Old school meets new school: Mister Softee and the Mud Truck.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)NEW YORK--Goat cheese is the new black. Introducing goat cheese cheesecake, asserted the Twitter account for a Manhattan food outlet called the Dessert Truck one morning in April, a few hours before it opened up shop at its semi-regular haunt on the corner of St. Mark's Place and Third Avenue.
The Dessert Truck is usually in good company. Walk out of the Astor Place subway station into Cooper Square, the gateway to the St. Mark's and Bowery nightlife strips, and depending on the time of day you can buy a cup of coffee, an order of Thai chicken, a Belgian waffle drowning in whipped cream, or a cone of local-ingredients-only ice cream--or, for that matter, goat cheese cheesecake--without ever setting foot inside a storefront. If you ask whether you'll find them there the next day, your server will likely tell you to keep tabs on the truck's Twitter account.
Cooper Square is a local hot spot for gourmet food trucks, a phenomenon that's been making headlines in cities like New York and Los Angeles for about two years now. And more recently, these roving food outlets found a promotional niche on the Web thanks to the rise of Twitter, which lets them broadcast their changing location, advertise deals, and keep up a customer base. It fits: were there a culinary embodiment of short-and-sweet Twitter, it would be the food truck, mobile and ultra-niche and in the midst of broad yuppie popularity that some say will be a lasting cult following and some are still pegging as a fad. Plus, at least in certain U.S. cities, they're pretty much unavoidable.
Kogi verde is coming to Koreatown! Wilshire and Ardmore! @ 11.45. Bring it! announced the Twitter account for Kogi BBQ, a Los Angeles purveyor of Korean barbecue tacos, Thursday night. The first Kogi BBQ truck (and accompanying Twitter account, which now has more than 20,000 followers) debuted in November, and the company is now about to increase its numbers from two to four trucks. Each Kogi truck regularly experiences hundreds of customers per night and sometimes even runs out of tacos.
"People search for it," said Alice Shin, Kogi BBQ's in-house blogger and Twitterer. "It's kind of like a treasure hunt for them."
Once restricted to hot dogs of questionable quality hawked on busy city corners and to Mister Softee ice cream vans drifting sleepily down tree-lined suburban streets, food trucks have ventured into yuppie culture. In New York you can go to the taxicab-yellow Wafels and Dinges truck and spend $7 for a "WMD" or "Wafel of Mass Deliciousness," a chewy Belgian waffle piled with as many confectionary toppings as you could possibly want. The cream-colored Van Leeuwen Ice Cream truck will serve you flavors like ginger and red currant, donating part of the proceeds to a nonprofit that supports endangered mountain gorillas. The Rickshaw truck sells Asian-inspired dumplings. Somewhere in the city there's even an Anarchist Ice Cream Truck that hands out political pamphlets.
In Los Angeles, the Cool Haus truck sells wacky ice cream sandwiches, and the Heartschallenger truck will hand out music samplers. Portland, Ore., is about to get its own Korean taco truck, called Koi Fusion, and hundreds of people are already tracking it on Twitter. This week, San Francisco is slated to get a new food truck of its own when French restaurant Chez Spencer unleashes a Twittering vehicle that sells, among other things, frog legs on-the-go.
Not every gourmet food truck uses Twitter. But for the ones that do, the microblogging service is usually an integral part of their nascent success stories.
"Twitter first had a practical purpose of telling people where we were," said Wafels and Dinges founder Thomas DeGeest. The waffle vendor's Twitter account now has more than 1,200 followers. "They'd call us 'the elusive waffle truck' because we'd show up, and the next day we'd be gone, and nobody knew where we were." DeGeest, who specialized in social-networking consulting at IBM for years, bought a 1968-vintage hot dog truck two years ago, and spent three months turning it into the Wafels and Dinges truck. He began to use Twitter about a year later.
"Sometimes we have a secret password, or sometimes we have a challenge," DeGeest said. "One of my guys came up with a challenge earlier this week to come and do an impersonation of a peacock." The reward is typically a free topping (or "dinges," the Belgian term for it), and DeGeest said that yes, people actually show up and do it.
Wafels and Dinges typically makes two stops each day: one in a business district during the workday, usually in midtown or outside the New York Life Insurance building on Park Avenue South, and one in a shopping district like SoHo or Union Square. The responses to Twitter challenges and "secret passwords," DeGeest said, are much more likely to come during the workday.
