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FeedEat scene: Why Columbus is the perfect city for food trucks
PHOTOS BY JODI MILLER
The night before opening Ajumama, Laura Lee couldn’t shake the nightmares.
Awake in bed in her parents’ Grandview apartment, she envisioned the parking lot of St. James Tavern, where the food truck was slated to open, being devoid of customers. Or worse, she imagined one or two of them snatching an order of her signature pajeon, a Korean-style savory pancake, and then promptly spitting it out. And booing her.
An hour into that first night on April 30, that didn’t look to be a problem. In fact, now she worried about a different nightmare she’d had: Running out of food.
So far, she’d survived other, smaller terrors.
Trouble with the truck? On the drive over, she realized Google Maps didn’t take truck-height clearance into consideration when it worked up driving directions, sending her 12-foot, 10-inch truck scraping through a 12-foot-7 tunnel on Fifth Avenue. She tried to keep from hyperventilating as she gripped the wheel with blanched knuckles and inched underneath, with a line of impatient cars stuck behind her.
Problems with service? Her mom, Linda, who manned the front window, decided to start taking orders a half-hour early without telling anyone, thus blindsiding Lee with the first order.
She tucked a stray piece of hair back under her bandanna. There were too many people in line for her to waste any time. Even when she’d pulled into the parking lot early at 4:30, there were already customers waiting.
On a normal Mobile Monday night at St. James, a line of four or five at peak dinner hours is good. Before 6 p.m., there were 12 lined up at Ajumama. Now, a little after 7, there were close to 40.
Things were going well and yet they weren’t.
In her tiny, rumbling mobile kitchen, she kept assembling orders. Her boyfriend-slash-grill-cook, Braden Kessler, interrupted her focus.
“Laura,” he said, “have you looked outside recently? The line’s halfway to the street.” He smiled.
She ladled batter for another order without looking up.
“I’m trying not to think about it,” she said.
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She was trying not to think about a lot of things. Like the fact that she ran out of the brown-sugar-and-walnut-stuffed griddle cake called hodduk more than an hour ago, when a famished friend begged for the last four orders. Or that she was cutting into an emergency stash of pajeon batter.
Or that she was down to just a couple of rolls of the night’s special, a Spam- or tuna-stuffed take on sushi called kimbap. Or that people had guzzled down her entire week’s supply of Korean soft drinks.
The weather had threatened rain all evening, but so far the sky had held. Part of her prayed for the sky to rip open and wash the crowds away. She could feed them eventually. Just not tonight.
The wind picked up, but the sky stayed silent.
The crowd continued to swell.
It’s taken Columbus a while to get here, where a mobile kitchen in a beat-up parking lot across from a bar can qualify as one of the biggest restaurant openings of the year.
Now, with about 70 food trucks making the rounds in the city, “waiting in line for an hour” has become the new “impossible to get a reservation.”
This comes in the wake of a nationwide food truck boom. Many trace the trend to Los Angeles, which saw an outpouring of food-world adoration for Korean truck Kogi BBQ in the late 2000s. As of 2011, 3 million trucks were roaming the streets of the U.S.
In cities like New York, Washington and San Francisco, you can order gourmet takes on waffles or poutine or curry or lobster rolls streetside, and then round out your meal with a cupcake from the truck around the corner.
The scene has developed faster in those cities, where it’s not uncommon to see trucks specialize in single items like artisanal popsicles or mac and cheese.
We’re not quite ready for that yet. In the not-so-distant past, Columbus food-cart vendors were few and far between.
Jim Pashovich, who runs the Pitabilities truck, started as a Downtown gyro vendor in 1986. At the time, there were just a few other carts, offering hot dogs and pizza and nothing else. His gyros were considered exotic.
The vendors coexisted at first. But as more carts popped up in the early 1990s, the scene got testy. They fought for spots. Pashovich tried to put together an association for cart owners, but nobody wanted to work together.
“There were times I had to get Downtown at 3 a.m. to get a good spot,” Pashovich says.
He saw the proliferation of food trucks really begin a couple of years ago when chefs started playing with concepts, making their food offerings a little more gourmet. It inspired him to upgrade from his cart to the Pitabilities truck last year.
Aside from carts, Columbus had a few taco trucks appear in the early 2000s. Jim Ellison, who runs the blog CMH Gourmand, says the taco trucks jump-started the shift from a few Downtown carts to full-fledged food trucks.
For both chefs and customers, their surge in popularity can be tied to the economy. It’s just not realistic anymore for an aspiring restaurateur to go to the bank and ask for a massive loan to rent a space and cover operating costs, says Ellison. They can’t gamble on an untested concept.
