Anti-Capitalist's Jeopardy: Regulating American Traditions out of Existence for 17 Trillion

02.16.2014

Death By Regulation: North Jersey missing out on food truck experience thanks to bureaucratic red tape

MARKO GEORGIEV/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Rosario D'Rivera has battled to change the law in Englewood to allow her gourmet hot dog truck.

“All I want to do is make a living, make people happy, and sell hot dogs,” said Bergen County’s favorite food truck owner.
Who knew that could be so complicated?

Instead, her bright turquoise Rosie’s Weenie Wagon is in storage and Rosario D’Rivera, the 53-year-old unemployed corporate graphic designer who turned to hot dogs to pay her bills, sat slumped across from me in a diner booth, talking about scraping out the last of her 401(k) for training to become a home health aide.

And there could go Bergen County’s one piece of the gourmet food truck craze that is setting trends elsewhere. While trucks selling ice cream or coffee have always been part of North Jersey’s landscape, our towns have inexplicably not welcomed the trucks of today, which offer foods that are so much more innovative and unique.

The full impact of what we’re missing hit me a few weeks ago at the Winter Blast festival in Secaucus. An artisanal taco truck hawked slow-cooked carnitas tacos with caramelized orange peel, while across the way, Neapolitan pizzas were being baked in seconds. Trucks sold apple cinnamon empanadas, kati rolls and biryani, fried cheese curds, authentic Thai soup, cake pops, all within feet of each other.

This is all common in New York and Philadelphia, and even in nearby Hoboken and Montclair. But the same kind of government wrangling that felled Rosie’s Weenie Wagon has made this scene only a dream around here.

“It’s easier to say no than to try to regulate us,” said Totowa resident Jon Hepner, who tried to offer his Aroy-D Thai Elephant Truck around offices in Montvale and Woodcliff Lakes a few years ago but said he ran into resistance from town officials.

The irony: How many local people would be thrilled for a fleet of food trucks? Witness the thousands who flooded a Food Truck Mash-Up event last July in Ridgefield Park, which, like Winter Blast, was produced by Exposure, a division of North Jersey Media Group, publisher of The Record.

Or read the email of Carlos Serrano, who runs three Empanada Guy trucks in Middlesex County and Hoboken. “I got people in Bergen County telling me, ‘Can you come to Allendale? Can you go to Paramus?’ I would love to,” said the Ramapo College graduate, but “I go where I’m wanted.”

“Bergen County is missing the boat,” Serrano added.

Part of the problem is that because food trucks are such a new industry, towns don’t have any rules in place for them. As officers in the New Jersey Food Truck Association, Hepner and Serrano hope to help towns with the nitty-gritty, suggesting ordinances and permitting procedures.

But a lot of towns just need a mind-set change. When Record Food Editor Esther Davidowitz last summer asked around about why this area has been so slow to embrace trucks, here are some answers she got from various town officials: “It’s not sanitary.” “We don’t want people to get sick.” And, “Restaurants have a hard enough time without the added competition of food trucks.”

Sick? Really? Food trucks are inspected by the same health departments that inspect restaurants. Why is a truck more likely to make us ill? And how have all these other areas managed to maintain food trucks without mass epidemics of foodies being sickened by contaminated cheese curds?

As for the competition, does a hot dog lady compete with people going out for dinner? Not really. But would a truck selling, say, pizza, compete with local pizzerias? Yes. From a consumer’s standpoint, that’s fine with me. Given the property taxes and other fees that brick-and-mortar places pay, this is a legitimate concern when devising any permitting.

At least Englewood was open to trying the idea. That’s where, after an unsuccessful search of nearby towns, Rosario D’Rivera found an available license to sell her Evil Devil Dawgs and other Sabretts heaped with crazy toppings — kimchi, pineapple habañero sauce, cactus. She found a spot in an industrial corridor where a hot dog vendor had retired after 18 years. And she spent two years merrily serving there until September, when I came along and wrote about her.

The day after my column was published, Englewood officials decided to enforce a decades-old city law banning stationary food trucks and sent police to kick D’Rivera off her corner. Her license technically requires her to sell and then move along, though authorities had never forced her (or her predecessor) to do so.

Her supporters urged Englewood to change its law, and by November, the City Council was considering a proposal to allow food vendors in fixed spots in the industrial/office area south of Route 4. But a few things bothered D’Rivera about the proposal: a requirement that food trucks pay $250 for a permit but could operate only on private property, and a ban on placing tables and chairs outside the trucks. D’Rivera had a homemade bench and chairs where her customers could wolf down a hot dog before returning to work.

Soon, a non-profit libertarian public-interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, was objecting to the restrictions, arguing that they violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection.” And in December, the whole plan was shelved.

So now, food trucks stationed in one spot remain illegal in Englewood, and there is much finger-pointing over whose fault this is – the city’s for throwing so many restrictions into the proposal or D’Rivera’s?

“We tried to accommodate her and she opposed everything we tried to do,” Englewood City Manager Tim Dacey said in an email. He said there were no plans to raise the issue again “unless she gives us something that she will not oppose that makes sense for Englewood.” Mayor Frank Huttle did not respond to requests for comment.

The upshot, for consumers, is that you can no longer buy a kimchi hot dog from a cheerful food truck owner in Englewood. And D’Rivera is one step closer to the possibility of going on public assistance, which she is desperately trying to avoid.

Right now, to pay her bills, she’s looking for events to do in good weather and for companies whose employees have no food options nearby. (You can call her at 201-741-4334.)

The two of us sat in the diner booth last week and fantasized about how she could spark a food-truck movement somewhere in Bergen County, in some town that might see the value. Why couldn’t property owners rent space to food trucks in underutilized parking lots? Why couldn’t some of our numerous, fabulous farmers’ markets bring in trucks every week? Why couldn’t spectators at high school athletic events buy empanadas or cupcakes from a truck?
“You’d get foodies into your town,” D’Rivera said. “You can be at the forefront of this.”

One of Bergen County’s most experienced fine-dining restaurant chefs agrees. Arthur Toufayan, the executive chef of Café Amici Wyckoff — which I rated three stars in December — and co-owner of the new Red Cedar Market in Ho-Ho-Kus, was so compelled by the idea of a kitchen on wheels that a few years ago, he and a partner opened The Burger Box truck.

“Grass-fed, organic beef is a tough sell,” Toufayan said, because of the high cost of the product. He said the markup becomes too high for a restaurant, where he has to pay wait staff, servers and rent. But merely handing such a burger to a customer out of a truck? That makes it more affordable.

That’s why so many food trucks are able to sell such high-quality, edgy, affordable eats. But customers in Bergen County haven’t been able to try Toufayan’s burgers. He had to take his truck down to Newark. (He’s currently on hiatus for the winter.)

“I think it’s a very simple fix,” Toufayan said of the local bureaucracy. “It’s a matter of getting somebody who can put a regulation into play and make it fair for everybody.”

And it would pay off in serious credo for the area. “It would just be so much more functional and practical for people to go out and to grab something to eat. … It gives the customer, the culinary foodie, more of a choice.”

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