXSW) festivities in Austin gave him the necessary exposure he needed. SXSW is primarily a music festival that takes place every year in Austin. It was initiated to increase tourism and business activities for Austin’s entertainment sector during spring break, when the university population is away. Although SXSW first started as a music festival, over the years it has expanded to other fields, including education and technology. It is one of Austin’s biggest events, with thousands of young musicians, technology entrepreneurs, educators, and tourists from all over the country visiting Austin for one week in March. Young professionals and artists revel in a youth culture embedded in music and technology. With their latest phone gadgets in hand, the participants text, Twitter, and blog about the latest trends emerging from SXSW.
For Chi’Lantro, the social media coverage it received during the SXSW week helped get it out of the red. Most of its business comes from catering parties hosted by the music, technology, and entertainment companies participating in SXSW. Because they are mobile kitchens, food trucks make ideal catering units and offer a different approach to conventional catering services. Known for their food innovation and urban hipness, with a nod to counterculture, food trucks coincide with the general ethos of SXSW’s alternative culture. At a “food truck” panel sponsored by the University of Texas’s Center for Asian American Studies, Jae frankly stated, “We prepare for SXSW six months in advance, and we make more during the festival than we do the rest of the year. Well … let’s say at least as much as the rest of the year.”
With the buzz generated during “South by South West,” Kim’s business picked up. Since the first year of its participation in SXSW, Chi’Lantro has gained a national profile, having been featured in popular media such as the Food Network, the Cooking Channel, the New York Times, Fox News, GQ magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN. Only a little more than years after its debut, Chi’Lantro has become a tourist attraction for many visitors to Austin. Indeed, on one Saturday morning in April 2012, when my family and I went downtown to pick up some Korean tacos from Chi’Lantro, we met a family visiting from Galveston, Texas. While waiting for the truck to open its doors, the Galveston family and I struck up a conversation. The mother of the group graciously offered to allow our family of four to order first. Pointing to her group of about a dozen people, she insisted, “There are a lot of us here, so go ahead and order first. Your kids are probably hungry.” Pausing for a moment, she continued,
We are [originally] from Guam, now living in Galveston, and we are on our way to a Dallas concert where Guam musicians are playing. We specifically planned our trip so we can pass through Austin for some Korean BBQ tacos, which we’ve heard so much about. We don’t want Mexican tacos, we can get that anywhere [in Texas]. We want something different … Korean BBQ tacos.
Indeed, I was reminded that it was precisely this seemingly exotic mix that attracts people from all over to Chi’Lantro and other food trucks like it. In a state where Mexican tacos are standard fare, people are intrigued by something different, something extraordinary but still familiar. The fact that it is delicious, of course, makes it that much more worthwhile to seek out.
The first time that many college students and young professionals visit Chi’Lantro and try their specialty kimchi fries (among other popular dishes), they often do so after a night of barhopping. When young Austinites end a night of fun, they are grateful to find a variety of mobile food trucks parked right in the heart of downtown, where many bars and entertainment venues are located. Chi’Lantro and other food trucks thus have become part of the urban hip geography by specifically targeting young professionals and college students seeking late-night snacks. Thriving on the media buzz that highlights their creative, experimental, and ethnic fusion dishes, the food trucks have been branded with a certain cosmopolitanism that attracts urban youth seeking the latest food trends. According to Jae Kim,
People are more willing to try new foods when they are a little drunk and with a group. After partying for a little while, when they get hungry, they want some food. And we make it convenient for them by being within walking distance. They look at the menu and get curious about kimchi fries. With some peer pressure, they try it for the first time. And most of the time, they come back when they are sober to try it again, to see if they really did like it. After that, they get hooked.
Kimchi fries are made of “caramelized Kimchi, a mound of sizzling Korean BBQ, chopped grilled onions, cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese, cilantro, magic sauce, sriracha and sesame seeds. All set on top of a pile of crispy French fries” (http://www.chilantrobbq.com/menu). As someone who is not a big fan of french fries, I hesitated ordering the kimchi fries, but after my first bite, I have been converted, not to fries in general, just kimchi fries. The combination of slight spicy, savory, sweet, and tartness make this dish unimaginably good.
While being part of the night scene in Austin has converted many people to kimchi fries and Korean BBQ tacos, the downtown presence of the truck during lunch hour3 has expanded and sustains another group of followers. During the day, the truck serves primarily white-collar office workers in the downtown area where restaurants are abundant. Unlike the earlier generation of food trucks that often parked in locations where there was less competition and most of whose consumers were working-class folks, today’s food trucks are situated in more accessible and prominent locations that attract white-collar workers and the middle class. The fact the today’s food trucks can compete well with the more established downtown businesses illustrates their success in filling a particular niche that is based on both taste and price, which in turn are shaped by the media and the economy.
