Street vending is an iconic New York City staple with a long and storied history. In recent years, a number of local culinary entrepreneurs have bypassed traditional cart fare like hot dogs and soft pretzels and introduced specialized cuisines to local pedestrians, from homemade Colombian food to dumplings to Belgian wafels to raw juices. The proprietors of this new wave of portable provisions form the backbone of the New York City Food Truck Association (NYCFTA), which is led by Rickshaw Dumpling Bar co-founder David Weber.
Weber and his business partner Kenny Lao initially considered the food truck ideal for testing the viability of expanding their Flatiron District dumpling establishment to other parts of the city. But Weber could sense that the regulations for street vending were incredibly outdated, and he wasn’t alone in the sentiment. He organized with other food truck entrepreneurs and the NYCFTA was born in January 2011.
“We wanted to unite groups of vendors to meet and share best practices,” Weber remembers. The collection of like-minded purveyors was primarily interested in community development and achieving “a singular voice to address what improvements needed to be made to the regulations.”
When Hurricane Sandy approached in late fall 2012, Weber and his wife were expecting their first child. As the scope of the storm became clear, members of the NYCFTA realized it was their moment to give back to the local communities that supported their businesses. Rickshaw and other trucks were moved to high ground, and their inventory was donated to local food shelters.
“We targeted locations where we could do the most good,” Weber says. “High concentrations of people and families in need in residential areas that had been hit hard.”
Fully mobile and self-sufficient, each with their own generator, the trucks proved to be the perfect response vehicles; the only limitation came in resources.
“The trucks had all the time in the world to donate, but very little disposable money of their own,” says Weber, “and it quickly became obvious that we were going to need sponsors.”
Enter JetBlue, with corporate financing, and, of equal import, plenty of prepackaged water and foodstuffs. Additional outreach soon brought MorganStanley, UBS, Glamour magazine, and other corporate sponsors into the fold. The NYCFTA also started a community fund on Indiegogo that has raised more than $24,000. Further coordination with the Mayor’s office led to a full-fledged dispatch system with 20 trucks responding in real-time to the city’s needs for hot meals.
“It was really an ideal match because we brought the trucks and the means for direct outreach, and they brought both the resources to pay for all the stuff and the knowhow of what locations were most acutely in need of assistance,” Weber says. In less than a month, the joint distribution efforts delivered more than 350,000 hot meals to victims of the hurricane. As Weber describes, it was “a monumental effort to scale-up, to go from a tiny institution with a single part-time employee to a sprawling public food distribution program inside of less than a month—it was exciting, rewarding, and definitely intense.”
With Baby Sebastian arriving after most of Sandy’s ill effects, Weber now focuses on the challenges of overseeing a burgeoning association along with the trials of fatherhood. He’s found the demands of parenting to be “so far beyond anything I’ve ever anticipated,” and, as so many other parents would agree, “so much more rewarding than anything I’ve ever imagined.”
“Things that I thought were hard and substantial in my life—I’ve started a couple companies, wrote a book, ran a lot of big projects—I kind of thought of having Sebastian as another big project… It’s so much more than that. It’s really given me a lot of perspective on what’s possible.”
“I think that the best part about hospitality is dealing with customers. Any day you work as a cashier or on the truck and you’re interacting with local residents and pedestrians–that’s what makes it all worth it. Connecting and interfacing with guests and delivering positive energy and enthusiasm through my food–that’s really what it’s all about.”
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