Dear Reader, do you find that sometimes, things don’t quite work out the way that you want them to but perhaps may lead to benefits or ideas later on? You may not know it at the time, and your fists might ball, teeth grit and eyes move heavenward searching for an answer but, eventually, you start to see the silver lining. And apparently that’s along the lines to what happened for Al Carbon Food Truck owner Attila Yilmaz .
One of the ten food trucks that was set to launch in Sydney during 2012, his truck took longer than expected to be completed. In the meantime, with a catering business set up in Canterbury, he was serving up samples of his tacos. After that, frustrated at the delays taken to finish the trucks, he decided to open up his warehouse space to diners on certain days and the reviews came thick and fast. With reputedly some of if not the best soft tacos in Sydney combined with it’s slightly out of the city location and the fact that diners never quite knew when it would be open helped to ensured its success.
A former police training officer, Attila swapped his life in uniform to a life following in the footsteps of his Turkish father who owned kebab vans in Canberra. Attila was injured several times in the line of duty but it wasn’t the physical scars but the psychological ones that put an end to his career as a Senior Leading Constable. The case was a particularly brutal 2008 murder involving family members. He recalls the day with sober sadness and as the first responding officer on the scene, had to check the victim for a pulse. As a family man, he couldn’t reconcile the brutality of the murder of a family member and was honourably discharged from the police force and put into motion, a plan that he had been thinking about for years.
The idea first came to him during undercover work in a park that was notorious for muggings and assaults at night. He thought that by activating the space using parking food trucks with their ensuing crowds would make the area safer for people to walk through. To research Mexican cuisine he travelled through Los Angeles and Mexico and “was downing thirty tacos a day” he says. He travelled with Bill Esparza from the blog StreetGourmetLA and met up with Tijuana based photojournalist and blogger Jason Thomas Fritz Of TijuanaLandia whose atmospheric black and white photograph of the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe festival sits pride of place beaming down on diners. A version of Guadalupe is Guadalupita and La Lupita is a shortening of the name.
Named Al Carbon which means “cooked on charcoal”, the food truck pops up every few days at a location. However, currently because they need a truck to tow them, they are at the mercy of the truck driver’s schedule. The current legislation limits food trucks to stints of three hours including set up which Attila tells us is too short a time period as his self designed truck takes about thirty minutes to set up. This time and place limiting legislation is set to change shortly. To supplement the food truck, he opens up this location about twice a week and also caters for festivals and events. Some customers come from as far away as the Central Coast, Manly and Liverpool while some follow him from lunch to dinner locations eating twice in a day.
Social Media has helped in numerous ways – one day he tweeted that he would offer a designer a lifetime supply of tacos in exchange for help with branding. He didn’t expect that the head of Interbrand brand management would respond and after an initial meeting, Interbrand were offering their services free of charge and “then we had twenty two staff turn up!”
Attila Yilmaz in front of his food truck
Every day there are about twenty phone calls asking if they are open. I had called up a few weeks ago to see when they would be open and Attila had answered the phone and a date was set and one warm Sydney evening, Girl Next Door and I were on our way to Canterbury. Even though it’s a main road, there isn’t much open on the street except for one telltale sign and when we walk in, the atmosphere is welcoming and the crowds are excited.
The black and white image glows on the right and exposed light bulbs hang. There’s a mix of people from families, younger groups and couples. The action is in the grill, where meats sizzle away on the charcoal getting that crispy char to their edges. A tortilla machine dispenses freshly made flour tortillas and Attila and his young, friendly staff are busy serving, slicing and talking to customers.
Ordering is like a yum cha menu where a two sided slip of paper gets marked every time you order something and you pay using the slip at the end. We take a seat towards the back where the food truck is parked. There are large share tables and smaller tables and you can also stand up and eat in the food truck itself.
We start with a range of the food-it’s hard to decide so we try a bit of everything. The menu changes regularly and there’s a mix of nibblies, salad, wings and tacos. Drinks include a Mexican Coca Cola (according to Girl Next Door, it’s stronger in syrup and similar in flavour to postmix Coke) and Agua Frescas which are cold, fresh fruit waters. Today’s flavour is raspberry and lime which is generous with real raspberry with the piquancy of lime.
Al Pastor Pork y roast pineapple $6 each
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February 11th, 2013
by Not Quite Nigella
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