8 ms·

Before Food Trucks, Americans Ate 'Night Lunch' from Beautiful Wagons

185 points by extarial 8y ago

wallace_f 8y ago
What's more American than the entrepreneurial spirit which drives self-owned & operated businesses like this? You have individuals who are self-responsible for their product/service. It's neat to see the historical precedent. Yet across America police are shutting down lemonaide stands. Even ones run by kids. Food trucks and stalls are ticketed and confiscated in other cases. Developers might be wise to speak up before you need an expensive license or medallion or charter in order to sell apps or other tech services. It's no less likely to happen, it just hasn't had time to yet.
- llukas 8y ago
  If your service involves public health or safety then you should be regulated.
  - landryraccoon 8y ago
    It’s a tradeoff. I’m kind of bummed that the West doesn’t have the kind of small street food cart culture that is common in Asia. I’ve eaten at dozens of them and never gotten sick.
    - pandapower2 8y ago
      I have a theory that the largely unregulared street food culture survives due to how rare it is for people in cities (in particular) to cook for themselves. Firstly, you have a large population who are going to purchase food several times a day. That means a food vendor can potentially establish themselves in single location or a neighborhood and build a base of repeat customers, customers who may purchase from them several times a week, if not every day. Beyond that direct repeat business, regulars will order from their favorite vendor even when they have no queue of waiting customers. That initial group of regulars around a vendor waiting for their order sends a strong positive signal to other potential customers who may not usually buy food in this area. If you dont know the vendors, buying from a vendor with no customers is a risky move. Next, because buying meals is such a common part of everyone's life it becomes a common conversation. That provides an additional chance to reward quality vendors while punishing low quality vendors. That environment strongly punishes food vendors that make their customers sick in particular. Your regulars will abandon you and bad mouth you to all their friends and coworkers. Meanwhile, in the west mobile food vendors rarely have that kind of repeat clientele. Most customers will purchase food from them precisely once. And even if you complain to your friends, chances are that so much time will have passed before they encounter that vendor that they will have forgotten the conversation.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    Didn't Portland (OR) come up with a reasonable compromise to regulate "food trucks" somewhat less rigorously than "restaurants" and then leaving it up to a (hopefully informed) consumer to choose? I'm perfectly happy to take my personal food safety responsibility myself when visiting, say, Thailand - some of their street food is _amazing_, and I'm sure some of it is not very safe. I've never "rolled the dice" wrong there, using just a small modicum of common sense and trustworthy local advice... (I'd eat pretty much anything deep fried, pretty much nothing raw, and lean on locals for advice on choices in between...)
    - wallace_f 8y ago
      Yea. I find it incredible that when news hit that Thailand was cracking down on food trucks, same as has been done in America, it was a big enough injustice of personal freedom and free markets that it even hit the front page of HN. However, criticize the same thing in America and my comment was extremely controversial. I think that says something about how much faith people put into precedent and authority.
- RangerScience 8y ago
  I mean, to be snarky - > What's more American than the entrepreneurial spirit which drives self-owned & operated businesses like this? Clearly, lobbying the government to make your competitors illegal. /snark It's super cool that a guy with a basket turned into night lunch wagons turned into diners. It's also then pretty interesting that it took nearly a century for a comeback. (Not that roach coaches haven't been a thing, but, food trucks took it to another level). Any indications for the intervening slump?
  - mc32 8y ago
    I think roach coaches were are a thing in “working clasd districs” where all you could afford is a cheap pop and prepackaged meals (burgers, knishes, burritoes, pizza, etc.). Food Trucks are glorified roach coached which charge a premium and serve mostly office workers who have more discretionary spending and sometimes more demanding palates. Admittedly, things are going “upscale”,
    - RangerScience 8y ago
      Roach coaches are also mostly ethnic food (and, at least in my experience, that ethnicity is Mexican), and aren't decorated. Food trucks tend to be "new" food (fusions, for example) and decorated... and also all the things you said :)
  - GW150914 8y ago
    I think the broadening palette and recovering from WWII and processed food had a lot to do with it. You can only make so many things in a truck, but if you’re able to draw from worldwide traditions it represents real variety. Everything from ramen to falafel is doable and delicious in a car or truck, but for a long time Americans weren’t interested in it. Americans seemed to be satisfied with dirty water hot dogs, re-warmed pizza, and things like pretzels. They also weren’t about to spend a serious wad of money for more upscale versions. Braden tastes, the foodie culture, the idea that even if you just want a hot dog there are good ones to be had for a bit more money changed things, but it took decades. You can chart a similar peak-trough-peak in bread in America actually. It used to be nice stuff, then post-war it was mass produced, pre-sliced crap for decades, and now... it’s back to some version of fresh. WWII didn’t have quite the impact on the American palette that it did on the Brits, but it did have an impact, as did modern “convenience” food.
- bigiain 8y ago
  <devil's advocate hat> If developers didn't keep serving up products contaminated with hidden privacy violations - and were actually held accountable for their product/service when it caused harm to their users - perhaps calls for licenses or charters wouldn't be quite so necessary... Equifax did the developer equivalent of exposing most of the US to salmonella. Reports this week seem to indicate it's had practically no detectable punishment via any form of "self-responsibility".