"Something we see that with the office locations is that people are spending their days behind the computer, and we get more response to the Twitterers," he explained. "I don't have numbers, but I don't think a lot of our customers are mobile Twitterers. I think from what I see, most of them must be onscreen."
Kogi BBQ's Shin also testified to the benefits of Twitter to boost business.
"When we went to the UCLA restaurant industry conference, nobody knew we were going to be there or where we were going to park that day," Shin said. "I Twittered that we were there at the hotel, and within two minutes it was kind of like 'Night of the Living Dead' when you see zombies. I saw all these people walking out of buildings toward the truck, and they were all looking at their phones and BlackBerrys...it was sort of both cool and creepy."
Marketing in the Digital Age
Both Twitter and the food truck craze are, in a sense, testaments to the mobility and spontaneity enabled by the Digital Age. And ultimately, they also may have their best niche as marketing vehicles (no pun intended) rather than standalone businesses.
The Mud Trucks, for example, are a small fleet of brazen orange vehicles known for parking conspicuously right outside Starbucks outlets in downtown Manhattan. They've long had a physical storefront among the vintage boutiques of Ninth Street in the East Village. The Rickshaw dumpling truck, on the converse, has always been a mobile outpost of a mini-chain of dumpling shops. Van Leeuwen ice cream, meanwhile, is now sold in Whole Foods supermarkets, and Wafels and Dinges may be doing something similar soon.
"My strategy is not to build an empire of food trucks," DeGeest said. "I have actually retail products that I put on the market too...prepackaged waffles to sell in stores, and I'm looking at bringing a waffle mix on the market that allows people to make waffles that are very close to our original Belgian waffles at home."
The Wafels and Dinges truck, ultimately, is "kind of like an In-N-Out Burger trailer, which is the biggest thing you can have at your party in L.A," DeGeest said.
Some of this may be connected to a problem that will sound all too familiar to Twitter experts: It's cheap and easy, relatively speaking, to launch a food truck business, but profitability becomes less of a guarantee when food trucks are at the mercy of community boards and municipal legislators.
"It's a lot easier to find a loophole and start a truck or a pop-up restaurant than an actual restaurant," said Paolo Lucchesi, San Francisco editor at restaurant blog network Eater. "Whether it's sustainable, that's yet to be seen, but in terms of starting a new project, there's a lot of things that you go around when you have a truck."
Some business owners in Sheridan Square, a quaint pocket of Greenwich Village dotted with retail storefronts and a small park, lobbied to restrict the presence of food trucks that could potentially undercut their rent-paying businesses. The bright orange Mud Truck has been temporarily booted from Sheridan Square at the request of none other than the local Starbucks.
In perhaps the most bizarre of these such incidents, a community message board for residents of northern Manhattan's Inwood neighborhood was a aflutter earlier this spring with complaints about a noisy ice cream truck playing its familiar jingle late on a weekend night: as one resident put it, "At this late hour this time of year I wonder if the truck is selling more than ice cream."
For food truck owners, dealing with both growth and complications can involve looking into more advanced and creative ways to use technology. Something you'll probably see soon, at least with some of the trucks, is a way to track them on a map using GPS.
"I'm actually talking to Sprint about (GPS tracking), and it's going to happen," DeGeest said. "We have a new truck coming out soon, our second truck. The second truck is coming out because I really thought that the '68 was going to die. It was in such bad shape that I finally bit the bullet and spent the money to put in a new transmission."
But he doesn't plan to give up on Twitter, the technology that really fueled the mobile food craze in the first place. "I don't think you can eliminate Twitter," DeGeest said. "You kind of maintain a dialogue with your customer. GPS can never do that for you."
Last Friday evening as the sun set, the Dessert Truck was opening up in its usual Cooper Square spot, goat cheese cheesecake still on the menu, as the Mud Truck shuttered its coffee sales for the day a block away. The Wafels and Dinges truck announced that it would be parked for the evening right off Washington Square Park, a stone's throw from the rowdy West Village watering holes frequented by college students who've just rolled into town for summer internships.
But if they're new to the city, they probably don't know yet that on this given night they can earn a free topping by telling the waffle vendor who their top three favorite fictional villains are.