Trucks lessen the risk by decreasing the overhead. The mobile kitchens cost a lot less, with start-up costs hovering around $50,000 depending on the truck. And only so many people fit in a tiny food-truck kitchen, so owners don’t have to pay as many employees. They don’t have to worry about renting a space in a bad location—if people aren’t into their food in, say, Dublin, they can find a spot Downtown the next day and cover their losses.
But there’s something special about what’s happening in Columbus, too. Pashovich has seen it.
“All the truck operators help one another out,” he says. “We’re becoming a tight-knit community.”
Perhaps that’s why Columbus is home to Food Fort, a group that works with aspiring mobile-food entrepreneurs to help craft business plans, secure loans and find trucks and carts.
Food Fort recently expanded its East Side commissary to include two full-scale kitchens and a bakery area that chefs can use to prep. But it’s also become a hub for cart and truck proprietors, who use the space to talk shop and share stories.
Pashovich himself is a big part of why the truck owners help one another so readily—they’ve watched him help fix broken electrical hookups or offer advice on the best spots for brisk business.
Ellison says the teamwork exists because truck owners recognize that Columbus’ scene is still fighting for recognition.
“If I’m a customer who’s never been to a truck and I have a bad experience, I may never try another food truck again, and the owners get that,” Ellison says. “If you look at other cities with a lot of vendors, it gets really competitive. Here, they’re willing to work together as collaborators.”
That’s exactly what Laura Lee was looking for when she decided to start Ajumama here. To her, Columbus is perfect.
Last year, Lee was still the sous-chef at a trendy hotel restaurant in San Diego, where she often trawled her taste memories for inspiration.
She’d been told since she began working at the restaurant that they wanted to emphasize seasonal and local food, which pleased her. That’s the type of food she cooked in Columbus at Latitude 41, where she worked before leaving for California.
So when she found herself with a gorgeous supply of in-season Mexican sweet corn, she instantly thought back to the sweet corn and black-raspberry ice cream churned up by her culinary idol, Jeni Britton Bauer, and decided to make her own batch.
Not long after dinner service began, a waitress tracked Lee down. Diners, the waitress said, were demanding “normal” ice cream.
“And I was like, ‘That’s it, I’m done, I want to go back to Ohio,’ ” Lee says. “Diners weren’t willing to take risks with the food they ate there. It was all about being seen.”
So she started to take a personal inventory. She thought about the food she wanted to spend her life cooking.
She could make a food truck, she thought. She’d recently read an article online about Food Fort, which sounded like the perfect support system for her first attempt at her own place. And she longed for Ohio, where she saw the whole “local and seasonal” movement happen organically.
And if she was going to do this truck, she wanted to make food that connected her to her family’s roots. The truck would have to be Korean.
She started watching a lot of YouTube videos to improve her technique, like Buddhist monks making vegetarian kimchi or bloggers crafting hodduk. She studied ingredient lists in packaged dishes at Korean grocery stores, decoding the proportions and making her own adjustments.
She even took the inspiration for her truck’s name from family trips to Korea. In every market and store she visited, there were feisty older ladies willing to throw elbows or push others out of the way to get to what they wanted. They were called ajummas, so she tweaked the word to make her name, Ajumama, and the truck’s tagline: “Fast and sassy.”
Lee decided early on that she wouldn’t serve the increasingly popular Korean barbecue dishes, like bulgogi. She opted instead for a smaller, traditional menu, with pajeon pancakes taking the lead.
But when she talked to friends and aunts in Korea about her menu, they all said she should make bulgogi or Korean tacos. They didn’t share her vision that Americans would enjoy the pasty but delicious mushroom and rice porridge Lee selected as a customizable, vegan option.
But Lee has always been stubborn. She insisted people in Columbus would fall for this food. They’re adventurous, she told them. She trusted her menu.
On her first night, she sold out of porridge within an hour.
Columbus has long been considered an ideal test market for new fast-food menu items and convenience foods in shiny wrappers, the manifestation of perfectly average diners with perfectly average tastes in food. So how can a truck like Ajumama succeed here?
Bethia Woolf, owner of culinary tour company Columbus Food Adventures, says we’re swept up in a national movement of people wanting to explore the world with their stomachs.
With the continued popularity of Food Network and Travel Channel shows like “No Reservations” and “Bizarre Foods,” Woolf says eating foreign fare has become a sort of tourism, even if you never leave the confines of your town.
“Food has become entertainment,” she says. “It’s not just a meal anymore.”
But the city has done plenty to sophisticate the palates of its residents.
For starters, there’s Jeni’s.
