Business Models, Experience Design, Retail Design, Service Design, Social Media

There’s a growing dining trend in several North American cities that has been gaining a lot of momentum.  Instead of trying to just bring new customers to their restaurants, innovative thinking restaurateurs are also bringing their restaurants to new customers.

Catering trucks and street food don’t have the best reputations–most have been known as “roach coaches”, and with good reason.   In the past, you could count on food trucks to serve up suspect tuna salad on stale white bread with limp lettuce and coffee so strong it could strip the paint off your car.  Today’s trucks, however, take a much different approach.  The new breed of  “food trucks” are not just stale sandwiches and greasy gut bomb burritos,  but are often mobile extensions of established restaurants.  Once the haunt of blue collar workers on a coffee or lunch break, food trucks now are attracting a new generation of technocrats in places like LA, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Austin who track and share the locations of the trucks via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and text messages.

Dan Delaney is a Brooklyn-based entrepreneur who has combined his abundant passion for fine foods and mobile dining with video production and social media with a web-series/podcast that takes the viewers across a tour of the US and reviews the best in portable cuisine. Check out VendrTV at http://vendr.tv/ or via iTunes, where you can download a podcast at vender.tv/itunes.   So you can watch a review of mobile dining on your mobile device.

Here he reviews Let’s Be Frank, a mobile restaurant not far from my neighborhood in San Francisco that serves local, grass fed beef and pork hot dogs and sausages.