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    Yet Wall St is one of the most highly regulated markets, and look how much destruction they still are able to cause. I'm not so much anti-regulation as much as I am for regulating sensibly. E coli comes from fecal contamination. Do we really need to ban street food because of fecal contamination? Do people need a license to know not to contaminate food with shit? That is the top criticism and post here objecting to mine. And if you believe in that sort of thing, then you everything should be regulated. I dont know what is more common sense than not putting shit in food. There are times where regulation makes sense, but this is not it.
- peteretep 8y ago
  > What's more American than the entrepreneurial spirit which drives self-owned & operated businesses like this? I'm struggling to see what's particularly American about this? Have you been to Asia? > Food trucks and stalls are ticketed and confiscated in other cases. I -- for one -- enjoy not having e-coli.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    Can you give me a source on what the total economic costs are (including opportunity costs) per reduced cases of e coli due to licensure of eateries? I have spent years in Asia and never heard of it. In the states I know of a few cases of it happening. Not from food trucks or otherwise unlicensed places. I'm all for prudent regulations. I'm not suggesting we abolish the FDA. However, I think government interfering in me and a lemonaide stand, or food truck being, able to voluntarily exchange value is far across the line into the absurd.
tsunamifury 8y ago
This is a gold standard for what a platform should be. An individual sells a product at a one-off price to a entrepreneur who then is able to make a living off of it. There is no 30% take in perpetuity with regulations that slowly chip away at margins. It's just one person selling another an honest opportunity to make money. And as they scale, everyone in the consumption chain benefits -- more sales, more businesses and more places to eat easily for the end customer.
- RangerScience 8y ago
  This occurs today. All the software tools I use are a one-off price for a forever license, and then a subscription to updates. There's also the argument for renting, where those wagons went unused during the day: if I rent, notionally, what I am renting can be made cheaper by the owners renting to others when I don't need it. But, this does not work well in all markets.
  - contingencies 8y ago
    BREAKING: Linux version upgrades still free. - @NeckbeardHacker ... from http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
- blt 8y ago
  rent-seeking is too seductive to the capitalist
  - adventured 8y ago
    Overly aggressive rent-seeking presents an opportunity to other capitalists. Throughout industrial history fat margins and egregious royalties are frequently sweet targets for disruption. Every day, Spotify goes to work looking for a way to route around or limit the obnoxious music cartel. They'll never stop pursuing that. Just as Netflix did before them with the movie industry cartel. The old movie industry ended up creating its biggest competitive nightmare.
- Eridrus 8y ago
crench 8y ago
There’s one of these in Portsmouth, NH: Gilley’s.
- QuinnWilton 8y ago
  And they also serve the best poutine I've had outside of Canada!
m3kw9 8y ago
Looks amazing inside, I’m sure many has tried to replicate such decor
laserBro13Fcali 8y ago
Was this submission inspired by yesterday's comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972163 It sure feels like it. :)
cryptozeus 8y ago
Really nice, good find ! Thanks for sharing.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
quickthrower2 8y ago
The use of "Night Lunch" as opposed to "Dinner" reminds me of the Randall Munroe's "Thing Explainer."
- minikites 8y ago
  "Dinner" might imply that the restaurant is open earlier?
  - wmf 8y ago
    I suspect in those days "dinner" implied a large meal while "lunch" is something smaller and simpler, like the sandwiches mentioned in the article.
    - minikites 8y ago
      That would also make sense, good point.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      My reading of it is also that many of these were used for what a lot of food trucks are still used for (depending on the city of course): late night food cravings (especially for the "afterparty" crowds). "Night Lunch" seems such a decent descriptor for a "Midnight Snack", that I might adopt it for that purpose.
kbrosnan 8y ago
Worth checking out Haven Bros. in Providence, RI for an example of this still in operation. Open from ~16:30 to ~27:00. It is driven in to down city every evening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_Brothers_Diner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_Brothers_Diner
- robotmlg 8y ago
  27:00?
  - AdamJacobMuller 8y ago
    A weird way of writing 3AM, I presume.
    - zdw 8y ago
      Fairly common in the UK and Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#Times_after_24:00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#Times_after_24:0...
      - toyg 8y ago
        16 years in the UK, never seen it used anywhere.
        SamColes 8y ago
        31 years native. That's the first time I've ever seen someone write 27:00...
      - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        "used occasionally in some special contexts such as broadcast TV" is not what I'd call fairly common! Never encountered it in half a century here, just military time "0 3 hundred" as used on the shipping forecast, or simply 3am.
swingline-747 8y ago
Hey zeitgeist, bring this back. There's barely anything open past 9 pm and almost nothing with power-plugs. How is one supposed to work afterhours? At home? (yeash) There's a 24 hour cafe called Happy Donuts however it's anything but: unheated, decrepit and must've been remodeled last in 1967.
- princekolt 8y ago
  I smell an untapped business opportunity around you.
GBond 8y ago
A version of these will likely come back. Autonomous vehicles tech will enable on-demand, self-driving restaurants that park in front of your door.

