- Michael Gebert
- Phillip Foss returns to his food truck—for one day.
Once they were the future—food trucks, bringing innovative new tastes to the hungry masses of the Loop and other places where drab fast food dominated. It was Phillip Foss with Meatyballs Mobile and Matt Maroni with Gaztro-Wagon who led the movement to change the city’s laws and attitudes toward food trucks and make them the center of street-level culinary innovation, way back in 2010.
The truck is parked in the loading dock, propane burners slowly warming its shelves. Foss’s plan is to visit six of the spots where he used to do business, five downtown and one at the University of Chicago (not originally in the plans, but after he announced his locations, he got a lot of requests from there on Twitter). Then he’ll swing by the other restaurants of chefs who got Beard attention in the first round and drop off sandwiches for them and their staffs.
“Yeah, actually you can cook on trucks now. You still can’t park anywhere, though,” Foss says.
“It doesn’t have to be. You’re making a personal choice,” Moorman interjects. “A personal lifestyle choice—”
“All right, guys, who wants meatballs? We’ve got three kinds—we’ve got buffalo chicken, original meaty, and barbecue.”
“I would not have imagined that this would be the case,” Foss says. “I mean, everybody’s exploding about it on Twitter, lots of buzz, lots of buzz—apparently people aren’t that hungry.”