Looks like we were right: PaidContent reported Thursday that restaurant and take-out menu listing site MenuPages has been acquired. The buyer, they say, is New York magazine.
No financial details were provided.
We reported back in May that MenuPages had been acquired, but didn't have any hints as to a buyer. We speculated that it was possibly Yelp or IAC's Citysearch. With New York as a buyer, it's likely that MenuPages will stay locally rooted rather than continuing to expand nationally: there are editions for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., but the buyer is wholly Gotham-centric. There's no word as to what will happen to the non-New York editions of the site.
New York magazine, which runs an extensive network of local blogs, is owned by private equity firm Wasserstein & Co., and restaurant listings are a prominent feature on its Web site.
The rest of the world might not know about it, but MenuPages, an online compendium of restaurant and take-out menus for eight major U.S. cities, is a pretty big deal in New York. But is it ripe for the picking? A source close to MenuPages told us that the Gotham-based start-up has been acquired, or is close to it, but didn't know who the buyer was, which means this one remains a rumor.
The ad-supported MenuPages, operated under the company name Slick City Media, runs local sites for New York to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. According to Compete.com, the site pulls in over 300,000 visitors per month and has grown steadily since last year, although the chart shows a bit of a plateau.
Compete.com shows that unique visitors to MenuPages.com have grown since last year, but plateaued recently.
(Credit: Compete.com)It's easy to see why someone with the available cash might want to buy it. A site like MenuPages provides opportunities for locally-targeted ads--literally down to the neighborhood--and the fact that people visit the site specifically to search for food means more opportunities for niche advertisers. And it's equally easy to see why the site management might want to cash out and move on: the company's been around since 2002, which is ancient in Web years.
So, assuming MenuPages is indeed a buyout target, who's the buyer? It's likely someone with interest in the local-search market, which means there are a few possibilities.
IAC/InterActiveCorp. Barry Diller's ocean liner of a Web conglomerate has made it through some stormy waters recently, and signs indicate that the New York company has resumed its feisty, pluck-em-up acquisition habits. Recently, IAC has purchased teen fashion site GirlSense and the parent company of Dictionary.com.
The thing you always read in IAC's acquisition announcements is that the company plans to integrate new buys with existing brands. And considering IAC operates local business directory Citysearch and would-be Google rival Ask, it seems like the most logical buyer for a site like MenuPages. But a source at IAC didn't know anything about a MenuPages acquisition, so this one remains a question mark.
AOL. Bebo aside, most of AOL's recent acquisitions have been in the advertising or technology space: widget maker Goowy, content-linking service Sphere, and ad firm Tacoda. Search doesn't seem to be at the top of its list right now. But it did buy a fantasy football site last month, so who knows?
Yahoo. Like AOL, Yahoo's focus in recent months has been advertising, not search. But even amid the Microsoft snafu, Yahoo still made a number of purchases itself, like Mac search aid Inquisitor and marketing analytics software IndexTools. If Yahoo still wants to grow its local-search options, this could be a nice pick for it. Still, unlikely.
Google. Probably not. Mountain View would likely prefer to serve MenuPages' ad space than own it. We all know Google just isn't known for content buys.
Yelp. The business reviews site is probably too small to make acquisitions, but it did raise another round of venture cash a few months ago, and providing menus alongside its restaurant reviews could give it a leg up over bigger rival Citysearch. Wildly popular in San Francisco, Yelp could use a MenuPages buy to broaden its footprint in New York--where it recently opened an office.
Somebody you haven't heard of. When it comes to New York start-ups, don't discount these guys. Around town there are new-media conglomerates, shopping-happy millionaires, and investment firms with a taste for majority stakes. And because there isn't a coherent culture of "tech" the way there is in the Bay Area, sometimes big names can fly under the radar entirely. Example: The Pilot Group, a firm spearheaded by former AOL exec Bob Pittman, has acquired or purchased majority stakes in a handful of niche content start-ups like locally-focused e-newsletters Thrillist and DailyCandy.
"Old" Media. Never rule it out. Sometimes they know what they're doing and sometimes, well, they don't. Either way, city-focused buys could be on the rise: NBC Universal showed an appetite for locally-flavored purchases when early this year it purchased LX Networks, maker of New York and L.A.-oriented video programming.
Yelp, the business reviews site famed for a vociferous user base willing to be brutally honest about the quality of their local restaurants, bars, bookstores, dog groomers, adult gift shops, and what-have-you, has launched a new service for those business owners to interact with the site's users.