Woolf says people see the scoop shops as safe environments, where they can taste goat cheese ice cream before making a commitment and learn what they like.
Lee believes years of the city feasting on flavors like Queen City Cayenne have given people a more refined understanding of how flavors work together.
And it’s not just happening at Jeni’s. You can get kimchi on a hot dog at Dirty Frank’s or lunchtime arepas at El Arepazo.
Kenny Kim and Misako Ohba’s Freshstreet, and its predecessor Foodie Cart, brought bulgogi cheesesteak crepes and Japanese takoyaki to the masses.
“It makes people more aware of these flavors,” Woolf says. “They may be becoming more mainstream. That helped pave the way for something like Ajumama.”
Not that these kinds of foods didn’t exist before. Woolf points to the influx of Latino, Asian and Somali immigrants and the restaurants they’ve brought along with them.
“To a large extent, the food scene is catching up to the city,” Woolf says. “A lot of people don’t realize how diverse and cosmopolitan the city has become.”
Her Columbus food tours are rapidly expanding as demand increases. In addition to tours of ethnic restaurants and taco trucks, she’s added dessert- and meat-centric outings.
And Laura Lee is sure she’d never have a problem serving anyone a scoop of sweet-corn ice cream here.
“I don’t think we realize here how far ahead of the curve we are, food-wise,” Lee says. “If you’re not into food, you may not understand how great of a city Columbus is. But it is.”
At 8:28 p.m. on that first night in April, Lee scraped the bottom of her extra stash of pajeon batter, poured the remainder into a small bowl, handed it to her boyfriend, and ducked outside the truck.
She addressed the crowd. “I am so, so sorry, you guys,” she yelled, “but we are out of everything.”
There were still at least 15 people in line, and Lee surveyed them. She took a deep breath.
A collective cry of “awww” came out from the crowd first, but it was just as quickly consumed by applause. Friends and strangers cheered, “Go, Laura!” She smiled and slipped back into the truck.
She foraged inside the kitchen, hoping to find something she could pass out to people who’d waited. The last couple to get their food had stood in line for nearly an hour. She found a few spare rolls of kimbap, which she sliced and plopped in a tray. With the addition of a toothpick to each piece, she offered them up as samples.
And then, it was over.
Tomorrow, she would have to do this all again at Dinin’ Hall, the mobile food court in Franklinton. She tried not to think about how the meager and nightmare-riddled four hours of rest she’d gotten the night before were probably the start of ongoing sleep deprivation.
“If we can resuscitate the chef, we’ll be there tomorrow,” her mom told customers as they grabbed samples. “Please come.”
Inside St. James Tavern, Lee sat with her boyfriend and a few friends. She clutched a cocktail, warding off thoughts of the drive back to Food Fort or how early she’d have to get up in the morning to make it back to the truck with enough time to prep.
She leaned her head back and finally exhaled. She smiled.
Outside, the rain began.
Since opening night, nothing has let up for Ajumama. The lines still come, albeit a bit more spread out. Lee still gets overwhelmed. But she’s learning.
Driving the food truck is still like driving a giant metal tomb. Its constantly snarling engine makes it hard to hear much of anything from the road.
She hasn’t worked up the courage to drive on I-270, instead opting for a slow drive up High Street for gigs in Worthington.
She’s only had a few close driving calls since almost getting stuck under that bridge her first night, including a bout of white-knuckle terror while curving on Rte. 315 near Riverside Hospital.
“I was screaming as I went around that,” she says. “I told Braden to just let me scream.”
She’s starting to tease out the truck’s secrets, too, like how she has to take all the knobs off the griddle before driving, lest they clatter to the ground as she accelerates. And she’s fashioned her own device to keep her refrigerated cans of Coke from shaking too much as she drives, using two cookie sheets and a cake lift she found at Restaurant Depot.
The truck’s starting to feel a little more like home, which is good, because sometimes it feels like she never leaves.
After her first night, Ajumama already had rave reviews on Yelp. Since then, she’s had a flurry of press.
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Lee is humbled by all the attention. But she’s not surprised Columbus has taken to the flavors. She knew, even a year ago in a kitchen a world away, that her city would embrace this food.
That’s just how Columbus is.
She has found a few moments for peace, too, after moving home to make all this happen, after giving up independence and health insurance to live with her parents and chase this. Every day, she gets to her truck early, around 7 a.m. That’s when nobody else is at the commissary.
She chops vegetables, talks to herself, sometimes plays The Black Keys or David Bowie from a small set of tinny speakers to keep her company. And she breathes.
Those moments are hers. And by 10:30, she will be on the road again.
Columbus is hungry.