185 points by extarial 8y ago

What's more American than the entrepreneurial spirit which drives self-owned & operated businesses like this? You have individuals who are self-responsible for their product/service. It's neat to see the historical precedent. Yet across America police are shutting down lemonaide stands. Even ones run by kids. Food trucks and stalls are ticketed and confiscated in other cases. Developers might be wise to speak up before you need an expensive license or medallion or charter in order to sell apps or other tech services. It's no less likely to happen, it just hasn't had time to yet.

llukas 8y ago
If your service involves public health or safety then you should be regulated.
- landryraccoon 8y ago
  It’s a tradeoff. I’m kind of bummed that the West doesn’t have the kind of small street food cart culture that is common in Asia. I’ve eaten at dozens of them and never gotten sick.
  - pandapower2 8y ago
    I have a theory that the largely unregulared street food culture survives due to how rare it is for people in cities (in particular) to cook for themselves. Firstly, you have a large population who are going to purchase food several times a day. That means a food vendor can potentially establish themselves in single location or a neighborhood and build a base of repeat customers, customers who may purchase from them several times a week, if not every day. Beyond that direct repeat business, regulars will order from their favorite vendor even when they have no queue of waiting customers. That initial group of regulars around a vendor waiting for their order sends a strong positive signal to other potential customers who may not usually buy food in this area. If you dont know the vendors, buying from a vendor with no customers is a risky move. Next, because buying meals is such a common part of everyone's life it becomes a common conversation. That provides an additional chance to reward quality vendors while punishing low quality vendors. That environment strongly punishes food vendors that make their customers sick in particular. Your regulars will abandon you and bad mouth you to all their friends and coworkers. Meanwhile, in the west mobile food vendors rarely have that kind of repeat clientele. Most customers will purchase food from them precisely once. And even if you complain to your friends, chances are that so much time will have passed before they encounter that vendor that they will have forgotten the conversation.
- bigiain 8y ago
  Didn't Portland (OR) come up with a reasonable compromise to regulate "food trucks" somewhat less rigorously than "restaurants" and then leaving it up to a (hopefully informed) consumer to choose? I'm perfectly happy to take my personal food safety responsibility myself when visiting, say, Thailand - some of their street food is _amazing_, and I'm sure some of it is not very safe. I've never "rolled the dice" wrong there, using just a small modicum of common sense and trustworthy local advice... (I'd eat pretty much anything deep fried, pretty much nothing raw, and lean on locals for advice on choices in between...)
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    Yea. I find it incredible that when news hit that Thailand was cracking down on food trucks, same as has been done in America, it was a big enough injustice of personal freedom and free markets that it even hit the front page of HN. However, criticize the same thing in America and my comment was extremely controversial. I think that says something about how much faith people put into precedent and authority.
RangerScience 8y ago
I mean, to be snarky - > What's more American than the entrepreneurial spirit which drives self-owned & operated businesses like this? Clearly, lobbying the government to make your competitors illegal. /snark It's super cool that a guy with a basket turned into night lunch wagons turned into diners. It's also then pretty interesting that it took nearly a century for a comeback. (Not that roach coaches haven't been a thing, but, food trucks took it to another level). Any indications for the intervening slump?