For some of the more established food trucks, renting a spot in a downtown parking lot offers a permanent venue, which makes it easier to grow their business. The predictability of being at a regular spot at a regular time gives clients a sense of certainty that if they go there, they will find the food truck of their choice. For despite the predominance of the Internet in contemporary life, not everyone is attached, or wants to be attached, to their mobile devices. Having a semipermanent location, then, helps reach a broader population, a population that may not be tech savvy but still is interested in the latest food trends. Most, if not all, food truck owners start without a regular spot. As they become more established, they may be able to rent a place in a parking lot. Location, of course, is everything, and even though the food truck business is still in a somewhat nascent stage in Austin, the cost of renting a spots in a parking lot is climbing. Interestingly, for most food truck owners in Austin, the end goal is to earn enough money to underwrite a brick-and-mortar business. The food trucks, then, are expected to generate both the capital and the consumer base to ensure the future success of a “real” restaurant.
In many ways, the rise of food trucks cannot be disassociated from a particular economic moment. For young business entrepreneurs with limited capital and proven experience, starting a small business can be extremely challenging. The food trucks offer a great entry point precisely because they require a relatively small initial capital investment but intensive labor. Whereas Jae Kim used his personal savings to start his business, Eric Silverstein consolidated funds from his savings, investors’ money, and bank loans. With approximately $70,000 to $80,000 of funds set aside to ensure both their business and personal economic survival for six months to a year, they embarked on their venture. In the beginning, each of them in his own business served simultaneously as the manager, cook, server, public relations officer, cleanup leader, and every other position.
Mindful of the current economy, food truck owners are extremely careful when pricing their food. Most dishes cost from four to seven dollars. According to Eric Silverstein, his clients are extremely sensitive to price, and he is well aware that pricing dishes above seven dollars will lead to fewer sales. “There is a certain threshold or price limit that people are comfortable with when it comes to buying food [from food trucks]. It is simply not sustainable if I raise the prices above that threshold,” he remarks. While the depressed state of the economy certainly has influenced the pricing of dishes, people’s expectations also play a role. People assume that food from food trucks will be less expensive than that served in brick-and-mortar restaurants, so they are surprised, sometimes even outraged, when they find slightly higher prices at food trucks. For Eric and other food truck entrepreneurs, then, the challenge is to provide innovative, high-quality food at an affordable price.
Eric Silverstein also noted that people in Austin are still quite hesitant to try new foods, whether they are new combinations of well-known cuisines or different ethnic cuisines that have not yet entered into mainstream food trends.
People want familiar food with an extra something. It’s hard to get them to try really different food—especially Asian food—that is completely new to their food repertoire. It just doesn’t work here. Texas is different from Washington [State] and California in that sense. They are less familiar with Asian fusion, in general. So, it’s been a challenge.
Unlike Korean BBQ tacos, which borrow from the two most common and popular foods—Tex-Mex and BBQ—in Austin (and Texas more generally), Eric’s food is a mix of Vietnamese, Thai, and Southern dishes that do not automatically resonate with Austin’s local food culture, despite the large Vietnamese presence in Austin and Texas’s proximity to the American South. It is important to remember that even though non-Texans may see Texas as part of the American South, Texans do not see it that way. Instead, they have a strong sense of Texan identity that is distinct from the American South and, more generally, the rest of the United States. In fact, the idea of the “Republic of Texas” is still very much alive in Texan cultural consciousness. The two dominant foods in Texas are BBQ and Tex-Mex, so Korean BBQ tacos, burritos, and quesadillas do not stray too far.
New food trends reflect the social concerns and aspirations of the time. For instance, in the United States, comfort food was characteristic of the economically depressed decade of the 1930s, and California cuisine and Japanese sushi, both status foods, emerged during the booming 1980s, along with the yuppie generation and Japan’s rising economy.4 The past two decades introduced fusion cooking, the slow food movement, and the organic food movement. Today, food trucks are the latest addition to the food scene. Even though they have been around for decades, food trucks have undergone a dramatic transformation and achieved mainstream status. Ice-cream trucks, old-style food trucks that offer coffee and pastries in the morning, and those that serve the more conventional burgers and tacos are still in operation. But when we speak of food trucks today, what comes to mind are not those old-style food trucks but the ones with catchy names (like Chi’Lantro and Peached Tortilla) and stylish designs, food trucks that serve the latest food trends and updated comfort foods. The question that arises, then, is why are food trucks so popular today? Indeed, what factors contribute to the reinvention, popularization, and mainstreaming of food trucks? What does the rapid proliferation of food trucks tell us about the current state of our cultural, social, and culinary world? My findings thus far are from research I did in Austin, so many of the details cannot be generalized to the food trucks in other cities like New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.5 Place and locality help determine how the food truck phenomenon transpires in these different cities. Nonetheless, I want to highlight several forces that have contributed to the general spread of food trucks across the nation.
