Before she opened the popular Coolhaus ice cream truck, co-owner Natasha Case was a Disney Imagineer. Her architectural training and design skills were handy not only in engineering the structural integrity of the ice cream sandwiches, but in concocting what she describes as the purposefully stripped-down, “ghetto fabulous” silver-painted vehicle as well. “It’s an Angeleno thing in so many ways,” she says of the way food trucks broadcast their wares via design. “L.A. reads graphically. The freeways become runways with these trucks.”
Photo By Glen Tagami
The Dos Chinos truck draws attention with its Day of the Dead-style design.
Photo By Thom Uber
A Rockin Ice’s design expands beyond the truck.
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It’s been only 30 months since chef Roy Choi famously launched Kogi, his Korean BBQ taco truck. Since then more than 200 local mobile vendors like Case have joined him, slinging everything from politically correct grass-fed beef sliders to the curry-filled South African mini bread bowls known as bunny chow.
In the process, what began as a culinary novelty and bloomed into a Twitter fad has already settled with remarkable rapidity into the newest full-blown cliché of life in L.A. — this decade’s contribution to the international shorthand of freeways, smog, gangs and paparazzi.
What’s been lost amidst all of the gluttonous hype and counterhype, however, has been the fact that the indigenous aspect of the movement isn’t just the fusion-fixated menus (sushi burritos, bánh mì–inspired meatballs). It’s how crucial the context of the city’s design traditions — from billboards and murals to hot rods and lowriders — has been in defining the sensibility of the food truck scene by informing the physical appearance of the trucks themselves. Brightly colored, strikingly patterned, aggressively logoed and sometimes gaudily accessorized by largely amateur designers, they’ve become icons of the cityscape, a fleet of optimistic small-business chariots, each attempting to make a microbranded go of it, the still-sluggish economy be damned.
“This strange regional brew — thematic architecture like Randy’s Donuts, the pervasive presence of billboards, the passion for customization in the Latino lowrider world — it’s a strong roadside culture that these trucks are pulling from,” says LACMA contemporary art curator Rita Gonzalez.
Yego Moravia, a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York who co-designed L.A.’s Keith Haring–inspired “Ride or Fry” Dante Fried Chicken truck, concurs. “It’s no surprise,” he says, “that this vernacular form really first emerged in a place known for its street artwork, whether in terms of graffiti or murals or even supergraphics” — large outdoor ads on the sides of buildings.
The shared appearance of the trucks — many are loud and often cartoony, infatuated with puns and their own mom-and-pop populist origins — has already influenced the overarching look found in copycat food-truck hotbeds from San Diego and Seattle to Austin and Atlanta.
“That subculture exportability itself, like surf style or drive-ins before it, is perhaps the most Southern Californian thing of all,” says graphic design historian Jim Heimann, editor of Los Angeles, Portrait of a City.
For all of its influence, Kogi and its initial successors didn’t prompt the graphic efflorescence that followed. Those first vehicles sought to emulate the authenticity of their taco truck forebears, the trucks that populated East L.A. for years before the current craze. Thus, they almost always retained the unadorned white paint job while adding only a quiet identifying emblem.
Within a year, though, the full-body vinyl wrap came into vogue, allowing for greater design variation. “The wrap is what it’s all about these days,” says Ross Resnick, proprietor of Roaminghunger.com, a national food truck aggregation site based in L.A. “The newer trucks have to come into the market at a higher graphic level. It’s much different than it was when the old-schoolers like Kogi first arrived.”
In fact, the wraps have grown so popular that some of the city’s long-standing bare-bones taco trucks have lately begun ponying up the $3,500 or more required to order a custom covering so as to be appropriately dressed for the new party. “They’re putting on wraps, parking on the Westside for the first time and charging more for the same old stuff,” says Josh Hiller, co-owner of Road Stoves, which rents out the vehicles for more than 30 of the new breed of operations, Kogi included.
That’s not all when it comes to sparkle. “Just look at all of the loncheros at night east of Western,” Resnick says. “How many of them have added LED signs” — the black screens with the scrolling letters — “in the past year? They’re upping their game.”
Contrary to popular belief, most of the new wave of food truck owners — who often are first-time hospitality entrepreneurs — didn’t go mobile because it’s trendy, rebellious, romantic and a path paved with certain gold. They chose the itinerant route simply because it’s a far cheaper starter commitment, in terms of time and money, to rent a truck than to open a retail storefront.