Called "Yelp for Business Owners," the section of the site lets business owners register for special Yelp accounts, which they then need to verify by phone. Once registered, they have access to some analytics (namely to see how many people have been viewing their business page), receive e-mail alerts when they have new reviews, update public data like their hours of operation or contact information, and message the users who have already reviewed their business.
While Yelp will not charge for business owner accounts, it's a way for the company to get more eyes on its ad-supported site.
The service will likely have its biggest splash in San Francisco, where the start-up is based and where "Yelper" has become a mild pejorative among some restaurant and cafe owners.
Elsewhere, it might not have quite the effect. I live in New York, where the food and hospitality industries seem to have a bigger problem with influential food bloggers rather than reviews sites, and the IAC-owned Citysearch is still the online directory of choice for many.
NEW YORK--What if you could get that coveted table for two at one of the hottest restaurants in town...by paying $25 for the reservation?
New York's famed Restaurant Week is fast approaching, which means that black books and BlackBerrys are filling with reservations aplenty. But this year, a new start-up called Tablexchange.com might put a fork in the system. The New York-based company has a simple model: it's a marketplace for buying and selling reservations at chic, trendy restaurants. It's brand new, and it's already controversial.
"So let's have a show of hands. Who thinks this is genius, and who thinks this is evil?" Such was the question posed by Scott Heiferman, Meetup.com founder and host of the New York Tech Meetup, when Tablexchange co-founders Gabriel Erbst and Dwight Lee presented their site at the January edition of the event earlier this month. Tablexchange is still small; with only a thousand registered users so far, it doesn't exactly have eBay-caliber activity levels, but it's starting to quietly take off. A table for two on Friday night at Little Owl, a tiny West Village restaurant where reservations seem to sell out in minutes, is on the books for $20, and seats at the chic Italian restaurant Babbo are going for $40.
Gabriel Erbst described the site as a solution for busy New Yorkers trying to mitigate the tension between the city's competitive, see-and-be-seen social climate and hectic professional lives that make it unfeasible to reserve a table at a red-hot restaurant three weeks in advance. "I worked at an investment bank for two years as an analyst," Erbst said in an interview with CNET News.com several days later. "My friends and colleagues were constantly busy, constantly working all the time." He and some friends started Tablexchange, which also offers reservation auctions in San Francisco and the Hamptons, Long Island's upper-crust summer escape, for people who don't know when they're going to be free, or who may need to pull out of reservations with little notice.
For busy New Yorkers eager to savor the city's culinary culture, the concept makes sense on the surface. But at the New York Tech Meetup, there was no real consensus on Heiferman's "genius or evil" question. About half the audience, seeing Tablexchange as a smart new way to democratize the cutthroat business of fine dining, raised their hands in accordance with the "genius" option. The other half, billing it as just plain sleazy, opted for "evil."
Some prominent figures in the New York hospitality industry don't see much gray area. "I just find it distasteful and manipulative," said Richard Coraine, chief of operations for the Union Square Hospitality Group, which operates several dining hot-spots like Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, and Tabla.
"We want to know you. We want you to talk to our reservation people. We want you to know our staff," Coraine continued. "That's really what gets to me, is that we have no relation-building opportunity in (reservation reselling sites). There's an added price we can't control, and that skews the value to us. It's very parasitic in its nature, which I don't find to be in keeping with the hospitality business."
"Scalping," the practice of reselling tickets to hot sporting and music events, often at a shocking premium, has been going on for years and has only escalated with the conveniences offered by the Web. It's controversial, and in some areas there are laws and regulations against it: Several sports teams, like the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots, have banned season-ticket holders from reselling above face value. And a brief legal flurry erupted last fall when prices for kids' music sensation Hannah Montana soared above the $200 mark on ticket reselling Web sites like the eBay-owned StubHub, and consumer protection advocates weren't too happy.
"I think, realistically, reservations at some restaurants in New York are very scarce, and it's not surprising that some capitalist folks have found a way to take advantage of that," said Ben Leventhal of the popular local restaurant blog Eater. "I don't really see it being that different from scalping seats to the Yankees or the Knicks, frankly."