The popularization of media and mobile technologies has been crucial to the recent success of food trucks. The mobile devices that allow us to access the Internet at any time have given food trucks a more effective way of communicating with and building a consumer base. Because food trucks do not have a permanent location, they rely on the Internet—through their own web page, Facebook web page, or Twitter—to keep their customers abreast of where they are. This constant online communication is necessary to ensure that consumers know where to find the food trucks and for food truck entrepreneurs to maintain a base of followers. For some people (especially young people and the professional class), being online is now an ordinary aspect of everyday life. While the popularization of Internet usage has been instrumental in revitalizing food trucks in this way, it has also rejuvenated, quite literally, the image of food trucks. Today’s food truck entrepreneurs and consumers identify themselves as young, urban, cosmopolitan, and/or professional. Internet media have brought this particular segment of consumers to the mobile food service, thereby revamping the image of food trucks and creating a new food phenomenon. Food trucks are no longer relegated to the margins of society and the edges of cities. Competing effectively with well-established restaurants in the heart of the city, they now are hip, urban, and thoroughly mainstream.
Food truck customers also belong to a cohort of people who have been socialized, through television, into a more diversified world of food consumption. They have been introduced to exotic dishes served in faraway places. At home, in the United States, they have experienced fine dining, modernized comfort foods, ethnic foods of all kinds, and fusion cooking. Their craving for food diversity and innovation, however, has been tempered by the current economic recession. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the economy was booming, the cultural ideal of food consumption was to go to an elegant, expensive restaurant. Now, though, it has become socially accepted, even culturally fashionable, to find tasty “cheap eats.” In a depressed economy, being budget conscious is now a concern for most people, not just for the working class. Food trucks, on the one hand, have a lingering stereotype of offering affordable food, which appeals to the budget conscious. Their presumably lower overhead costs suggest lower-priced food as well. On the other hand, these new food trucks are serving the latest food trends, which are usually associated with cutting-edge restaurants with famous chefs. In some ways, food trucks fill the vacuum created by the increased demand for innovative, tasty food and the unwillingness or inability of consumers to eat at expensive restaurants.
I conclude with a word about the “Asian Latino” fusion food that is becoming popular in Austin and other urban areas. By Asian Latino fusion, I am referring to the mix of at least two cooking traditions associated with Asia and with Latin America. While “fusion” in the 1990s often meant the combination of Asian (usually Japanese and Chinese) and European (usually French) influences, the fusion of today has a broader reference, one that includes both Asian and Latino influences. Korean BBQ tacos are prime examples of Asian Latino fusion. How do we make sense of their invention and subsequent wide acceptance? I suggest that this new kind of fusion—the invention of dishes that draw from various Asian and Latino cooking traditions—actually reflects the changing demographics of various cities in the United States as well as the cross-ethnic intersections and interactions between Asian and Latino populations. As Jae Kim pointed out, it was his experience of living in a largely Latino and Asian community and eating Mexican food and Korean food that led to his creation of Korean BBQ tacos and burritos.
Asians and Latinos are the fastest-growing immigrant populations in the United States. Neighborhoods and cities are being transformed, producing new kinds of conversations and connections. Asian Latino fusion, I believe, represents and indexes an emergent cultural form that resulted from these groups living close to each other and engaging in a process of interaction, exchange, and cultural invention.
I sincerely thank Robert Ji-Song Ku for his thoughtful comments and suggestions. This chapter has been enriched by his input, though I take full responsibility for all its shortcomings. Without Robert’s Zen-like patience and support, this chapter could not have been finished in time for this publication.
1. By Chinese Latino restaurants, I am referring to a wide range of restaurants that serve a combination of Chinese food and food from a Latin American or Caribbean country.
2. Lok Siu, “Chino Latino Restaurants: Converging Communities, Identities, and Cultures,” Afro-Hispanic Review 27, no. 1 (spring 2008): 161–71. These restaurants are established by diasporic Chinese who have migrated to the United States from Latin America and the Caribbean. Note that these restaurants do not serve “fusion” cuisine, understood as food created from a mix of culinary traditions, spices, and/or ingredients. Instead, their menus reflect the coexistence (separate but together) of two cuisines conventionally known as “Chinese” and “Latino.” Moreover, the food they serve is not fusion per se, in the sense of newly created dishes that draw on two different food traditions. In any case, the restaurants offer the possibility of consuming, at the same time, both “Chinese” and “Latino” dishes, thereby bringing together people of various backgrounds drawn to those two different culinary traditions. For a more detailed discussion of these restaurants, refer to Siu, “Chino Latino Restaurants.”
3. Unlike many cities in the United States, the lunch hour for Austin businesses is always and everywhere set from noon to 1 p.m. This makes it possible for the food trucks to park for just a few hours, usually 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., when they can maximize their lunch sales in just a few working hours. This aspect of Austin culture gives food trucks a predictable schedule.
4. See Sylvia Lovegren, Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads (New York: Macmillan, 1995); and Theodore C. Bestor, “How Sushi Went Global,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader, ed. James L. Watson and Melissa I. Caldwell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 13–20.
5. Since moving to Northern California a few months ago, I have become abundantly aware of just how much place—local culture, population, expectations, and regulations—has shaped the development of the food truck phenomenon. The differences between the food truck culture of Austin and that of the Bay Area are too many to cover in this chapter.