Food Truck

What is it? A "mobile farmer's market" that whips up hearty sandwiches, soups and salads made with locally sourced, seasonal ingredients. Fare that's more healthy and tasty than you might expect from two guys in a truck. What to eat: Owners Kris Pepper and Eliot Coven are still plating their winter menu, which features the flavorful grilled squash sandwich (squash, ham, mixed greens, goat cheese and homemade herb mustard on multigrain bread) and rib-sticking soups, such as chipotle black bean chili and organic potato and leek.

Truckers wryly call it "New York produce. " But in truth this produce is garbage, increasingly carried from the New York City and Philadelphia areas to Midwest landfills in the same trucks that bring farm produce to the East Coast. "The thought of rotting garbage being hauled in food trucks is truly disgusting," said Rep. William F. Clinger (R., Pa.), leading an outpouring of congressional revulsion over the practice. Lawmakers at a Capitol Hill hearing yesterday vowed to outlaw the practice revealed recently in media reports.

A trio of food trucks will be pulling up to the Camden waterfront every Friday at lunch beginning May 10 and continuing throughout the summer. Organized by the Cooper's Ferry Partnership waterfront development corporation, "Food Truck Friday," as it's being called, is drawing interest from a variety of gourmet trucks around the region, including the three that will start next week: deli-on-wheels Reuben on Rye, Cupcakes 2 GoGo, and Lil' Trent's Treats...

A few local food trucks that do catering: Sweet Box Serves: Cupcakes Owner: Gretchen Fantini Phone: 215-237-4647 Facebook: Iheartsweetphilly Lil' Dan's Serves: Italian cuisine, sandwiches Co-owner: Daniel Pennachietti Phone: 215-252-1677 Facebook:LildansFood Little Baby's Ice Cream Serves: Ice cream, including vegan Owners: Pete Angevine, Martin Brown,...

Here is an excerpt from Craig LaBan's online chat of April 30, 2013: Craig LaBan: With the spring weather blooming, it's my cue to lighten up with salads like this one from Zea Mays Kitchen truck, which focuses on creative uses for Native American ingredients. It didn't make into our food-truck story, so I'm glad to give it a shout-out. In big restaurant news from the Insider , some exciting new projects coming to the burbs have been announced: Josh Lawler of the Farm and Fisherman is the latest big Philly name to head to South Jersey, with plans to take over Andreotti's Viennese Café on Route 70 in Cherry Hill with a larger and more casual F & F Tavern and Market, targeted for the fall.

The more cultured among us may raise a pinkie to the James Beard Foundation, which annually bestows its Beard Awards on the nation's loftier restaurants and chefs. But for populist street food honors, we have the Vendy Awards, which recognize sidewalk chefs. Philly is amid a boom in food trucks, with zones extending from LOVE Park to the universities. Joining the cheesesteak and falafel trucks are a new wave of street vendors offering fish tacos, delicate macaroons, and even pizza from a wood-burning oven.

If you went to the Chinatown Night Market expecting oodles of unusual Asian dishes, you may have been disappointed. If, on the other hand, you went to explore unusual dishes from China, Indonesia, Mexico, the Caribbean, Italy, France and more - and enjoy beer, bubble tea, and Lion Dancing under a harvest moon, you would have been pleased. Thousands were. A crowd of 10,000 was expected at this, fourth night market planned by The Food Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing affordable, healthy food to neighborhoods throughout the city.

Night Market, an evening street-food festival launched as an experiment in 2010 along a stretch of then newly popular East Passyunk Avenue, proved the wisdom of its ways last Thursday on Germantown Avenue in Mount Airy. "People are talking to each other as they wait in the lines at the food trucks," said Jim Villarreal, a local with his own cable show about dreams. "They're talking to people they never would have talked to in other circumstances," he marveled at the scene before him. They're all mixing and doing what Mount Airy is all about.

Dan Pennachietti is a three-meatballs-are-better-than-one kind of guy, usually from an eating perspective. But lately, the Italian American food vendor in Philadelphia is applying his strength-in-numbers point of view beyond gastronomic cravings. His goal is to improve the business climate in the city for his burgeoning industry. Pennachietti has cofounded the Philadelphia Mobile Food Association (PMFA), incorporated as a nonprofit organization in February, to coalesce the concerns of a diffuse group of independent business owners into one influential voice.

The design came to her in a dream. Just as Keith Richards came up with the riff to "Satisfaction" in his sleep, Cupcake Lady Kate Carrara woke up one Sunday in 2009 and quickly grabbed crayons to record her vision of a cupcake truck. When she brought the drawing of the white box truck sprinkled with giant jimmies and lined with a metal flounce to a car detailer, he said he could do everything except the giant cupcake springing from the roof. "Go under an overpass and you'll knock that thing right off," she remembers him saying.