- mc32 8y ago
  I think roach coaches were are a thing in “working clasd districs” where all you could afford is a cheap pop and prepackaged meals (burgers, knishes, burritoes, pizza, etc.). Food Trucks are glorified roach coached which charge a premium and serve mostly office workers who have more discretionary spending and sometimes more demanding palates. Admittedly, things are going “upscale”,
  - RangerScience 8y ago
    Roach coaches are also mostly ethnic food (and, at least in my experience, that ethnicity is Mexican), and aren't decorated. Food trucks tend to be "new" food (fusions, for example) and decorated... and also all the things you said :)
- GW150914 8y ago
  I think the broadening palette and recovering from WWII and processed food had a lot to do with it. You can only make so many things in a truck, but if you’re able to draw from worldwide traditions it represents real variety. Everything from ramen to falafel is doable and delicious in a car or truck, but for a long time Americans weren’t interested in it. Americans seemed to be satisfied with dirty water hot dogs, re-warmed pizza, and things like pretzels. They also weren’t about to spend a serious wad of money for more upscale versions. Braden tastes, the foodie culture, the idea that even if you just want a hot dog there are good ones to be had for a bit more money changed things, but it took decades. You can chart a similar peak-trough-peak in bread in America actually. It used to be nice stuff, then post-war it was mass produced, pre-sliced crap for decades, and now... it’s back to some version of fresh. WWII didn’t have quite the impact on the American palette that it did on the Brits, but it did have an impact, as did modern “convenience” food.
bigiain 8y ago
<devil's advocate hat> If developers didn't keep serving up products contaminated with hidden privacy violations - and were actually held accountable for their product/service when it caused harm to their users - perhaps calls for licenses or charters wouldn't be quite so necessary... Equifax did the developer equivalent of exposing most of the US to salmonella. Reports this week seem to indicate it's had practically no detectable punishment via any form of "self-responsibility".
- wallace_f 8y ago
  Yet Wall St is one of the most highly regulated markets, and look how much destruction they still are able to cause. I'm not so much anti-regulation as much as I am for regulating sensibly. E coli comes from fecal contamination. Do we really need to ban street food because of fecal contamination? Do people need a license to know not to contaminate food with shit? That is the top criticism and post here objecting to mine. And if you believe in that sort of thing, then you everything should be regulated. I dont know what is more common sense than not putting shit in food. There are times where regulation makes sense, but this is not it.
peteretep 8y ago
> What's more American than the entrepreneurial spirit which drives self-owned & operated businesses like this? I'm struggling to see what's particularly American about this? Have you been to Asia? > Food trucks and stalls are ticketed and confiscated in other cases. I -- for one -- enjoy not having e-coli.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  Can you give me a source on what the total economic costs are (including opportunity costs) per reduced cases of e coli due to licensure of eateries? I have spent years in Asia and never heard of it. In the states I know of a few cases of it happening. Not from food trucks or otherwise unlicensed places. I'm all for prudent regulations. I'm not suggesting we abolish the FDA. However, I think government interfering in me and a lemonaide stand, or food truck being, able to voluntarily exchange value is far across the line into the absurd.