But it is different, because restaurant reservations typically do not come with a price tag--and putting a monetary value on it can just look tacky. "I'm already down a hundred when you walk in the front door, and that's not something that I find palatable," Coraine said in reference to the fact that a site like Tablexchange means that people are spending money on a restaurant that the restaurant never sees. "I want to control the entire value equation."
Tablexchange doesn't mark the first time that restaurateurs have felt threatened, or even just repulsed, by a reservation-selling site: Last year, an online "concierge" service called PrimeTimeTables gained some negative buzz around New York restaurant blogs for daring to charge an exorbitant subscription fee for "guaranteed" reservations. But Erbst says Tablexchange is different. "What we are, we operate like a peer exchange," he said when asked about PrimeTimeTables. "We match up buyers and sellers, whereas they are just the sellers themselves."
Erbst added that Tablexchange, which makes money by taking a commission from each sale as well as through advertising revenue, doesn't operate in an auction format, so you won't see people bidding into the triple figures. Additionally, buyers and sellers are restricted to reservations on coveted Friday and Saturday nights (as well as weekdays during Restaurant Week). This may help Tablexchange save face by looking less sleazy, but it also could mean that another, more brazen site could come along and fill that niche.
All in all, there's a good chance that this sort of commodity could take off in New York--but don't look for it to become an epidemic on the scale of Hannah Montana tickets. "I think it's going to grow and get uglier in New York for sure. I don't see there being much opportunity in very many other cities," Eater's Leventhal said, adding that there just aren't many U.S. municipalities with such a high-demand restaurant industry. "But again, for me, I think it really comes back to scarcity. If the tables are not available, and people are willing to spend money on them, then chances are you're going to be willing to find someone willing to sell them."
And in the unlikely event that Tablexchange and potential rivals do manage to cause real headaches for the restaurant industry, there are some undesirable but nevertheless possible steps that could be taken: photo identification, or credit card verification, for example. And at the very least, a meticulous restaurant staff could keep tabs on potential opportunists: for example, if "Bill Gates" makes a reservation every Friday night but a different couple shows up each time.
"I think, to varying degrees, they already are paying closer attention to the names in the book and how the reservations are being secured," Leventhal said. "In a very basic way, the restaurateurs are not happy losing control of their reservations so they're going to do whatever they can to get it back."
(Credit:
Grand Life NYC)
Left-leaning news hub The Huffington Post launched a new blog on Thursday, one that's been talked up quite a bit among the New York new media scene. It's called "236.com"--that's 23/6, which could be considered the 24/7 of the liberal leisure class that reads HuffPo blogs in the first place. (For the record, the main 236.com domain, which will include more print and multimedia content, has not yet launched.)
Anyway, in describing itself to curious visitors, a blurb at the top of the new blog explains: "236.com is a co-production between the gigantic, vaguely Death Star-like 'new media holdings company' IAC/InterActiveCorp, and The Huffington Post, a progressive news hub where outraged people go in order to get more outraged before going to have dinner at Balthazar."
For those of you outside the New York tech scene, that last sentence might not make a whole lot of sense, so I'll help you out with it. Balthazar is a highbrow, red-awninged French bistro in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo, opened a decade ago by restauranteur Keith McNally, and it has a reputation for high-quality but high-priced food at all meals of the day.
If you're involved in new media in Manhattan, chances are good that you've been to Balthazar more than a few times. But at first glance, the Euro-styled place isn't particularly nerdy. The crowd at breakfast typically consists of business-hipster types in black framed glasses who walk in with copies of the International Herald-Tribune tucked under their arms, and later in the day it's a social spot for well-dressed downtowners and tourists who still have a few bucks to spend after a day of shopping in retail-friendly SoHo.
The unlikely geek cred of such a place comes from the fact that Balthazar is one of the bigger and more high-profile restaurants in a neighborhood that's pretty much saturated with Web start-ups. Within shouting distance, aside from the Huffington Post, are Gawker Media, Flavorpill, Mogulus, Thrillist, TreeHugger, Socialight, GroundReport, PSFK, Blip.tv, and probably a handful of others I'm forgetting. Consequently, Balthazar is a constant go-to place for meetings, power breakfasts, after-work libations, and what-have-you.
In fact, it's become such a ubiquitous spot for the digital-media crowd that some people are downright sick of it, opting to instead hold meetings at--the horror!--the Starbucks across the street.
- prev
- 1
- next