tsunamifury 8y ago

This is a gold standard for what a platform should be. An individual sells a product at a one-off price to a entrepreneur who then is able to make a living off of it. There is no 30% take in perpetuity with regulations that slowly chip away at margins. It's just one person selling another an honest opportunity to make money. And as they scale, everyone in the consumption chain benefits -- more sales, more businesses and more places to eat easily for the end customer.

RangerScience 8y ago
This occurs today. All the software tools I use are a one-off price for a forever license, and then a subscription to updates. There's also the argument for renting, where those wagons went unused during the day: if I rent, notionally, what I am renting can be made cheaper by the owners renting to others when I don't need it. But, this does not work well in all markets.
- contingencies 8y ago
  BREAKING: Linux version upgrades still free. - @NeckbeardHacker ... from http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
blt 8y ago
rent-seeking is too seductive to the capitalist
- adventured 8y ago
  Overly aggressive rent-seeking presents an opportunity to other capitalists. Throughout industrial history fat margins and egregious royalties are frequently sweet targets for disruption. Every day, Spotify goes to work looking for a way to route around or limit the obnoxious music cartel. They'll never stop pursuing that. Just as Netflix did before them with the movie industry cartel. The old movie industry ended up creating its biggest competitive nightmare.
Eridrus 8y ago

crench 8y ago

There’s one of these in Portsmouth, NH: Gilley’s.

QuinnWilton 8y ago
And they also serve the best poutine I've had outside of Canada!

m3kw9 8y ago

Looks amazing inside, I’m sure many has tried to replicate such decor

laserBro13Fcali 8y ago

Was this submission inspired by yesterday's comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972163 It sure feels like it. :)

cryptozeus 8y ago

Really nice, good find ! Thanks for sharing.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

quickthrower2 8y ago

The use of "Night Lunch" as opposed to "Dinner" reminds me of the Randall Munroe's "Thing Explainer."

minikites 8y ago
"Dinner" might imply that the restaurant is open earlier?
- wmf 8y ago
  I suspect in those days "dinner" implied a large meal while "lunch" is something smaller and simpler, like the sandwiches mentioned in the article.
  - minikites 8y ago
    That would also make sense, good point.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    My reading of it is also that many of these were used for what a lot of food trucks are still used for (depending on the city of course): late night food cravings (especially for the "afterparty" crowds). "Night Lunch" seems such a decent descriptor for a "Midnight Snack", that I might adopt it for that purpose.

kbrosnan 8y ago

Worth checking out Haven Bros. in Providence, RI for an example of this still in operation. Open from ~16:30 to ~27:00. It is driven in to down city every evening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_Brothers_Diner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_Brothers_Diner

robotmlg 8y ago
27:00?
- AdamJacobMuller 8y ago
  A weird way of writing 3AM, I presume.
  - zdw 8y ago
    Fairly common in the UK and Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#Times_after_24:00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#Times_after_24:0...
    - toyg 8y ago
      16 years in the UK, never seen it used anywhere.
      - SamColes 8y ago
        31 years native. That's the first time I've ever seen someone write 27:00...
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      "used occasionally in some special contexts such as broadcast TV" is not what I'd call fairly common! Never encountered it in half a century here, just military time "0 3 hundred" as used on the shipping forecast, or simply 3am.

swingline-747 8y ago

Hey zeitgeist, bring this back. There's barely anything open past 9 pm and almost nothing with power-plugs. How is one supposed to work afterhours? At home? (yeash) There's a 24 hour cafe called Happy Donuts however it's anything but: unheated, decrepit and must've been remodeled last in 1967.

princekolt 8y ago
I smell an untapped business opportunity around you.

GBond 8y ago

A version of these will likely come back. Autonomous vehicles tech will enable on-demand, self-driving restaurants that park in front of your door.